The legacy of the Hungarian composer, ethnomusicologist and pianist Béla Bartók stretches beyond the boundaries of what is generally called classical music. Think of the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, a masterpiece of the 1930s that is featured in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, or of Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater landmark Blaubart based on the opera Bluebeard’s Castle. However, Bartók has not only been acknowledged as a great composer of the Western canon; he is also a moral and political hero of the twentieth century. The two aspects can hardly be separated. Bartók’s moral integrity is celebrated in a wide range of written and visual formats in many different countries, from educational television broadcasts to popular cultural products, such as comics and novels. The writer Kjell Espmark, a member of the Swedish Academy, wrote a novel on this topic in 2004: Béla Bartók Against the Third Reich. His book has been translated into many different languages, including French, Italian, Romanian and Spanish. Bartók’s moral stature is also a recurrent topic in illustrious academic discourse. When in 2006 Richard Taruskin derided the awkward choice of the editors of The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music to ‘leave Bartók out’ of the volume, he was not defending Bartók’s musical beauty, but his moral beauty. Without Bartók the whole history of twentieth-century music would lose any ethical sense. According to Taruskin, Bartók is ‘the only redeeming exception to the dismal saga of modernist responses to barbarism’ and his figure ‘offers a rebuke’ and ‘a possible redemption’ to ‘the sad history whereby over the course of the twentieth century the autonomy of art has degenerated into irrelevance, and the disinterestedness of artists has degenerated into moral indifference’. Passionate statements of this kind have some appreciable – and, it might be added, beneficial – consequences. The support and public funding gained by the Béla Bartók Complete Critical Edition, inaugurated in 2016 after three decades of pre-planning and painstaking permission issues, was due not only to Bartók’s stature as Hungary’s leading composer but also to his ‘wider beacon-of-humanity, moral role’.

Bartók still emerges today as a committed composer who is judged by his political deeds: in the standard narrative, he is venerated as an anti-fascist who fought against totalitarianism through his moral coherence and then his self-imposed period of exile in the United States.