Bartók’s choice of the word “pictures” in the title of his op.10 is an unmistakable sign of the influence of Claude Debussy, whose music he had first encountered when Kodály brought some scores back from Paris in 1907. (He even used the French title Deux images.) The French master’s Images for piano must have been much on Bartók’s mind during the summer of 1910, and his direct stylistic influence on the first of the Two Pictures has frequently been remarked upon. (Debussy’s orchestral Images were not completed until 1912.) Yet whereas Debussy always arranged his Images (whether for orchestra or piano) in groups of three, Bartók adopted the two-movement lassú-friss (slow-fast) pattern familiar from Liszt’s Hungarian rhapsodies. He had himself used this pattern previously in Two Portraits, op. 5, and was to return to it several times in his later works.

French and Hungarian – Western and Eastern – influences are combined in Two Pictures, but the principal artistic discovery is that the two are really one: the pentatonic scale, central to the old layer of Hungarian folk music, is equally prominent in the music of Debussy. Thus, the opening melody of the first Picture (“In full flower”), modelled on a descending pentatonic line, could come out of a Hungarian folksong (albeit with chromatic alterations); at the same time, it could also be construed as deriving from Debussy. (Bartók’s immediate model seems to have been the first of Debussy’s Three Nocturnes.) This merging of two separate streams into one major river guarantees the unity of the two-movement work, whose second half (“Village Dance”) is firmly rooted in the folk music tradition, although the whole-tone scale, so important in Debussy’s work, is also present. Many of the harmonic and orchestrational ideas of this work were developed on a larger scale in such subsequent works as Bluebeard’s Castle, The Wooden Prince or the Dance Suite.

The title “In full flower” is justified by a veritable blossoming that takes place in the course of the movement as the opening melody grows to a powerful climax thanks, above all, to the lush orchestration with the highly effective use of the brass, the timpani, and especially the harps. The “Village Dance” combines elements of a folk-dance with segments of the whole-tone scale; the simple opening melody is developed into a rondo of some complexity, with many thematic and textural contrasts along the way. A particularly memorable moment is the long-drawn-out accelerando (speeding up of the tempo) over a single measure of music that is repeated over and over again; this accelerando provides the momentum for the energetic conclusion.