Abstract
Felicie Fábián, three years younger than Bartók, studied piano and composition at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music in Budapest. Her name appears more and more frequently in Bartók’s letters from the beginning of the 1899 academic year, and their intense relationship, lasting until 1903, is also evidenced by three compositions associated with Felicie. Liebeslieder is the earliest of these, written during 1900, lacking an opus number, and unpublished during Bartók’s lifetime. Its lyrics and musical style suggest German Romantic models which, indeed, played a decisive role in the young composer’s orientation. This is confirmed by an important source: until 1903, the composer kept detailed lists of all the works he had studied, heard, or intended to study in the future. Lieder are included in the list of pieces he had already known from the spring of 1898 onwards; before that, Bartók makes no mention of the genre, and from the end of 1900 the Lied almost disappears from the list. Since during this period the young composer studied several songs or song cycles by Schubert and Schumann, certain songs by Brahms, and even Wagner’s The Valkyrie, we can agree with scholars who compare the Liebeslieder to these works. Although some others think that the influence of Hugo Wolf, Richard Strauss and Franz Liszt can be traced in the Liebeslieder, their names do not appear in Bartók’s list yet, so we can rather speak of coincidental similarities or common stylistic bases. However, the analyses often disregard a no less important figure from the list: Beethoven, who was not only considered by Bartók to be an unavoidable figure in symphonic, chamber and piano works, but the young composer also studied his Lieder. In this paper, I explore the influence of Beethoven’s only song cycle on Bartók’s Liebeslieder.
Keywords: Béla Bartók, German Romanticism, musical influences, song cycles, Ludwig van Beethoven, early 20th-century music.
About the author
Fanni Molnár works as content editor for the Budapest Music Center. Between October 2019 and May 2022, she was an associate of the Liszt Ferenc Memorial Museum and Research Centre. She obtained her MA degree in musicology in 2021 at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, Budapest. She is currently participating in the PhD programme of the Academy; the provisional title of her thesis is Historicism on the opera stages of Budapest during the long nineteenth century.
DOI: 10.47809/MP.2023.38.01.02
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