The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Béla Bartók · a work in four movements for two string orchestras, celesta, piano, harp and percussion, Sz. 106, BB 114, scored as one work in its standard performing version · commissioned by Paul Sacher for the Basler Kammerorchester and first performed in Basel on 21 January 1937 · about half an hour in performance
Mode
Concert music as cyclic argument; fugue, sonata form, arch form and rondo-like dance under one subject
Mythos
Darkness to light: one voice’s lament, through night, to the village dance; the chromatic opened into the diatonic
Phase
Four movements on A, C, F sharp and A; a fugue, an Allegro, an Adagio and an Allegro molto
Presentation
Concert music; two string orchestras placed on either side of the stage, with celesta, piano, harp, xylophone, timpani, side drum, cymbals, tam-tam and bass drum between them; no winds or brass; the seating printed in the score
Register
From a muted lament and the dread of a night piece to wit, energy and the exhilaration of a dance
Scale
One voice, the night around it and the community that answers it; about half an hour
Governing Proposition
A slow fugue in muted strings opens outward from A, entry by entry, until it has touched every key and breaks open at the farthest point; a night follows in which the human voice is a stranger, and a village dance in which the fugue’s subject returns with its steps widened. The wager of the work is that constraint and release are one material, and that a single cell of grief, opened out, can become a song shared by many.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The work begins with a fugue, slow and muted, on A. Its subject is chromatic and constricted, a line that moves by half steps and barely rises, and it enters alone, in one section of the strings, before any other sound has been heard. The metre changes almost from bar to bar, so that the line has no regular step to lean on. It is a lament, and it is constricted: the first thing the work presents is a voice that cannot open.
Then it opens. The entries move outward from A by fifths, alternately above and below, each adding the next key, and as they spread the texture thickens and the volume rises. The fan has a plan, and the plan is the form: the entries are the expansion, so that no other form could carry what this one knows. When the two arms have touched every key they meet at their farthest point, E flat, a tritone from where they began, and there the strings throw off their mutes and the fugue breaks open. Height is reached by counting, and it arrives exactly where the count says it must.
After the climax the subject returns inverted, and the music draws back, the fan closing toward A as it had opened from it. Near the close the celesta enters for the first time, held in reserve until now, and the movement ends drawn back to A. Whether the climax also falls at the golden section of the movement’s length, as Ernő Lendvai argued, is disputed, and nothing here rests on it. What is not in dispute is the shape: a lament that opens until it covers the whole field of keys and then gathers itself back.
Movement II
The second movement is on C, a minor third above the fugue’s A, and it is quick. Here the two string orchestras, placed on either side of the stage with the percussion and keyboards between them, are set against each other. Material passes from one group to the other and back, and sometimes both combine; the listener hears the argument move across the space. Bartók printed the seating in the score, and the seating is part of the form. Reduce the two bodies to one orchestra and the dialogue would become a texture.
The form is sonata form, and the piano, harp, timpani and percussion take their places as partners in it, not as colour laid over strings. This is the work’s energy and its wit. The rhythm drives, the groups answer, and the movement is the most extrovert of the four. Its material is less audibly bound to the fugue’s subject than the other three; it is held to the rest by the key plan more than by the theme.
The development, with its pizzicato and its piano passages, runs longer than the argument needs, and here the form is a good container more than an instrument. It is the place where the work’s making is least fine, and the place where elevation gives way to play. The movement does not answer the lament. It sets it aside, as the second movement of Op. 131 (9.1) sets aside that quartet’s fugue, and leaves the answer for later.
Movement III
F sharp, a tritone from C and a minor third below A: the third centre lies on the same cycle as the first two. The night begins with a single note on the xylophone, repeated, quickening and then slowing, over timpani glissandi that slide beneath it. It is a sound of struck wood and sliding drums, and it is the work at its most frightening. The strings’ slow line enters in the dark. It is night music, the kind Bartók had written a decade earlier in Out of Doors, made here with an orchestra.
