I. Moderato  II. Allegro molto  III. Allegro vivace  IV. Molto tranquillo  V. Comodo  VI. Finale – Allegro

The Dance Suite was composed for a gala concert marking the fifty year anniversary of the unification of Buda, Pest and Óbuda into the metropolis known as Budapest. Bartók was requested to composed a special work, as were fellow composers Kodály and Dohnányi. This itself represented a thaw in attitudes on behalf of the commissioners. After the First World War, Budapest was the scene of its own Russian style revolution, that led to Republic of Counsels (which collapsed after 133 days). All three composers accepted an invitation to sit on the board of a musical directorium, and all three later suffered as a result. By 1923, enough water had flown under the bridge to enable a degree of reconciliation, which this triple commission symbolised. Kodály poured out his “bitter rage” in his greatest composition, the Psalmus Hungaricus. At the November 19th premiere, it was Kodály’s work that received the greatest applause. Dohnányi’s Festival Overture was politely received, but Bartók’s Dance Suite seemed to go right over the audience’s head.
In talking about this work, we are entering the murky world of Hungarian national politics, and the non-Hungarian reader should be warned that attitudes to these events still divide people to this day. After the First World War, Hungary had about two thirds of its territory stripped from it as part of the Trianon Peace Treaty. This had a traumatic effect on Hungarians, as can be imagined, although one should not forget that only 45% of the population of pre-war (Greater) Hungary were ethnic Hungarians. Greater Hungary, then, was ethnically very diverse. Some have argued that the Dance Suite is secretly about the Trianon Treaty: that it is Bartók’s vision of a Greater Hungary, where all nationalities are united into a single state. The problem with such speculation is that it owes more to speculators than to evidence, and tells us nothing useful about the music. What is undisputed is that Bartók planned a sequence of dances, using motifs characteristic of the various ethnic styles of folk music of those peoples living in the region. Later, Bartók felt that the Slovak episode was musically insufficiently interesting, and instead composed music deriving from Arab music which he had also studied in depth. Dance Suite comprises of six section and a finale. The first theme begins with the smallest interval, the minor second, and this is followed by a greater step (major second), and then a minor third. This tendency to gradually widen the interval can also be observed later. The characteristic interval of the second section is also the minor third, while the next commences with a fourth – and so on. This “development” is not mechanical. The melodies with the narrowest compass can be found in the fourth episode (which Bartók confirmed was Arabic music.) The theme of the fifth episode – which we know from Bartók’s own writings – “is so primitive that you can only talk about its primitive peasant character and give up trying to classify it according to nationality.”