Volume 10 of the Complete Edition, containing all folk song arrangements by Bartók for voice and piano, was published in November 2024. By bringing together these works, it provides a unique overview of the genre that played an important role in Bartók’s workshop, and of its stylistic diversity. The very broad timeframe of these works is also telling: the earliest one (Székely Folk Song, 1904) coincides with Bartók’s first decisive folk song experience and the latest can be dated to the last year of Bartók’s life (Three Ukrainian Folk Songs, 1945). The volume includes several works and versions that were not published in Bartók’s lifetime.
Edited by Vera Lampert, with the collaboration of Viola Biró, the volume contains seven compositions in its main part, including such well-known works as Eight Hungarian Folk Songs, Village Scenes based on Slovak folk songs, Twenty Hungarian Folk Songs, and the Bartók pieces of the Hungarian Folk Songs published jointly by Bartók and Kodály in 1906. (This latter set is presented in two versions: namely according to the first edition and to the last revised edition.) Appendix I is novelty: five works left in manuscript by Bartók – completed but unedited sets, including the hitherto largely Nine Romanian Folk Songs –, discarded pieces, occasional arrangements, early versions, and unfinished or fragmentary works. While the unpublished works, most of which date from the period of collecting folk songs, reveal the interconnectedness of Bartók’s compositional and ethnomusicological work, the versions show the diversity of the methods and purposes of folk song arrangement. The latter is exemplified by the three versions of some of the pieces of the Hungarian Folk Songs of 1906: the original version for amateurs published in the first edition, the concert version of the same time intended for Bartók’s own use (Four Hungarian Folk Songs, 1906) and the concert version recorded more than twenty years later with bold harmonization (Five Hungarian Folk Songs, BB 97, 1928).
The score is complemented by a rich textual apparatus. The publication is preceded by an introduction on the history of the composition, performance and reception of each work, and a chapter for performers on the characteristics of Bartók’s notation and performance practice. Appendix II provides a literal English translation of the song texts. The volume concludes with the critical notes: here all the sources for the works are presented, with facsimiles and diplomatic transcriptions of many manuscript fragments and the complete draft of the Twenty Hungarian Folk Songs.