Streichquartett Nr. 6

Bartók began work on his Sixth String Quartet in the summer of 1939 as a guest of Paul Sacher in the idyllic Swiss mountain village of Saanen, before the impending outbreak of war drove him first to Budapest and then into exile in America. The work was created at the urging of the New Hungarian String Quartet. Yet Bartók adamantly refused to allow it to be performed in Europe as long as the German occupation of Hungary continued. And so, the premiere took place in New York in 1941 by the Kolisch Quartet, with whom Bartók was closely connected. A theme already noted in the first sketches pervades the four-movement work like a musical motto. It is heard at the beginning of each of the first three movements and then becomes the main theme in the deathly pale final movement. Before that, Bartók unfolds his entire quartet artistry one last time, from the chromatic inflection of the opening movement through the grotesque “Marcia” up to the spectre-like “Burletta” with its deliberately off-tune glissandi and breath-taking pizzicato passages. Based on the scholarly findings of the Bartók Complete Edition, the new Urtext edition –presented here by the tried-and-tested Bartók team of László Somfai and Zsombor Németh, and issued by G. Henle Publishers – with parts equipped for performance and a handy study score, now provides the ideal basis for approaching this keystone in Bartók’s quartet oeuvre.