The movement is an arch: it goes in toward a centre and comes back out through the same doors. At the centre is the panel the frame exists to hold, the night at its fullest. What the movement discloses is the world without us: insect and bird figures, water, a single repeated note, and the lament as a stranger in it.
Then the arch closes. The music goes back out the way it came. Of everything in the work the Adagio has had the widest second life. In 1980 Kubrick laid it under the corridors of The Shining (8.6), and through that film its sound world entered later horror scoring. That is presence, not proof. The proof is in the score: an arch made of colour, in which the form of night falling and lifting is the form of the movement.
Movement IV
Back on A, and out of doors. The finale is a dance, rondo-like in plan, in folk-derived asymmetric rhythm, and its energy is the village’s: driving strings and percussion, the whole ensemble in one motion. The asymmetric metre is made to drive a whole orchestra, and it does, with a command of rhythm that Bartók had been building from folk music for two decades. The lament has not been answered yet. The dance seems to have forgotten it.
The episodes follow one another, a chain of dances, and here the subtractive test finds give: one more or one fewer would be heard as different, not as wrong. The form is a container, well filled. Then, near the end, the fugue’s subject returns. Its half steps are widened into whole steps and its narrow compass is stretched, so that what was chromatic is now diatonic, and what was constricted now opens. It comes broader, and the whole orchestra carries it.
This is the work’s answer, and the knowledge it exists to reach: the dance is the lament opened out. The one law of the work is stated twice here, thematically in the widened subject and tonally in the return to A, the fourth point of the cycle having been the fugue’s climax. The apotheosis is managed more than discovered, and some will hear the diatonic return as a simplification rather than a fulfilment; the question is still argued. But the passage it completes is built into the score: from one voice’s grief in muted strings, through night, to a song shared by many.
Movement V
The Hungarian title is “Zene húros hangszerekre, ütőkre és celestára”. Paul Sacher commissioned the work for the tenth anniversary of his Basler Kammerorchester, and he conducted its first performance in Basel on 21 January 1937. Universal Edition published it the same year. Bartók was fifty-five. He answered the commission with two string orchestras, and with an ensemble of keyboards and percussion between them that had no precedent in the concert hall. The same year he wrote the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, which follows from it.
The work stands in the field of its decade beside Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms (8.9), and it takes its place in a line of music whose nearest posted neighbours are Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time (8.8) and The Rite of Spring (9.2). Against the Messiaen, at the same sum, it is stronger in its making and its law, weaker in what it discloses and in the myth it builds. Against the Rite it stands below on almost every axis but the two where its compactness tells, The Made and The Inner Law. Its range is the range of a wordless half hour: a voice, a night and a dance, without the family, the state or history.
In ninety years of performance and analysis the work has become a test case for theories of Bartók’s harmony and proportion, and those theories are still disputed. The score needs none of them. It asks two orchestras to face each other across a stage, a xylophone to strike one note in the dark, and a fugue to count its way outward to the farthest key and back. What it shows, in the end, is a single figure: a lament so narrow it can barely move, opened by the whole work until it can be danced.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test meets resistance in three of the four movements. The fugue cannot lose an entry: each adds the next fifth outward from A, and the last brings the climax, so a cut breaks the count the form is built on. The Adagio’s arch needs both its halves, and its centre is the panel the frame exists to hold. The finale’s return of the fugue subject, widened from chromatic to diatonic, is the work’s answer and cannot go. The give is in the second movement and the finale. The Allegro’s development runs longer than its argument needs, and the finale’s episodes are a chain of dances in which one more or fewer would be heard as different, not as wrong.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Disclosure through sound is credited in full. What the form shows can be stated, but only by interpretation: that a single cell of constricted, chromatic grief can open outward until it covers every key, and then be heard again with its steps widened, as a dance shared by many. Constraint and release are one material. The Adagio discloses something rarer: night heard as the world without us, in which the human lament is a stranger. Held below the gate by the line between mood and meaning. Much of what the work discloses is a mood, dread, nocturnal unease, communal release, and the step from those to a statable human condition is the listener’s more than the work’s.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Height is reached three times. The fugue’s climax, the strings unmuted on E flat at the far point of the fan, is the sublime of something long contained breaking open, and the collapse after it, the subject inverted and drawing back toward A, is as strong. The Adagio is the sublime of dread: the xylophone’s repeated F sharp quickening and slowing, timpani glissandi beneath it, the strings’ slow line in the dark. It is among the most frightening pages in orchestral music. The finale’s broadening of the fugue subject, now diatonic, is transport. Held below the top on frequency: the second movement is energy and wit rather than elevation, and much of the finale is exhilaration.
