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Analysing Bartok's Visions: Portals on Modernism and the Doors of Reception

Analysing Bartok's Visions: Portals on Modernism and the Doors of Reception In an article of 1941, later published in revised form as an obituary, Bence Szabolcsi wrote: in a way bordering on the miraculous [Bartok] forced the instruments to evoke  unprecedented hallucinations . . . . [One] realizes that in a genius, the unreal imagination, exploding the material, functions together and is interwoven with an analytical passion that buries itself in the material and exalts it. The uninterrupted and fanatic work of four decades raised . . . Bartok the shaman.  (Szabolcsi 1995, pp. 292±3) Bartok is thus characterised as a visionary composer whose musical forms,  figures and landscapes are created magically, even alchemically. As an obsessive explorer in a brave new world, he succeeded in opening up the psyche through a daring conjunction of the fantastical with the analytical. A man of `sensitive nerves', Szabolcsi continues, Bartok `was unable to go through the  doors of human abodes and drank only from a pure source': thus he sought the inspirational potions that would deliver him from the `suffocating', civilised human world (p. 292). There are resonances here with Walter Benjamin's `profane illumination', which he found revealed in the intoxication of the Baudelaireian hashish trance, a http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Music Analysis Wiley

Analysing Bartok's Visions: Portals on Modernism and the Doors of Reception

Downes, Stephen
Music Analysis , Volume 23 (2‐3) – Jul 1, 2004
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Wiley
Copyright
Copyright © 2004 Wiley Subscription Services, Inc., A Wiley Company
ISSN
0262-5245
eISSN
1468-2249
DOI
10.1111/j.0262-5245.2004.00212.x
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Abstract

In an article of 1941, later published in revised form as an obituary, Bence Szabolcsi wrote: in a way bordering on the miraculous [Bartok] forced the instruments to evoke  unprecedented hallucinations . . . . [One] realizes that in a genius, the unreal imagination, exploding the material, functions together and is interwoven with an analytical passion that buries itself in the material and exalts it. The uninterrupted and fanatic work of four decades raised . . . Bartok the shaman.  (Szabolcsi 1995, pp. 292±3) Bartok is thus characterised as a visionary composer whose musical forms,  figures and landscapes are created magically, even alchemically. As an obsessive explorer in a brave new world, he succeeded in opening up the psyche through a daring conjunction of the fantastical with the analytical. A man of `sensitive nerves', Szabolcsi continues, Bartok `was unable to go through the  doors of human abodes and drank only from a pure source': thus he sought the inspirational potions that would deliver him from the `suffocating', civilised human world (p. 292). There are resonances here with Walter Benjamin's `profane illumination', which he found revealed in the intoxication of the Baudelaireian hashish trance, a

Journal

Music Analysis – Wiley

Published: Jul 1, 2004

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