A Context for Bela Bartok on the Eve of World War II: The Violin ...

24 Schneider Bart6k's Violin Concerto
Bart6k's political sympathies were far more liberal than
Teleki's; his departure <strong>for</strong> the United States on 12 October
1940 was a more timely and infinitely less violent exit than
the prime minister's suicide several months later. Yet, that
even a man of Teleki's quasi-fascist convictions would share
Bart6k's sense that abdication was the only moral response
to Hungary's increasing attraction to the magnet of radical
National Socialism illustrates the tension of the political atmosphere.
It was becoming increasingly clear that there
was near zero tolerance of neutrality.
Teleki's and Bart6k's respective departures were tacit
admissions that the gap between the various positions they
embodied and the current political reality was, at least <strong>for</strong>
the <strong>for</strong>eseeable future, unbridgeable. However, to acknowledge
that Bart6k's decision to leave Hungary represented a
cul-de-sac on the road of negotiation is to imply that Bart6k
had been negotiating until that time. In other words, until
Bart6k left Hungary <strong>for</strong> good, he must have been finding a
way to negotiate between his ideals and official policies.
For, as Hitler's radical brand of fascism swept Germany and
began to hold sway in Hungary, compromise was not optional,
it was a fact of life, a matter of survival; it need not
imply moral or artistic prostitution.S Lucky were those
who, like Bart6k, found a way to produce valuable art
through the end of the decade. Luckier still was the fact that
Bart6k was well enough connected outside of Hungary to
be able to leave when the time came, and, unlike Prime
5. Rene Leibowitz's infamous attack on Bart6k as a compromiser of
Schoenbergian ideals of modern music ["<strong>Bela</strong> Bart6k ou la possibilite de
compromis dans la musique contemporaine," Les temps madernes 25
(October 1947): 706-34] has obvious political overtones despite its ostensibly
"purely artistic" charge. I would like to thank Danielle Fosler­
Lussier <strong>for</strong> pointing out the political implications of Leibowitz's article.
The subject will be treated in depth in her <strong>for</strong>thcoming dissertation on the
postwar reception of Bart6k's music.