Score: 9.0 / 10
A structure that could be called archetypal is built and bears weight: the passage from darkness to light, from one voice’s lament through night to the village dance, from the chromatic to the diatonic. The subject that began as grief in muted strings ends as a song of the community, and the form builds that passage rather than laying it on. Held below the gate because the particular is thin, as in all wordless instrumental music: no person, place or act is named, the Adagio’s night is a type Bartók had used before, and the finale evokes the village without building it. Darkness to light is the commonest shape of the symphonic tradition since Beethoven. Myth built in outline, evoked in substance.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The inheritance is the Baroque concerto grosso, the four-movement symphonic plan and the string orchestra for which Sacher commissioned. The departures: an ensemble without precedent, two antiphonal string bodies with keyboards and tuned and untuned percussion as equal partners rather than colour; stage space as an element of form, the seating printed in the score; a slow chromatic fugue opening the work, built as a fan that touches all twelve keys and closes; one subject governing all four movements; the Adagio’s sound of glissandi, struck wood and string clusters. The stake was real but limited, and much of the turn runs along Bartók’s own road: the arch forms of his Fourth and Fifth Quartets, the night music of Out of Doors (1926), two decades of folk dance. The swerve is from the tradition, not from himself.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Change the form and the work loses what it knows, which is that one cell can contract and expand. The fugue’s fan is the form of opening out and drawing back, and no other form would carry it, because the entries themselves are the expansion. The antiphonal division is the form of dialogue and echo: in the second movement the two groups throw the material across the stage, and reduced to one orchestra the argument would become a texture. The Adagio’s arch is the form of night falling and lifting. The finale’s diatonic return is the knowledge the whole exists to reach, and it needs the three movements before it. Held below the top by the second movement and the finale’s episodes, where sonata and rondo are good containers more than instruments.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Evidence, not promise. Ernő Lendvai’s analyses from the 1950s made the work a test case for a theory of Bartók’s harmony, the axis system, and for the claim that the first movement’s climax falls at the golden section of its length; the claim and the method have been disputed, by Roy Howat among others, and the dispute is still argued. A large analytical literature turns on the fugue’s plan, the cyclic subject and the Adagio, and the performance tradition still contests tempi, the balance of the two groups and the Adagio’s colour. The work keeps yielding on its own questions: whether the finale’s diatonic return is fulfilment or simplification, and what the Adagio’s night is. Held below the top because much of the literature is about the system more than the meaning.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The field is concert music of the 1930s, with Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms (8.9) beside it. Intrinsic force is high: the work reorganised what an orchestral piece of moderate size could be, making percussion and keyboards structural rather than coloristic, stage space an element of form, and a single-subject cyclic design hold a whole work without a programme. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is real but diffuse. Its antiphonal and spatial writing stands among the precedents for later spatial music, through many channels; its Adagio entered film, above all through Kubrick’s The Shining (8.6) of 1980, and through it later horror scoring. It did not redirect a school as The Rite of Spring (9.2) did, and it led to Bartók’s own Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion of 1937 more than to a tradition.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole: published by Universal Edition in 1937, with no doubtful text and no lost part. The presence is wide and continuous: the work is a fixed part of the orchestral repertory and of conducting study, and its Adagio has a second life in film, which is presence, not proof. Ninety years of that life is survival demonstrated, though over a shorter span than the oldest works on the desk. The surface fixed to its moment is small: no programme, no text, no instrument now obsolete. What holds it below the widest figure is that its presence, though secure, is not the widest a concert work of its span has had.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight: the fugue’s counterpoint, with entries in a fixed plan, metres that change from bar to bar, muted strings and a climax that arrives where the fan says it must; the scoring of percussion and keyboards, each instrument chosen for one function and used sparingly, the celesta saved for the close of the fugue and the Adagio; the Adagio’s colours, timpani glissandi, the xylophone’s figure, string glissandi and harmonics; the antiphonal writing of the second movement; and the finale’s command of asymmetric dance metres driving a whole orchestra. The cost is small. The second movement’s development and the finale’s episodes are less finely made than the fugue and the Adagio, and the finale’s apotheosis is managed more than discovered. It stands level with Winterreise (9.2), below the Goldberg Variations (8.9) and Op. 131 (9.1).
