Word: szigeti
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...Bartok & Szigeti...
Posthumous Justice. The explanation was partly sentimental: most of the solo artists and conductors took no fee, but specified that the money should go to Bartók's sick widow. But Bartók's closest friend and fellow Hungarian, Violinist Joseph Szigeti (rhymes with spaghetti), insisted that there was more to the Bartók revival than that. Said he: "It's not planned but spontaneous. It has an element of the bad conscience, like all posthumous justice...
...Szigeti and Bartók spent some time together at Davos, Switzerland (the locale of The Magic Mountain) in 1928, while Bartók was treated for consumption and Szigeti recuperated from pneumonia. Szigeti remembers him as a slight, frail man with the burning blue eyes of a zealot, whose hair had turned white at 22. They later played in concerts together all over Europe. Said Szigeti: "He was an anachronism . . . who should have lived in the times of Haydn and Beethoven. He couldn't fit into big business...
...Says Szigeti: "The mental inertia of the music-listening public is something so terrifying it is better not to think of it. Our sluggish mental habits make so much great music seem esoteric. We shut out our participation because we are afraid. Bartók is one of the imperishable creative artists. His position is less likely to be corroded by the years than that of Sibelius or Strauss or Prokofiev...
...Bartók's own favorites was his early (1907) Portrait No. 1 in D, in which a tender strain of violin melody was originally played by the concertmaster from his seat in the orchestra. Bartók once begged Szigeti: "You must rescue it, take it out of the orchestra." Last week Szigeti played it as a violin concerto, with Leonard Bernstein's New York City Symphony, in its first Manhattan performance. Said the New York Herald Tribune: "How music of such extraordinary value can have escaped [our] attention . . . for four decades is difficult to understand...