The roots of the Concerto for Orchestra

In February 1939, Bartók wrote to his American piano student Dorothy Parrish:

Bartók had visited the United States in April 1940 in order to give a series of concert performances, the first of which was with the violinist Jozséf Szigeti. During this visit plans were made for a longer stay, ‘perhaps for several years’, but there is little evidence to suggest that he believed that this was going to be a permanent emigration. His mother, with whom he had always had a particularly close relationship, had died in December 1939, breaking the last major link to his homeland, and it seems that he felt that the preservation both of his family and of his manuscripts was more important than impotent opposition to the pro-Nazi régime in Hungary. Whilst he had been involved in a number of minor skirmishes with some elements of the Hungarian press in the years leading up to 1940, and had, with other leading composers, publicly protested against an Austrian Composers' Copyright Association questionnaire which had enquired as to its members' racial origins, there is no real sense in which he can be regarded either as a political refugee, or an escapee from racial intolerance, and his life was certainly not in danger.