Score: 9.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the fugue’s muted chromatic lament and the finale’s loud diatonic dance in asymmetric metre. One law governs both, and it is stated twice. Thematically, the fugue subject returns in the finale with its semitones widened to whole tones and its compass stretched, so that the dance is the lament opened out. Tonally, the four centres, A, C, F sharp and A, lie on one cycle of minor thirds, and the fugue’s climax on E flat is the fourth point of that cycle, a tritone from A. The range is wide for a half-hour work, from single struck notes to full dance. The tension is in the second movement, whose material is less audibly bound to the subject; there the law is the key plan more than the theme.
Score: 9.4 / 10
The orders the work holds, bound by one subject: consciousness, in the fugue’s lament; the natural order, in the Adagio’s night; the community and its play, in the village dance of the finale; the learned and sacred traditions, in the fugue and its church style; and time, in the passage from dark to light. They are held together, not listed. What holds the axis at 7.0, the lowest of the twelve, is absence: the family, the state and history are not present, except as a listener hears 1936 in the dread, which the work does not ask for. A wordless half-hour work for strings and percussion holds fewer orders than a song cycle or a set of variations that holds a person or a household, and the figure says so.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.5, then The Inner Law at 9.4 and The Living Form at 9.3. A fugue whose climax arrives where its plan of entries says it must, a scoring of percussion and keyboards in which every instrument has one function, and one law, stated in the subject and in the cycle of minor thirds, governing everything from the muted lament to the closing dance.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.0: consciousness, the natural order, the community’s play, the learned tradition and time are held under one subject, but the family, the state and history are absent. Next above it, The Archetypal Deep at 8.1 and The Unconcealment at 8.3, which share a cause: with no words and no story, the passage from darkness to light is built in outline and evoked in substance, and what the work discloses is more mood than meaning.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.5, The Inner Law at 9.4 and The Living Form at 9.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.1, The Swerve at 8.9 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.3 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.1 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.1, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.0. Four of the five summit conditions are met, and with the Epochal Gate unmet and an aggregate of 8.8 the work stands in Tier IV.
Basis · the score of Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (Zene húros hangszerekre, ütőkre és celestára), Sz. 106, BB 114, in its standard performing version, the four movements as published by Universal Edition in 1937 and played today, and its performance tradition, read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music; no score, edition or recording was in hand, and bar numbers are not given. The four movements are scored as one work; no movement is scored apart, and no performance or recording is the object. The Adagio’s use in film is counted as presence of the work, not as a second work. There are no words; the title, in Hungarian and English, is the only text quoted. The tonal centres and the steps between them were counted by script. Details that could not be verified are not given, among them the date on the score, the exact arrangement of the printed seating plan, the doubling of keyboard players, the bar count of the first movement and the bar of its climax, the pitches of the fugue’s subject and the exact order of its entries, the inner plan of the Adagio’s arch and the instruments at its centre, the grouping of the finale’s metre and the tempo marking of its last broadening, the reception of the first performance, and the extent and early history of the work’s recording and its place in later spatial music. The golden-section analysis of the first movement is stated as contested, and no figure rests on it. The running time is a range across the recorded tradition, not a measurement, and the sound of the work as heard is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.