Overview

Bartók's tendency to demarcate the boundaries of the individual sections of his later pieces by precisely noting their durations suggests a composer who is as concerned with the juxtaposition of formal units as ‘organic’ organization. This concern seems to be reinforced by his own analysis of the Concerto for Orchestra, which emphasizes its block-like construction, even in the sonata forms of the first and fifth movements – a viewpoint which may seem crude to the reader schooled in Schenker's ‘organic’ theory of sonata form. His description of these two movements as being ‘written in a more or less regular sonata form’ is problematized in the first, both by the reversal of the themes in the recapitulation (producing an ‘arched’ structure – I II development II I – a favoured scheme of his), and because the second subject does not return in the key area of the first, and is therefore not subsumed within its tonal sphere of influence.

This is, of course, a reasonably common strategy in the late Romantic symphony – in the first movement of Brahms's F major Third Symphony, for example, the second idea appears in the mediant major (A major) in the exposition, and in the submediant major (D major) in the recapitulation. Although Lendvai's theory does clarify Brahms's tonal scheme, it does not satisfactorily explain the tonal relationships in Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra. Whereas in the first movement of the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (which is effectively ‘in’ C) he is able to explain the key area of the second subject of the exposition (E) as a substitute dominant, and those of the recapitulation (A and F#) as substitute tonics, no such relations hold in the Concerto.