The music of Béla Bartók

Josef Haydn wrote 68 string quartets. Mozart wrote 23, Beethoven 16, Schubert around 20, and Shostakovich 15. I love string quartets and recalled having on my shelf for several decades a double CD album of the six string quartets by Béla Bartók, recorded in 1965 by the Novak Quartet. I took them down out of curiosity, blew off the dust, and settled down.

I have never taken to Bartok's music; I have always found it dessicated and lacking in soul. So it was now with the string quartets; I listened to two of them, then decided I was wasting my life and listening time. One would have thought Bartok would have learned from his extensive folk song collecting that, to appeal to listeners, music needed the occasional theme, motif, melody or tune. None of that here: the quartets meander down the river. There are no landmarks, no memorable sites, nothing to retain in the mind. The six quartets are firmly back on my shelves where my heirs will no doubt discover them sometime in the future. Mr Bartok's music is not for me.