Night music (Bartók)

From an audience point of view "'Night Music' consists of those works or passages which convey to the listener the sounds of nature at night".

The development of Night music was influenced by sound effect compositions by Debussy and Ravel as well as pre-Bachian composers like Couperin.

Nonetheless, it contains a night music characteristic: arpeggiated clusters of three adjacent notes in the medium and lower registers on the piano, played forte.

The text is not particularly strong, but greater forces than artistic value (let alone reason) formed the inspiration: Bartók was madly in love with the poetess.

INTERMEZZO The genesis of Here down in the Valley Starting in the summer of 1915, Bartók (by that time 34 years old) undertook collection trips of Slovakian folk music in the country while staying in the mansion of Gombossy, the chief forester of the comitatus Zólyom, near the town of Kisgaram (now Hronec in central Slovakia).

The forester had a fourteen-year-old daughter, Klára, whom Denijs Dille later described as of lively intelligence and openness of character and at fourteen coquettish, strong-willed and mischievous.

She was not only musically but also literary inclined and showed the composer a number of her poems, all in a late Romantic style: pathetic, egocentric, sentimental, hysteric.

Despite its immediate success,[12] Bartók realised the piano is ill-suited for compositions of overlapping, widely differing musical textures.

Therefore, he employed ensembles and orchestras for his further compositions in mature Night music style: slow movements of, among others, concerti and string quartets.

There is an overlapping alteration of "Mist": a block chord of G-A-C-D around middle C, going up and down in semitones; and an unaccompanied "lonely" "Melody" from "the external world": a mostly pentatonic (Hungarian Old style(!))

The opening bars present a theme of rising fourths in cellos and basses, answered by tremolando strings and fluttering flutes in Bartók's characteristic "Night music" style.

Trumpets, pianissimo, chant a pungent, short-phrased chorale [...][clarify] Bartók described the keystone third movement, "Elegia", as a "lugubrious death-song", in which unsettled "night music" effects alternate with intense, prayerful supplications (again related to the chorale-like material that pervades the first half of the work).

Bartók's last composition which contains Night music style is the slow movement of his third piano concerto, written in August and September 1945.