Bartók, Divertimento

It can often lead to misleading conclusions when trying to match the meaning of a work with the composer’s biographical events. But taking a slightly different angle, it can be fascinating to observe how the work interacts with tendencies or preferences generalized from biographical facts. Such an approach focuses not on the work itself but on that fleeting moment of inspiration that was extrapolated and elaborated into a self-sufficient entity.

What stands out most in Bartók’s Divertimento (composed in 1939 for Paul Sacher’s Basel Chamber Orchestra) is the use of Gypsy elements, especially in the 3^rd movement. When Bartók set out to collect tunes from Hungarian peasant music in the late 1900s, he made a point of finding something that is quintessentially Hungarian and to avoid anything that has been influenced by the culture of the Gyps, but the opening of this movement is nothing less than a reinterpretation of Brahms’s Rondo alla Zingarese. Yet, to say that the Divertimento is a display of the Zingarese style would be an overblown statement, as the piece also showcases a collection of other novelties such as the passage with parallel chords in the 2^nd movement that is reminiscent of ‘Bydło’ from Pictures at an Exhibition. Such eclectic references may well represent Bartók’s view of what a divertimento is, but amongst this virtuosic display of variety there is one element that persist throughout the three movements and that is an overblown obsession with canonic imitation. These echoes and inverted exchanges exaggerates a turn towards Baroque contrapuntal craftsmanship that he took in 1926, but to what end this conscious act of exaggeration serve is quite a riddle.

December 2012