Sigma Alpha Iota

sai-national.org • WINTER 2017 • PAN PIPES 23 Among the objects to be seen are his red portable typewriter, the phonograph described above, one of his Bösendorfer pianos (the other is in the Béla Bartók Hall at the Liszt Academy in the city), a hurdy- gurdy that he played — yes, a hurdy-gurdy! — a pocket metronome, colorful folk art such as textiles and pottery (many with animal figures), spectacles and sandals he wore, and a pocket chess set. As a lover of nature, Bartók began collecting flowers and insects as a youngster. He was a very tidy person in general and meticulously kept records of the pinned specimens in his collections along with their Latin names. He admired and purchased chairs, tables, and chests of György Gyugyi Péntek's Kalotaszeg-style furniture with flowers and bugs carved in the designs. ey certainly are unique. Béla, a prodigy, was born in 1881 in Transylvania in a town formerly in Austria- Hungary and now in Romania. When he was seven, his father died. Béla was very close to his mother, and she was his first piano teacher. Because as a young child he was sickly, his mother homeschooled him, and he didn't have many friends. Some of his childhood was spent with her and his sister in places now located in Ukraine and Slovakia. During his later musical studies at the Royal National Hungarian Academy of Music (now called the Franz Liszt Academy of Music), he met Zoltán Kodály. ey became close friends and even traveled together, collecting folk songs jointly published. (Unfortunately, the Zoltán Kodály Memorial Museum and Archives, which opened in 1990, were closed on the day I was in Budapest.) en in 1907, Bartók, a brilliant concert pianist, became a piano professor at this music academy where he taught future luminary conductors, such as Fritz Reiner and Sir Georg Solti. Bartók, a chain smoker, apparently liked a brand of cigarettes called Longfellow Twins. (At least, on a shelf in an exhibit case there is an empty box of them with an orange lid.) In 2006 when his Bösendorfer piano was being cleaned, one of his partially smoked cigarettes was found. Now even it is on view! During my visit, individual students were rehearsing for an end-of-term piano recital in the upstairs concert hall, formerly three separate rooms, two of which were connected by a folding door that opened for concerts. Both of Bartók's wives had been his students and he oen concertized with his second wife, Ditta Pásztory-Bartók, a fine pianist. In this house the composer wrote Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, one of his most frequently performed works. He and Ditta played its 1937 premiere in Switzerland. I treasure the Moscow recording I have of my late brother, concert pianist Malcolm Frager, performing this piece with Russian pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy, along with the Soviet percussionists Ruslan Nikulin and Valentin Snegirev. Unfortunately, the disc is no longer available to the public. However, one can still purchase a special Bartok recording: Contrasts for Violin, Clarinet and Piano. He dedicated the trio to violinist Joseph Szegeti and clarinetist Benny Goodman; they performed this trio with the composer himself at the piano for CBS Masterworks. #47676. You can also watch the score as you listen to other musicians play the piece on You Tube (youtube.com/watch?v=c38rcj9retw). A crater on the planet Mercury was named aer Bartók in 1979. Two years later, on the centenary of his birth, this museum opened. In the front yard is Imre Vagra's life-size statue of Bartók overlooking a small amphitheater. ere are also statues of him in Brussels, London, Paris, and Toronto. A bust and plaque at 309 W. 57th Street, his last residence in New York, is only a block away from where my brother used to live and very near to Carnegie Hall. Museum admission includes a guided tour. I happened to be the only one visiting that early summer morning, so Victoria Dolnik, a graduate student who works there part-time, was my private guide for over an hour and a half. She was very fluent in English, gave me lots of information about the composer and his museum, and answered all of my questions. My brother Malcolm memorized virtually all of his extensive repertoire, but because of many key and meter changes in Bartók's third piano concerto, he chose to perform it with music. Before Bartók died in 1945, he wrote "Vége" ("e End") on the score. However, it really wasn't quite complete. Tibor Serly, a student of Bartók, used the composer's extant notes to orchestrate the final seventeen measures. Of course, Malcolm read the piece onstage in the traditional horizontal way — not bottom up! Jayne I. Hanlin is an initiate of Alpha Omicron and current member of the St. Louis Alumnae chapter. Mrs. Hanlin, the sister of famed pianist Malcolm Frager, is the co- author of Learning Latin Through Mythology (Cambridge University Press, 1991). A WORLD OF MUSIC

• Cover