Piano Concerto No. 3

Béla Bartók was born in Nagyszentmiklós, Transylvania (then part of Hungary, now Romania), on March 25, 1881, and died in New York City on September 26, 1945. He wrote the Piano Concerto No. 3 in summer 1945. The last seventeen measures, left unfinished at the composer’s death, were filled in by his pupil Tibor Serly. The first performance was given by pianist György Sándor with Eugene Ormandy conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra on February 8, 1946. 

In addition to the solo piano, the score of the Piano Concerto No. 3 calls for 2 each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, side drum, cymbals, bass drum, tam-tam, xylophone, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses). 

On September 21, 1945, the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók was taken to New York’s West Side Hospital. Suffering from the final stages of leukemia, he died four days later, on September 26. Before getting into the ambulance, he asked his son Peter to draw the bar lines on the last two pages of the score of his Third Piano Concerto, which he meant to finish in the hospital. Too ill to complete the work, he left the last seventeen bars blank. The word “vége” (end), which Bartók added after these empty bars, looks like a symbolic gesture, marking not only the imagined conclusion of the concerto, but also Bartók’s entire oeuvre. His doctor reported that in his last conscious moment Bartók told him that he regretted leaving with his “suitcase full.”

The heaviness of thwarted creative energies did not weigh down Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto, which many consider one of his most accessible works. Maybe the closeness of death eased his existential anxiety, the constant worries about how to survive in American exile. Whatever the reason, the Third Piano Concerto displays a rare combination of exuberance and peaceful resignation, allowing the music to leave earth’s gravitational orbit and soar into unknown heights. Lightness was not a characteristic associated with the harshly modernist Bartók, composer of such aggressively dissonant works as the Allegro barbaro (1911) and the Fourth String Quartet (1928). Hearing Bartók’s late works, the composer, conductor, and music theorist René Leibowitz, an undying champion of modernism, retroactively accused the exiled Bartók of having compromised his modernist sound to gain the approval of his new American audience. Accusing Bartók of compromise—a term that carried damning political connotations after World War II—was not only aesthetically but also morally unjustified. Bartók was one of the few who went into voluntary exile not because of fear of persecution, but because of disgust at his country’s alliance with Nazi Germany. 

The lightness of Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto was not only an aesthetic choice. Unlike his first two piano concertos, the third was designed not for himself, but for his wife, Ditta Pásztory, who had struggled with the technical difficulties of the Second Concerto. Although plenty challenging, the piano part of the Third Concerto is less robust, lighter in texture, and slightly shorter than Bartók’s first two piano concertos. The Third Concerto follows a traditional structure infused with unusual features: an Allegretto first movement in sonata form with clearly defined first and second theme areas, a short development section preceded by stubborn repetition of minor thirds invoking children’s song, and an unmistakable recapitulation; an Adagio middle movement with a simple ABA structure that nevertheless contains the concerto’s most explosive emotional outbursts; and a conventionally rustic finale in rondo form with two episodes, the archaic style of which contrasts with the folk dance inspiration of the rondo theme.

Frequently called a “female” concerto, the Third Piano Concerto invokes the grace of Mozart, especially the finale of that composer’s final piano concerto, No. 27 in B-flat, K.595, which, as musicologist György Kroó put it, seems “to dance and soar in a strange state of euphoria towards eternity.” Unlike Mozart’s concerto, Bartók’s draws inspiration from nature, both from nature sounds and from folk music. The rustling strings that introduce the first movement move similarly to the woodwinds depicting the milling crowd at the beginning of Stravinsky’s ballet Petrushka (1911). But Bartók’s strings do not suggest an urban scene. Combined with the effect of the E tonic pitch, the perfect fourth sounded in the timpani, and the piano’s ornate melody, the passage recalls not the Russian Stravinsky, but an earlier idol, Richard Wagner, who cast the scene of the forest bird in Siegfried, the third opera in his Ring of the Nibelungen, in E major, with similarly murmuring strings, tonic-dominant pedal tones in the bass, and a pentatonic, descending melody representing birdsong. Unlike Wagner’s magical bird in Siegfried, Bartók’s wears a distinctively Hungarian costume, its rhythm reminiscent of the verbunkos, a military recruiting dance from 18th-century Hungary. The stately dotted rhythms and the ornamentations of the piano’s tune are both characteristics of the verbunkos style that the young Bartók had rejected as marker of an outmoded, romanticized Hungarian style, the more mature Bartók rediscovered, and the exiled Bartók remembered nostalgically. 

