Pierre-Édouard Deldique receives for the magazine Ideas dedicated to Béla Bartók: Laetitia Le Guay, normalienne, doctor of literature, musicologist, professor at the University of Cergy-Pontoise, producer at France Musique and France Culture. She is also a specialist in the Russian domain.
” Like Debussy, Stravinsky and Schönberg, the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók was one of the great “moderns” of the early 20th century. This contemporary of Stefan Zweig and Paul Klee had the revelation of popular music when one day, by chance, he heard the song of a peasant woman. This book recounts the adventure that ensued and led him to develop a unique language. He explains how, as a member of the Hungarian artistic avant-gardes, Bartók constructed a scenic work that begins in the wake of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande and ends in expressionist violence: Bluebeard’s Castle, The Wooden Prince, The Wonderful Mandarin. Finally, it explores the career of Bartók, a virtuoso pianist, who performed in the interwar period throughout Europe, as long as the rise of Nazism, which he denounced without concession, allowed him to do so. »