Bartók in Hungarian Poetry
Bartók in Hungarian Poetry

Summary/Abstract: " When I was a student at the Liszt Academy in Budapest, I spent a lot of time in a classroom where a famous photograph of Béla Bartók, by Kata Kálmán, was hanging on the wall. Whenever I looked at this picture, it seemed to me that Bartók’s eyes were constantly on me. I tried to escape his probing look, and moved to another corner of the room. But those large, deep, and expressive eyes were following me wherever I went. The impression was akin to what Rainer Maria Rilke described in his poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo:” denn da ist keine Stelle, / die dich nicht sieht. Du musst dein Leben ändern. (“For there is no place at all / that isn’t looking at you. You must change your life.”) The perception that Bartók is constantly looking at us and therefore we have to change our lives is practically as old as Bartók reception itself. And the people who were best able to put this perception into words were poets, like Rilke who had expressed a similar perception about an ancient Greek statue."[...]

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