Walking silently with Bartók

The night was cold. Much colder than I thought it can be in October. I'm no longer used to these cold nights. I'm used to sea washed air that carries the sweet warmth of some nearby under ocean stream. All I had to warm me was some melody pouring into my ears and the thought that I would be home soon. The big yellow beast was speeding down the hill towards the river. The Danube was dark and glittering. It was reflecting mightily the little signs of life, the lights that people light in their wonderful homes. Wonderful I presume, for why would they not be wonderful? If I was to imagine stories of terror and tears, I would have been colder than I already was. I sat patiently on my wooden seat and pleaded with the naughty breeze not to blow towards me.

I drifted in a deep sleep. I almost missed my stop. The great Calvin would not have humoured my idleness. He who took no rest in devotion, who offered his whole being and even more to the Lord would have found my inaptness frustrating. Calvin who was not fastidious but would not have crept out in the middle of the night to nail the declaration of the reformation on the doors of the Wittenberg Church, yet in unison he declared mercilessly: no music, no painting, no saints, no confession, no nothing that stands between man and God. Holy I am not. A sinner I am fully and Calvin would not have humoured me.

I hurriedly traced my steps back to my third floor apartment. But my mind was racing and I was engulfed by the music blaring into my ears. A glance to the left and I am on the path of Bartók again. A statue. A statue of not the man in his full figure, but a symbolic one, just abstract pieces representing him. I follow the great master to great lengths.

The journey started somewhere in a small town in Hungary called Eger, where I sat behind a grand piano at the age of six for the first time. My every move was watched. It was decided I had no remarkable talent, but I can learn if I want to. Mother and father said: “she wants to”. Bartók came with his étude. I hit the keys on the piano and thought “this Bartók guy wrote some pretty easy and very much boring stuff. Why is he a great composer? Even I with little talent and almost non-existent motivation can play it. What’s the big deal?” The years passed and my love for the piano levelled somewhere between tolerance and indifference. There seemed no point in continuing. The études stopped contributing to my afternoons and Bartók left just as silently as he entered. Bartók who seemed to be an enigma, since I knew some of his work but never knew anything about the man, only a faint picture on the inside cover of my piano book. The picture lingers.

A man of considerable genius and I continue my journey. Bartók enters again many many years later. In that blissful year of 2004 I was accustomed to walking the streets of London. Budapest being a long way away, Bartók never having entered my mind once since that shameful episode with the étude. Yet I come across a sign on a music shop’s door announcing the unveiling of a Bartók statue right there in South Kensington. The restaurant opened, it was on my way to the bank, the sun was shining, so I went to see. I saw every day to and from work. I saw and tipped my invisible hat that after such a long time, after I thought Bartók will never again set foot in my life with his boring and bland pieces of five finger piano bashing, he came back. Talent and travel are the two things that make a man great.

Crossing over the Danube the yellow tram swirls down the hill on Bartók Street. Minutes after the Calvin Square where I get off, there is a Bartók statue in the garden of a university building. I am walking in the footsteps of giants. I must be doing something right...