Piano Concerto No. 3, Sz. 119

Program notes

About the Work

The Third Piano Concerto is Bartók’s farewell, the last work he all but completed, written in the final months of his life in 1945, against the gathering shadow of the leukaemia that would kill him that September. He had emigrated to the United States in 1940, and the American years had been bruising: illness, money worries, and the ache of exile pressing on a composer used to standing at the centre of his own musical culture. Yet the late works that emerged from that hardship are among the most luminous and reconciled he ever wrote, and the Third Concerto is the most serene of all.

There is a tender private story behind it. Bartók’s first two piano concertos are ferocious, percussive, fiendishly difficult, and written for himself to play. The Third is gentler and more lyrical, and it was conceived as a gift: a surprise birthday present and, he knew, a legacy for his wife, the pianist Ditta Pásztory-Bartók, so that she would have a concerto to perform after he was gone. He worked on it through the summer of 1945, racing the disease. He very nearly won that race. At his death the score was complete but for the orchestration of its final seventeen bars, which his friend and fellow émigré Tibor Serly completed from Bartók’s notes. Ditta, grief-stricken, did not give the premiere; that fell to Bartók’s former pupil György Sándor, with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, on 8 February 1946.

The concerto is cast in three movements and looks, in part, backward, to a clarity and balance that feels almost neo-Baroque or neo-Classical, the spiky modernism of the earlier Bartók softened into something songful and humane. The outer movements are bright and folk-inflected; the slow central movement is the heart of the work, a hushed hymn of thanks. Across its twenty-odd minutes the Third Concerto offers a portrait of a composer making peace: with his illness, with his exile, and with the music he was about to leave behind.

What to Listen For

The first movement (Allegretto) opens not with a flourish but with a quiet, flowing folk-like theme in the piano over a soft shimmer of strings, the keyboard treated lyrically, as a singing voice rather than a percussion battery. Listen for how Hungarian and Romanian melodic turns colour the writing, and for the unforced, almost conversational dialogue between soloist and orchestra. This is Bartók with his sharpest edges put away.

The central Adagio religioso is the emotional core, and one of the most moving things Bartók wrote. Its outer sections are a solemn chorale. The marking ‘religioso’ is no accident, and many listeners hear in it an echo of Beethoven’s ‘Heiliger Dankgesang’, the convalescent’s hymn of thanksgiving from the A minor String Quartet. Bartók, gravely ill, is making his own gesture of gratitude. At the movement’s centre comes something unmistakable to anyone who knows him: ‘night music’, that private Bartók world of chirping birds, rustling insects, and trills evoking the sounds of the nocturnal countryside, the orchestra alive with tiny flickers around the piano’s quiet musings.

The finale bursts in without pause: a vigorous, dancing rondo full of folk-rhythm propulsion, with a sturdy fugal passage that shows the old contrapuntal master still fully in command. Listen for the swing between exuberant dance and rigorous counterpoint, and for the way the concerto ends: bright, affirmative, untroubled. Knowing this was the last music Bartók finished, that hard-won brightness is what stays with you.