Bartok

Some of the most popular works of nineteenth-century music were labeled either "Hungarian" or "Gypsy" in style, including many of the best-known and least-respected of Liszt's compositions. In the early twentieth century, Béla Bartók and his colleagues questioned not only the Hungarianness but also the good taste of that style. Bartók argued that it should be discarded in favor of a national style based in the "genuine" folk music of the rural peasantry.

Bartok’s mother, Norma Herr, was a pianist who suffered from schizophrenia and was homeless for much of her life. When Bartok was a child, her unpredictable mother tried to jump out of a second-floor window. After enduring years of painful uncertainty, Bartok and her sister made the difficult decision to cut off all ties to their mother, with only a post office address as a tenuous connection. They changed their names, too, and had unpublished telephone numbers and addresses.

This is the first book-length examination of Bartók's 1911 opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle, one of the twentieth century's enduring operatic works. Writing in an engaging style, Leafstedt adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the opera by introducing, in addition to music-dramatic analysis, a number of topics that are new to the field of Bartók studies. These new areas of critical and scholarly terrain include a detailed literary study of the libretto and a gender-focused analysis of the opera's female character, Judith.