The naked face of genius : Béla Bartók's American years / by Agatha Fassett.
| Author/creator | Fassett, Agatha |
| Format | Book |
| Publication Info | Boston : Houghton Mifflin, ©1958. |
| Description | 367 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm |
| Subjects |
| Abstract | In this moving and enveloping account of the last years of the great composer, one can learn more about the nature of creativeness than from any number of scholarly and psychological studies. It is an intensely observed personal record of an intricate and driven genius, fighting a relentless and uncompromising battle against time, fatal illness, and, most of all, the petty considerations of the mortal world. The book covers the last five years of Bela Bartok, a giant of modern music. These years have special significance, not only because they brought the culmination of his career but also because the comprised his American period, a time of self-chosen exile from his native Hungary. The author, herself a Hungarian who had long been in America had close association with Bartok and his wife from the time of their arrival in 1940 until Bartok's death in 1945. She recounts Bartok's passionate feeling for nature, whether for toadstools in a New England woodpath or the wild forests of Eastern Europe where he wandered searching for folk songs; his uncanny ear, which could catch through his open window the faint cry of a cat trapped in a treetop far from home in the deep Vermont woods; his sense of smell, which could evoke all the layers of centuries of life in the soil; his reverence for the earth and for a peasant's closeness to it. As one by one these themes are sounded and developed, always gaining new force as they combine with the ever present motif of homesickness, the story of Bartoks past life in Hungary gradually emerges, while the account of his present life in America continues its tragic course, and the narrative takes on the pace, rhythm, and form of a fine novel. |
| General note | Catalogue of Bartok's Works: pages 361-367. |
| LCCN | 58007304 |