Béla Bartók

I liked it

Very technical for the non-expert.

Very interesting

Sorry, but I really don't know for whom this book is destinated. For a normal layman it is not possible to read it. And I guess for a professional musician it is not of much help. He can take the notes himself and analyse them. I expected mor on the side of the biography. Perhaps Mr. Cooper should have put the analysis of the music at the end of the book, as an appendix. It would be much easyer to read.

This is a very humdrum book. Not a work of synthesis at all. The author has no original ideas about music to bring to Bartok's compositions. At the end of the book, he characterizes Bartok's music as both rural and urban, naive and sophisticated....blah blah blah. Bartok's work is interesting, although it and all twentieth century music looks more like cake decoration the further away we get from it in time. Nevertheless, if it's worth writing about at all, it's worth putting Bartok in the intellectual context of his era--at least! The book doesn't even do that. Very boring and disappointing. It's the kind of "this happened to Bartok, then this happened to Bartok, then this happened to Bartok" biography that we can pretty well live without.

Highly knowledgeable and a detailed guide to both life and works. The analysis is fairly technical, as one would expect; it's not a "listener's guide" in the way that, for example, Tovey's Essays are, and it would be much easier to read with more music examples instead of lists of note names, but there are many good insights to be found if you persevere. The description of the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion is an example of rewarding analysis, even if I happen to disagree with both structures suggested for the first movement, one by the composer and one by Cooper. For a first book on Bartok I think Halsey Stevens should still be the first port of call for many.Am I the only listener who finds Bartok's insistence on giving exact timings for even subsections of movements singularly unhelpful? They always seem too short compared with sensible performances, and I wonder if as a consequence he wrote several works too long? He certainly referred to the Solo Violin Sonata as taking 20 minutes, but anyone who can play it in that time must have twenty fingers and two bows.

Cooper provides an outstanding guide to the music and life Bela Bartok. He does what would be expected of a first rate musicologist both in placing Bartok's works in their context and analysing them musically. He has done the scholarly hard work on the composer's life in a most satisfying way. Over and above what might be expected, he has an unfailingly satisfying inwardness with the historical period and political tensions of the Hungary of Bartok and his family.I read the book as a companion to the boxed set of Bartok's complete work. It could not have been more helpful or interesting.

A fine biography, with enough musical knowledge to challenge the reader, without seeming to exclude the musically unskilled. Bartok is such an important figure, and such an interesting person. He is reaching beyond his skills and need for praise and recognition, in the service of Magyar music as an artistic vehicle for social and moral commentary on the world's promise and perils.