Béla Bartók’s second Violin Concerto was completed on the last day of 1938. The composer created the work during a difficult period in his life, when he was filled with serious misgivings about the rising tide of fascism. A staunch anti-fascist in his beliefs, Bartók became the target of a number of different attacks in pre-war Hungary. The concerto clearly shows the direction in which his manner changed – all the works composed after it can be attributed to the composer’s ‘late period’, which is characterised by a striving for maximum simplicity, clarity and completeness, as well as a more sustained and natural blending of all the elements of musical language. In his music of this period, one can hear melodies of sweeping breath, transparent texture and tonal definition. There is another important feature: a freer approach to composition. Like most other masters, towards the end of his life Bartók turned to folk sources. Whereas he had previously given maximum attention to the old peasant song tradition, by the late 1930s the composer was readily using the Verbunkosh style, which he had earlier rejected as ‘pseudo-folk’. We can hear echoes of the temperamental Hungarian-Gypsy improvisations in the themes of the Second Violin Concerto. Continuing in the tradition of Liszt, Bartók literally revels in the florid, freely ornamented violin improvisations and the buoyant element of the Hungarian czardas, enhanced and updated by the hand of a 20th-century master.
The concerto was commissioned by the Hungarian violinist Zoltan Székely in 1937. Bartók initially planned to create a large-scale work in the form of variations, but the violinist persuaded him to turn to the traditional concerto form: an epic song first movement, a lyrical-fantastic Andante and a fast, energetic-dance finale. Eventually Székely gets his three movements and Bartók gets his variations, since the third movement is a variation on material from the first. Although the work lacks the dodecaphonic technique, it does contain 12-tone themes – for example, in the first and third movements. Nowhere else in Bartók’s entire oeuvre does variation play such a large role as in the Violin Concerto No. 2.
It was premiered on March 23rd, 1939 in Concertgebouw, Amsterdam and was a huge success. The soloist was Zoltan Székely and the conductor was Willem Mengelberg. The concerto quickly established itself in the world repertoire, attracting the attention of celebrated performers of the stature of Yehudi Menuhin, Isak Stern, Tossy Spivakovsky to name but a few. The American premiere of the concerto was in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1943. The soloist of the Cleveland Orchestra was Tossy Spivakovsky and the conductor was Artur Rodziński. Spivakovsky later gave the New York and San Francisco premieres of the work.
The success of the Violin Concerto No. 2 brought Bartók deep satisfaction: for the first time, his great work did not shock or baffle the general listener, but delighted and aroused admiration like the best violin concertos of the classics. In a letter to Szigeti, the composer proudly quoted the conductor Ormandy’s comment: ‘After Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Brahms, he believes that no one has ever written such a violin concerto’. Bartók infuses the concerto with irrepressible creative energy, above all in the dazzlingly vivid virtuosity of the solo instrument. The violin here rules unchallenged, the orchestra completely subservient to it and remaining gallant, precise and modest, while also being irrepressibly tempestuous at the right moments, as is the work’s protagonist. The solo part of the concerto presents a wide range of virtuosic effects, from the exquisitely crafted ornaments and passage movements, to the heavy marcato, wide octaves, four-part chords and double and triple notes. Registers are used very boldly, from extreme lows to translucently gentle highs. Leaps, forshlag, complex rhythmic combinations and passages with trills are frequently used.