Bartok's First

At the start of his great career, when Composer Bela Bartok was about to become a piano instructor at the Budapest Academy of Music, he fell in love with a former academy student. 17-year-old Violinist Stefi Geyer. The 26-year-old Bartok expressed his devotion in two mistily adolescent letters and in one piece of music--Concerto No. 1 for Violin and Orchestra--that conveyed his emotions far more cogently than any words. That was in 1907. For reasons unknown. Violinist Geyer never played the work publicly, and at her death in 1957, twelve years after Bartok died, she left the manuscript to Swiss Conductor Paul Sacher. who performed it in Switzerland in 1958. Last week Violinist Isaac Stern, playing in Carnegie Hall with the Philadelphia Orchestra, introduced Bartok's long-lost concerto to New York concertgoers.

Actually, the first movement is familiar as one of Bartok's Two Portraits for violin and orchestra. The second, fast movement, however, never got off the pages of Violinist Geyer's manuscript (which carries a dedication from Bartok that Conductor Sacher regards as too personal for publication). The 20-minute concerto emerged as a first-rate work--colorful, rhapsodic, characterized by soaring melodic lines of originality and striking beauty. Frankly romantic, it gives only occasional hints of the later Bartok of the second Violin Concerto--notably in the abrupt shifts of mood, the raucous attacks of the second movement.

Whether the two movements were written at the same time nobody knows. But according to Conductor Sacher, the second movement is an exact musical portrait of Violinist Stefi Geyer, whom friends remember as a dark, rapt beauty, a trifle spoiled by her early musical success, and more interested in her career than in young Bartok.

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