Overview

This book opens up new perspectives on the history of Béla Bartók's music in the 20th century. It joins a growing literature on music and the cultural Cold War. It draws inspiration from a trove of historic correspondence discovered in Massachusetts in 2010, written by Béla Bartók's executor and trustee, Victor Bator. Bator, an accomplished Hungarian-American businessman, had been personally appointed to this role by the composer. He fulfilled his charge honorably, using his court-backed authority to fend off challenges hurled against him by Hungarian government attorneys eager to wrest Bartók's legacy from New York City and return it to Budapest. Epic transcontinental legal battles dragged on for decades, locking the Bartók Estate in bitter conflict. Unpublished letters from Bator's desk form the starting point for the book, which weaves them into a larger story of one man's battle to keep the American Bartók Estate and Archives from falling into Communist hands during the Cold War.

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9781943596232

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Carl S. Leafstedt is a musicologist on the faculty of Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. He received his Ph.D. in music from Harvard University. The subject of his doctoral work, and his first book, was Béla Bartók's opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle. He writes regularly about Bartók and his music, most recently in Contemporary Music Review (2019) and Mitteilungen der Sacher Stiftung (2019). He is currently working on several projects involving music in Texas during the Works Progress Administration era of the late 1930s. For the American Musicological Society he has served on the AMS Council and as President of the Southwest Chapter.At Trinity he served as Chair of the Department of Music from 2006-12. He currently Co-Chairs the university's innovative Arts, Letters, and Enterprise program, which provides students with business literacy courses and internship placements to help launch their careers.

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