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Béla Balázs, the librettist of Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle and Wooden Prince, wrote many remarks about Bartók in his recollections throughout his life, and their manuscripts are preserved in Budapest, in the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and National Széchényi Library. Some parts of these texts, however, still remain unpublished. Even though his reminiscence tends to exaggerate their friendship, which in fact ended in their earliest period in Budapest, examination of the sources provides us with a new understanding of the relationship between the librettist and the composer. Therefore, this paper introduces the documents written by Balázs, gives a selective overview of their friendship, and examines how the image of Bartók changed in Balázs’s mind over time.
Béla Bartók’s “On Hungarian Music,” one of his controversial articles published in 1911, is known for criticizing Géza Molnár’s book, Theory of Hungarian Music (1904). However, it has not been mentioned that Molnár himself replied to Bartók’s article in the next volume of Aurora [Dawn] magazine, using exactly the same title as Bartók’s. While Bartók asserted that true Hungarian music had never existed before, Molnár, a musicologist in Budapest, bitterly criticized Bartók’s assertions from an academic perspective. This controversy over Hungarian music published in Aurora seemed quite crucial for understanding and relativizing Bartók’s position at that time. The historian Mary Gluck explained that several intellectuals, including György Lukács and Béla Balázs, had to depend on the older generation, both financially and philosophically, during that period. Using Gluck’s framework, this paper examines the genesis of Bartók’s article and the connection between him and the intellectuals in 1911, as well as to interpret this controversy. In conclusion, the controversy with Molnár, and plausible “defeat” in the field of musicology could be added to his list of challenges and setbacks before 1912, the year that saw Bartók’s temporal exit from public musical life.
