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

28 Schneider Bart6k's Violin Concerto
A member of Universal Edition's Vienna office continued in
more conciliatory, but no less chilling terms:
We know your position in these matters and it is far from our intention
to ask you on purely business grounds to take a position that
you might absolutely not accept. The new German terminology is
not concerned with whether one is Aryan (which is not at all to be
found in Hungary), but above all, whether or not he is of Jewish origin.
Several of our composers were inclined, in order to facilitate further
per<strong>for</strong>mances in Germany, to provide this type of proof in which
they supplied copies of their baptismal certificates and the marriage
certificates of their parents and grandparents. We give these facts to
you without any commentary and consider ourselves to be obliged
only to notify you and we must leave it to your own judgement
whether or not you will provide us with the necessary papers <strong>for</strong> <strong>for</strong>warding
to Berlin.12
As the tone of the letter from Universal's Vienna office anticipates,
<strong>Bartok</strong> had no intention of complying with their
request. In his words: "I would not dream of sending certificates
of baptism to Germany even if I had them at hand." 13
<strong>Bartok</strong>'s refusal to cooperate with his publisher in the face
of German pressure, a stance he would take again in 1938,
shows that when <strong>Bartok</strong> clearly saw himself being asked to
make a moral compromise, he was indeed willing to take a
stand.14
In many of <strong>Bartok</strong>'s dealings with German organizations
in the some half-dozen years be<strong>for</strong>e the Anschluss,
however, the choices between moral rights and wrongs
were not so clearly articulated. As a non-Jewish citizen of a
country officially friendly to Germany, <strong>Bartok</strong>'s lack of
11. Documenta Bart6kiana 3, ed. Denijs Dille (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado,
1968),170. Original in German, all translations are my own unless otherwise
specified.
12. Ibid.
13. Quoted in Kroo, A Guide to Bart6k, 174.
14. For documentation of Bart6k's 1938 refusat see his letter to Mrs.
Muller-Widmann, 13 April 1938, in <strong>Bela</strong> Bart6k Letters, ed. Janos Demeny,
trans. Peter Balaban and Istvan Farkas (London: Faber and Faber, 1971),
267.