A CONDUCTOR’S GUIDE TO BÉLA BARTÓK’S CANTATA PROFANA

Abstract

Béla Bartók composed Cantata Profana in 1930, at the height of his interwar European career. Bartók’s only major choral-orchestral work, the cantata is a synthesis of Bartók’s immersion in Eastern European folk music and his mature compositional aesthetic. Cantata Profana is a work of modest scale, approximately twenty minutes in duration, though it is also one that makes considerable musical demands of a double chorus, tenor and baritone soloists, and a full orchestra. Above all, it is a work that is considered by many prominent Bartók scholars to be among the composer’s finest creations. Despite all of this, Cantata Profana is so infrequently performed that most musicians know it only by reputation or through one of the handful of existing recordings, if they know it at all. This dissertation gathers the resources a choral conductor needs when preparing to perform Cantata Profana. These resources include a brief history of the cantata’s genesis and analyses of the work’s structure and musical elements. The dissertation examines the required performing forces, choral divisi, Hungarian diction, rehearsal strategies, and programming considerations, and provides possible solutions to these as some of the challenges inherent in the work. The last section of the dissertation considers the interpretation and meaning of the cantata. Appendices are devoted to a literal English translation and International Phonetic Alphabet transliteration of Cantata Profana’s Hungarian text; a selected performance history of the work; and an annotated discography of the available recordings. The ultimate goal of this dissertation is to make Cantata Profana a more approachable work, and to encourage more conductors, choruses, and orchestras to undertake its performance.