ABSTRACT
One of the most provocative discussions of formal process and expressive meaning in the music of Bela Bartok has come from Lawrence Kramer. In Bartok's quartet the formal and symbolic integrity of the independent movements is 'devalued' and ultimately negated. Bartok's letters to women resonate with his philosophical and aesthetic enthusiasms. Elliott Antokoletz has remarked on Bartok's search for the 'ideal companion' to 'assuage his spiritual lonelines', and how the 'bitter disappointments' that followed led to Bartok's musical language being infused with a 'unique vocabulary of motives and attitudes deeply rooted in emotion and instinct'. Bartok's stylistic shift from the post-Romanticism of the first movement of the Concerto to an art of stark expressive extremes was 'born of seemingly bottomless despair' and personal crisis. In Bartok's scribbled musical epigram there are processes of motivic transformation through major and minor versions, diatonic and augmented triads, and a unity of melodic and harmonic dimensions.
