Béla Bártok, Romanian Folk Dances

As his pianist mother once said, the child Béla Bartók could distinguish and repeat the rhythms of the dances she played on the piano when he could no to pronounce a complete phrase. By the time he released the first one, the boy already had in his repertoire a few songs to which he added as many as he continued to grow. Before he was five, his mother understood that the boy should pursue formal piano studies. She was not mistaken, because at the age of eleven Béla Bartók was warmly acclaimed in the Hungarian city of Pozsony where he gave his first recital which included the first work of his own, incidentally.

The composer finished his studies in 1901 at the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest, where he had as a companion his compatriot and future composer Zoltan Kodaly, with whom he began a lifelong friendship.

The song of a nanny
In 1902, while on vacation, Bartók had overheard an eight-year-old girl singing folk songs to entertain the children in her care. Captivated by this music, six years later the composer would travel through Hungary and neighboring countries in the company of Kodaly collecting thousands of old folk songs, in search of the genuine ones that the eight-year-old nanny had unknowingly made known to him.

Béla Bartók (1881 - 1945)

The composer's enchantment with this music lasted for decades. It was difficult to escape from its various intricacies that allowed him alternating between quiet plaintive singing and the most fiercely aggressive rhythms. The complexity and perfection he found in Eastern European folk music would exert a powerful influence on Bártok's musical language in the years to come, just as it had done in the previous century with his compatriot Franz Liszt.

Romanian Folk Dances
Composed in 1915, these are arrangements for seven instrumental melodies that Bartók collected between 1910 and 1912 in Romanian localities. The author choose those that best served his intentions because of their timbral diversity and variety. The melodies are practically those of the original source, which Bartók elaborated scarcely because his intention was none other than their transformation into small miniatures whose duration did not exceed one minute. For it, Bartók took care to indicate in the score the exact duration that each one should have.

The original version is for solo piano, but arrangements for other instruments or ensemble of instruments are numerous. Here it is presented in a version for piano and violin by Hungarian musicians Katika Illenyi and Tamas Bolba. (The miniatures are six in all because the last one contains two themes).