Bartók in Chicago

Béla Bartók’s name was hardly known here when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra gave the U.S. premiere of his Second Piano Concerto in March 1939. The Orchestra had played only two works — the Suite for Orchestra and the Dance Suite — in the 1920s, and nothing since. That would eventually change. Bartók came to Chicago in April 1940. By then, many of the important creative musicians of prewar Europe had moved to America; after Bartók’s departure from his native Hungary in late 1940, in anticipation of the Nazi invasion, he joined them.

As soon as it was announced that Bartók would be coming to this country to give the U.S. premiere of his Rhapsody no. 1 with violinist Joseph Szigeti at the Library of Congress in Washington (D.C.), the Arts Club of Chicago, which had already hosted both Arnold Schoenberg and Paul Hindemith, invited him for a dinner-recital evening. At the Arts Club, which was then housed in the Wrigley Building, Bartók joined John Weicher, the Chicago Symphony’s concertmaster, in the rhapsody only six days after the Washington premiere, and played selections from his newest work for piano, Mirkokosmos — “so new that it is just being published today,” the Tribune reported on April 10. The pianist Artur Rubinstein, who was in Chicago a week earlier, told the Tribune that Bartók was one of the very few great pianist-composers of our time.

Bartók returned in November 1941 to make his debut as a pianist with the Chicago Symphony, conducted by second music director Frederick Stock. The work once again was the Second Piano Concerto, a score that had still not been played in any other U.S. city. The New York Philharmonic did not add the work to its repertoire until 1951, the Boston Symphony Orchestra eleven years after that. In the meantime, the Chicago Symphony had already programmed all three of Bartók’s piano concertos, the first of the American orchestras to do so.

In the years after Bartók’s death in 1945, his music slowly gained ground in the Chicago orchestra’s repertoire, particularly under music directors Fritz Reiner and Sir Georg Solti, who both studied with the composer at the Budapest Academy of Music early in the 20th century and became among his most important champions. It was Reiner, along with Joseph Szigeti, who talked Serge Koussevitzky into offering Bartók the $1,000 fee for the landmark 1943 Concerto for Orchestra, which has become one of the anchors of the Chicago Symphony’s 20th-century repertoire (it was recorded by the Orchestra under both Reiner and Solti). Six months after Solti’s death in 1997, his cremated remains were interred in a Budapest cemetery next to Bartók’s plot.

By now, the Chicago Symphony plays Bartók’s music nearly every season, and certain pieces — the three piano concertos; the Second Violin Concerto; music from The Miraculous Mandarin; Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta; even the opera, Bluebeard’s Castle — are performed with a regularity the composer never lived to see.