Bela Bartok

This long-awaited, authoritative account of Bartoacute;k's compositional processes stresses the composer's position as one of the masters of Western music history and avoids a purely theoretical approach or one that emphasizes him as an enthusiast for Hungarian folk music. For Begrave;la Bartoacute;k, composition often began with improvisation at the piano. Lagrave;szloacute; Somfai maintains that Bartoacute;k composed without preconceived musical theories and refused to teach composition precisely for this reason. He was not an analytical composer but a musical creator for whom intuition played a central role. These conclusions are the result of Somfai's three decades of work with Bartoacute;k's oeuvre; of careful analysis of some 3,600 pages of sketches, drafts, and autograph manuscripts; and of the study of documents reflecting the development of Bartoacute;k's compositions. Included as well are corrections preserved only on recordings of Bartoacute;k's performances of his own works. Somfai also provides the first comprehensive catalog of every known work of Bartoacute;k, published and unpublished, and of all extant draft, sketch, and preparatory material. His book will be basic to all future scholarly work on Bartoacute;k and will assist performers in clarifying the problems of Bartoacute;k notation. Moreover, it will be a model for future work on other major composers.

Laszlo Somfai is Director of the Bartok Archives in Budapest and Professor of Musicology at the Liszt Academy of Music, Budapest.