Nature also appears in less mediated guises in the Third Piano Concerto. In the middle section of the middle movement Adagio we encounter “real” birds. Above the tremolos in the strings, the oboe, the clarinet, the flute, and the piano, later joined by the piccolo and the xylophone, engage in birdsong. Bartók’s son Peter remembered seeing his father notating bird songs during his summer vacations. Only one slip of paper survived with a few melodies, one corresponding to the first bird song in the movement. Another bird, the rufous-sided towhee, is clearly identifiable in the piccolo, flute, and oboe. Such nature episodes in Bartók’s music are frequently designated as “night music,” so called after a movement in the piano cycle Out of Doors (1926). But Bartók’s bird choir in the Adagio has nothing to do with the frightening sounds of nocturnal creatures conjured in his night episodes. The birds in the middle part of the Third Concerto’s slow movement chirp happily, basking in sunlight, affirming life in its full exuberance. 

Bartók surrounds this happy bird music with a brooding dialogue between the solo piano and the orchestra, a familiar trope from other slow movements by Bartók, such as the Adagio of his Second Piano Concerto (1930-1931) and the Lento of his Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (1937). In both previous works the nature sounds in the contrasting middle sections intensify the feeling of human loneliness. In the Third Piano Concerto, the colors are softer and the mood more resigned. Unique in the oeuvre of the atheist Bartók, the movement carries the designation “religioso.” The word likely refers to Bartók’s inspiration, Beethoven’s String Quartet in A minor, Opus 132, the slow movement of which is, as Beethoven wrote, “A Hymn of Thanksgiving to the divinity from a convalescent, in the Lydian mode.” Bartók’s recovery from his illness was temporary—but his feeling of gratitude for the momentary relief was sincere. 

In the dialogue between the orchestra’s imitative song and the piano’s chorale in the Adagio, which for Bartók carried associations with communal singing exemplified by J.S. Bach’s richly harmonized Protestant hymns, the ailing composer allows the strings to lift the soul gently to another world. In the dialogue the strings never raise their voice. But the piano, as its lines expand, becomes emotional, its harmonic language abandons the tone of old chorales and swells into textures reminiscent of Bartók’s early piano laments, the Four Dirges (1909). As if yielding to nature’s healing power, when the chorale returns after the bird concert of the middle section, it sounds in the woodwinds, accompanied by the piano’s new, Bachian counterpoint. The former dialogue turns into collaboration: the orchestra has learned the harmonic progression from the piano, the piano the contrapuntal texture from the orchestra. The orchestra brings the chorale to an expressive climax, which the piano takes over as its own before it calms down and concludes the movement with the recapitulation of the orchestra’s first, gentle counterpoint.

The third movement’s bustling rondo theme evokes folk dance in the spirit of Bartók’s boisterous folk finales. In the two episodes recurring between rondo themes Bartók reverts to a more learned style. The first episode is a meticulously developed fugue ushered in by the timpani. Despite its complex contrapuntal texture, the fugue is light in character. There is no trace of the heavy, labored fugues of late Beethoven. The tone remains playful, the texture transparent, and the dynamic never rises above mezzo-forte until the triumphant return of the rondo theme. The second episode is even more gracious. Sweet, arpeggiated chords in the piano combine with Bach-like, “grazioso” counterpoint in the orchestra to form what Tibor Tallián dubbed an “antique minuet.” The middle section or trio of this minuet features a duple-meter brass fugue, recalling the brass fanfare from the finale of Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra just two years earlier. When the gentler minuet proper returns, Bartók assigns the gracious Bachian counterpoint to the piano, transferring the sweet chords to the horns.

The finale ends with a mad chromatic rush to the final bar line. This energetic conclusion does little to alleviate the sense of nostalgia that permeates the music. The modal shifts, the folk music flavor, the Hungarian spice, the confessional tone, the evocation of nature, children’s song, and old-fashioned counterpoint all testify to Bartók’s nostalgia, which the Russian American cultural theorist Svetlana Boym defined as “a sentiment of loss and displacement,” “a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed.” The surface lightness of Bartók’s last piano concerto conceals a deeper longing for the ephemeral—the innocence of nature and childhood, and an ideal homeland untainted by war.

Klára Móricz

Klára Móricz is professor of music at Amherst College. She is author of Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Music (2008), In Stravinsky’s Orbit: Responses to Modernism in Russian Paris (2020), co-editor of Funeral Games in Honor of Artur Vincent Lourié (2013), and editor of Béla Bartók Complete Critical Edition, vol. 24, Concerto for Orchestra (2017).

The first Boston Symphony Orchestra performances of Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 3 took place on April 9 and 10, 1965, with soloist Sidney Foster under Aaron Copland’s direction—but Arthur Fiedler introduced the piece to Symphony Hall audiences with the Boston Pops and soloist Samuel Lipman in June 1961.