I cannot imagine that an artwork could be anything but the manifestation of the infinite enthusiasm, despair, sorrow, vengeful anger, distorting and sarcastic irony of its creator. He who paints only in order to paint a landscape or writes a symphony only in order to write one is no more than a good craftsman at best. I strongly believe and profess that every true art is manifested and created under the influence of ‘experiences,’ those impressions that we absorb into ourselves from the surrounding world.
In a letter to his wife during a field trip to Darázs (Slovakia) in 1909, he wrote: What we had to do was to grasp the spirit of this hitherto unknown music and to make this spirit (difficult to describe in words) the basis of our works.īartok’s commitment to expressing ‘the spirit’ of folk music is much more familiar to us than his individualistic approach toward art because he described the latter in letters mostly unavailable in English. This would have been mere craftsmanship, and could have led to no new and unified style. I should, in fact, stress one point: in our case it was not a question of merely taking unique melodies in any way whatsoever, and then incorporating them-or fragments of them-in our works, there to develop them according to the traditionally established custom. In order to really feel the vitality of this music, one must, so to speak, have lived it-and this is only possible when one comes to know it through direct contact with the peasants. It is true though-provided they are reliable-that they acquaint one with the melodies, yet one absolutely cannot penetrate into the real, throbbing life of this music by means of them. The melodies of a written or printed collection are in essence dead materials. It was of the utmost consequence to us that we had to do our collecting of folk songs ourselves, and did not make the acquaintance of our melodic material in written or printed collections. This attitude is best illustrated by the statement Bartok wrote in 1928: ‘Spirit’ was something beyond the material of music in the case of folk music, it expressed the totality of lived experience. Among the most important elements in the background of this aesthetics was a dual conception of the artwork’s ‘spirit.’ As Bartok understood it, the artwork was to express a communal spirit (the spirit of folk music) and yet arise from the inner urge of the artist to express his emotions.
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