ABSTRACT

Béla Bartók became a national affair in Hungary after 1945. It was the young György Ligeti’s intention to study with him at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, but Bartók died in New York on 26 September 1945. Bartók’s death, however, made possible the canonization of his oeuvre, and Hungarian musicology immediately gave its full attention to collecting documents of his career, researching manuscript sources and interpreting and analysing his works. Bence Szabolcsi, the leader of Hungarian musicological research and an excellent expert on Bartók, played a central role in this research, and considerably influenced the formation of Hungarian Bartók interpretation, for example the later works of László Somfai, György Kroó and János Kárpáti. Szabolcsi’s Bartók seminars held at the Academy of Music were attended by progressive young musicians and musicologists, such as Ligeti, György Kurtág and Ernő Lendvai. Ligeti’s and Lendvai’s first Bartók analyses were born in this environment. My chapter aims at introducing the context, sources and literary-analytical models of the young Ligeti’s understanding of Bartók, which revealed itself in his articles ‘Bartók: Medvetánc (1908)’ (1948) and ‘Megjegyzések a bartóki kromatika kialakulásának egyes feltételeiről’ (Observations on the conditions of Bartók’s development of chromaticism) (1955).