Béla Bartók's Pedagogical Legacy: Mikrokosmos
by Jamie Pasho

Bartók's initial pedagogical work, titled Piano Method, was published in 1913 at the request of publisher Rózsavölgyi and Company.  Owing to Bartók's lack of experience in teaching beginning piano students, he secured the help of Sándor Reschofsky.[1] David Yeomans, professor of piano and an authority on Bartók's piano music, writes: "In addition to having established a formidable reputation as a piano virtuoso...Bartók had secured a notable pedagogical standing with...The First Term at the Piano and the Bartók-Reschovsky Piano Method."[2] Comprised of eighteen pieces taken from the latter method and published in 1929, The First Term at the Piano had become part of the standard piano pedagogical repertory in Hungary.[3] Regarding the authorship of various pieces within the Method, Reschofsky later clarified that he composed the exercises, and Bartók composed the forty-eight character pieces.[4]

When Bartók began arranging beginning piano pieces for Mikrokosmos, he sought advice from his colleague, Margit Varró, director of the piano pedagogy program at the Budapest Academy of Music, where Bartók also taught, and author of publications in theoretical and practical problems of piano teaching and music education.[5] Vera Lampert's research finds firm dates to be unknown: "In her recollections Varró did not specify the date of her interview with Bartók but referring to her second book, published in 1929, as being in press at that time, she implied 1929 or thereabouts."[6]

Varró's use of the Bartók-Reschofsky Piano Method in her own teaching placed her in a position to critique Mikrokosmos, thereby aiding Bartók in its creation.  Using the concepts from his earlier method as a springboard, he composed new pieces according to Varró's notes, which contained such suggestions as: "Every child feels the meter of this piece as 6/8; thus we are asking for another piece with real triplets!"[7] Such suggestion resulted in No. fifty-five, "Triplets in Lydian Mode," which contains a melody alternating between pairs of eighth notes and triplets, played over steady downbeats in the other hand.  A duet is provided to ensure further a steady pulse.[8] An examination of Bartók's manuscripts reveals his original attempts to rework various pieces from Piano Method, following Varró's suggestions:

Bartók was still undoubtedly thinking about the revisions of the Piano Method...but it would be difficult to estimate exactly when he made the decision to create a new piano school rather than republish a corrected and enlarged version of the old one....In all likelihood, Bartók had to abandon his plans about the new edition of the Piano Method precisely because the publisher could not undertake the project without the knowledge and consent of the co-author.  Therefore, Bartók resolved not to use anything from the Piano Method, save one single thoroughly revised pieced, and he even provided replacements for its most successful pieces.[9]

Another source of initial drafts later used in Mikrokosmos originated with Bartók's teaching of his younger son, Pétér.  A promoter of contemporary music and Bartók's personal friend, pianist and composer Erik Chisholm, recalls an interview in 1933:

Bartók spoke also about another educational project he had in hand: the collection he called ‘Mikrokosmos'....In the quiet earnest manner in which Bartók spoke about this novel piano ‘tutor' it was clear to me he was extremely interested in the project, and that it was one very much after his own heart.  As a matter of fact he had a very personal interest in this collection, as he intended it primarily for the musical education of his nine-year-old son Pétér and, indeed, dedicated the first two volumes to Pétér.[10]

In the foreword to Mikrokosmos, Pétér reveals his father's unconventional approach to teaching and the initial conception of the pieces that were reworked for Mikrokosmos:

His teaching programme did not follow an accepted ‘piano school' technique.  At first I was to sing only.  Later, exercises were improvised, directed partly at the independent control of the fingers.  In the course of our lessons he sometimes asked me to wait while he sat down at his desk...In a few minutes he would bring to the piano an exercise, or a short piece, that I was to decipher right away and then learn for the next lesson.  So were born some of the easier pieces in these volumes.  However, he kept on producing others at a much faster rate than I could learn them.  He wrote the little compositions as the ideas occurred to him.  Soon there was a large collection to choose from, so I could learn these assigned to me from a fair copy of the manuscript.  Eventually my father arranged the pieces in a progressive order for publication.[11]

Although Bartók was inexperienced in teaching children, his older son, Béla, affirmed his father's genial attitude towards youth:

He had a great devotion to children; he regarded them as the raw material from which a finer humanity could be shaped.  His educational activities formed an important part of his whole work-witness his piano manual, co-authored with Reschofsky; the cycle of works For Children, which he revised several times; and the six volumes of Mikrokosmos, composed with most careful attention to detail.[12]

Bartók provides two interpretations for the translation of Mikrokosmos, "small world": "The word Mikrokosmos may be interpreted as a series of pieces in many different styles, representing a small world.  Or it may be interpreted as ‘world of the little ones, the children.'"[13]

Bartók's desire to provide the next generation with a contemporary method stemmed from his dissatisfaction with the public's reception of his music.  Ernest Roth, Bartók's publisher at Boosey and Hawkes in London, helped him to see the need for such a work:

It was at the beginning of the 1930s.  The general economic crisis all over the world had hit new music hard....With Bartók himself things had gone badly.  His works were hardly ever played....He complained that even his piano works, apart from the ‘Allegro barbaro,' found no favour with the public.  He rightly called himself the only legitimate contemporary composer of piano music, being a pianist himself and knowing how to write not only good but real, effective piano music.  I could speak only from my own pianistic experience: from J. S. Bach to the Romantics every stylistic period had its educational literature which taught the beginner about both musical style and its technical problems; after Schumann this up-to-date literature of exercises and easy pieces began to disappear and the young player still had to start and finish with Czerny, which gave him all the equipment for Mozart and Beethoven but was no help with Chopin and Brahms, let alone what followed.  ‘But I am always writing short, easy pieces for beginners,' replied Bartók, ‘I have drawers full of them.'  This was not enough, I said.  What was required was a system, a method....Bartók listened attentively and said he would think it over.  The result was his Mikrokosmos, which I published in London in 1940.[14]

[1] Vera Lampert, "On the Origins of Bartók's Mikrokosmos," Studia Musicologia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae T. 39 Fasc. 1 (1998): 125.

[2] Antokoletz, Elliott, Bartók Perspectives: Man, Composer, and Ethnomusicologist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002): 189.

[3] Vera Lampert, "On the Origins of Bartók's Mikrokosmos": 125.

[4] Vera Lampert, "On the Origins of Bartók's Mikrokosmos": 126-127.

[5] Vera Lampert, "On the Origins of Bartók's Mikrokosmos": 124.

[6] Vera Lampert, "On the Origins of Bartók's Mikrokosmos": 136.

[7] Vera Lampert, "On the Origins of Bartók's Mikrokosmos": 130-135.

[8] Béla Bartók, Mikrokosmos, Vol. 2 (London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1987): 27-28.

[9] Vera Lampert, "On the Origins of Bartók's Mikrokosmos": 136.

[10] Malcolm Gillies, Bartók Remembered (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991): 118.

[11] Béla Bartók, Mikrokosmos, Vol. 1 (London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1987): 4.

[12] Malcolm Gillies, Bartók Remembered: 26.

[13] Béla Bartók, Mikrokosmos, Vol. 1: 4.

[14] Malcolm Gillies, Bartók Remembered: 128-129.