My Father. (Book Reviews: Composers).(Book Review)

My Father. By Peter Bartok. Homosassa, Fla.: Bartok Records, 2002. [iv, 331 p. ISBN 0-964-19612-3.) Music examples, illustrations.

The term "canonization" applies to Bela Bartok in both senses of the word. First, he is one of the most performed and most studied composers of the twentieth century and a landmark figure in the history of ethnomusicology. Second, because of the potent combination of his nationalist rhetoric, his advocacy for the peasant music of Hungarians and other groups in the region, and his international prominence as a composer, he has been an ideal candidate not just for performance and study but also true "musical sainthood," in the words of Malcolm Gillies ("The Canonization of Bela Bartok," in Bartok Perspectives: Man, Composer, & Ethnomusicologist [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000], 293). Recent scholarship has shown how Bartok's work was interpreted and reinterpreted as the model for whatever direction any given writer espoused for the country from the 1940s to the 1980s (cf. Danielle FoslerLussier, "Bartok Reception in Cold War Europe," in The Cambridge Companion to Bartok [Cambridge: Cambridge University P ress, 2001], 202-14, and Susan Gal, "Bartok's Funeral: Representations of Europe in Hungarian Political Rhetoric," American Ethnologist 18 [1991]: 440-58). Since Bartok was transformed into a symbol through which political meaning could be contested, writings about him have often taken on a reverential tone. Most biographers have not followed the almost idolatrous example of Agatha Fassett's The Naked Face of Genius (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), and more recently Kenneth Chalmer's Bela Bartok (London: Phaidon, 1995) has chipped away some of the pedestal on which the composer has been placed. Yet the scholarly community is still in need of a thorough revisitation of Bartok's biography.

Peter Bartok's My Father will surely be one of the sources to which future biographers will turn. This memoir is both a continuation of the tradition of idolization and an antidote to it. Peter Bartok, the composer s younger son, currently directs the Florida archive that holds most of Bartok's manuscripts and is in the process of producing corrected, revised editions of all of his works. Peter was born in 1924, when Bela Bartok was 43 years old, and was 21 when his father died in 1945. Therefore, as he states in the foreword, his work is not a biography, but a record of his recollections of his father, in the hope that "this book will help toward understanding Bela Bartok as a man" (p. 2). The book is richly illustrated with family photos, facsimiles of manuscripts, and musical examples--most of them from folk songs--and includes seventy-nine pages of previously unpublished letters from father to son.

The greatest contribution of Peter Bartok's memoir is its personal view of the family life of one of the twentieth century's greatest composers. It offers an intimate portrait of the family's home life, both its amusing aspects and its difficulties; the affection the author brings to this project is obvious and touching. Among the funnier anecdotes he relates are stories of how the mischievous composer "shocked respectable ladies" (p. 203) by reciting some of the ruder folk songs he had collected (texts included); and of how his habit of referring to the Academy of Music, his place of employment, as "the awful place" around his young son came back to haunt ...