Strategies of integration

Much energy has been expended by Bartók scholars in the attempt to explain the apparent coherence of a music whose sources and techniques are extremely heterogeneous. Most stress the unity of his mature compositions, observing a higher-level synthesis of the various elements which contribute to its surface, especially those features which originate in folk musics. Such a synthesis, it has often been argued, is ‘organic’, implying a harmony of form and content, in which foreground events are the ‘natural consequence’ of deeper structural features.

It should be clear from the synopsis that the most immediate and striking features of the Concerto which seem to promote unity are the germinal motif whose contour is found in almost all of the important themes, in one form or other, and the perfect fourths shape first articulated at the start of the Introduzione. The evolution of the germinal motif in the introduction to the first movement is carefully controlled, from its first suggestion in the entirely chromatic figure encompassing a perfect fourth between C5 and F5 played by the first flute in bar 11. Its function here is twofold: to act as the completion of the first violins' ascent (which only reaches E5 before falling back to C5), and thus shadow the opening fourths in the lower strings; and to move the register a fourth higher for the second statement at bar 12. Underneath the flute figure, the cellos and basses play a long held pedal C#, the first of a series underpinning bars 6–54 which forms the sequence C#–F#–D#–E–G, a transposed reordering of the first five pitches of the germinal motif (C#–D#–E–F#–G).