Interview with Donald Maurice
International Viola Congress XXXII, Minneapolis, Minnesota
11 June 2004

by Dwight Pounds

DP: It is my good fortune to have the opportunity to spend some time interviewing Dr. Donald Maurice, author of a recently released book, Bartók’s Viola Concerto: The Remarkable Story of his Swansong, published by Oxford. I would like to begin by asking which preceded the other in your personal interest: Bartók the composer, or Béla Bartók’s Viola Concerto?

DM: The interest in Bartók came through listening to the string quartets. I was seventeen and remember that I had never listened to any Bartók—I simply wasn’t aware of his music—and a friend of mine said to me, “Well look, I’m going to sit you down and you’re not going to get up until we’ve heard all six string quartets.” I actually listened to all six quartets straight which was a pretty shocking thing to do when you are thrown straight into that texture. There is no easy way to get you into that language—it was the “deep” end and I would say for the first hour I had no idea what was going on. It was like being dropped into a foreign language and not understanding a word. At the end of what must have been two-and-a-half or three hours, I almost felt as if I was speaking the language because it was so intense, in spite of everything.

DP: Did you listen to the quartets in order?

DM: Yes, all six, and then I just wanted to hear more Bartók and became a lover of Bartók’s music from that point on. I was aware of the concerto and I listened to it but didn’t study it at that point—in fact I delayed studying it for a very, very long time. I was always aware that there was some sort of issue about this work but didn’t really understand what it was all about and there were other things I wanted to do. Three years later I went to England to study for four years at the Guildhall but I didn’t study the work there. I went to Washington and studied with Don McInnes and again didn’t study the work to play; I did, however, begin studying the work from a scholastic point of view. I thought this was the right time, and with reason: in 1978 I went to Banff and Primrose was at Banff that year. One day he announced that he was going to give a talk to all the students there on the Bartók Viola Concerto. I attended that talk. I don’t know what age Primrose was at that time but he must have been quite elderly already—I suppose he was 74 or so—and he approached the subject of performance practice. When you talk about ‘performance practice’ with regard to the Bartók/Serly Viola Concerto, you’re really talking about “What did William Primrose do?” because he established what performance practice was with that piece. I think he believed he had a kind of ownership of the piece—it was his piece, he paid for it, so I think he believed he had more than an ownership, that he had an authority about how it should be played. He was sharing with us his ideas about how fast it should be performed and so on and suggested some changes from what was in the score. That puzzled me a bit because I wasn’t sure by what authority one could change what was in the score. Just because you paid a fee for it, I don’t think it necessarily gives that level of carte blanche authority. I wasn’t sure it was because in his older age and wisdom he had found better ways to do things, but anyway, that was the trigger for me to delve into the work. I realized later that actually in some ways he did have some authority because there is so much that Bartók didn’t give us that may have resulted if he had had a meeting with Primrose.

DP: This was not the presentation where Serly was present?

DM: No, I believe that was a few years earlier in the seventies. I was not present for that one.

DP: Do you know if a transcript was ever made of that presentation?

DM: Ralph Aldrich referred to it in his review of the book. He was present and would be the one to ask, but I really don’t know. It would be fascinating to read that transcript.

DP: Yes, it would, but you were not privy to this lecture in the course of your research?

DM: No, not at all…I didn’t even know about it until Ralph mentioned that it had happened. But I did return to Seattle where I was studying and decided to study the concerto as part of my Masters Degree—the oral presentation, not a performance, and I wanted to re-analyze the piece historically and musically.

DP: Therefore your first in-depth analysis of the concerto was in preparation for your Masters?

DM: Yes.

DP: At this point I would like to move on to your association with Peter Bartók. I found it rather remarkable that, on the whole, Peter Bartók was very forthcoming during the preparation of the book, but I am sure he had his own concerns. Would you share some of those with us please?

DM: Of course he had an interest in what my book says because he has made the only official revision of the concerto available in North America and Europe. He had been working with Paul Neubauer to make a new performing edition based only on the manuscript, but I did manage to write him shortly after my Chicago presentation to explain what I was doing, that I wanted to turn my study into a PhD dissertation and would like some assistance from him documenting and confirming information, wanted to include parts or the whole of my revision in my thesis, and would he give his permission to do that. I wanted to discuss with him my decisions and he said to me—that would have been in 1993/94—that he would prefer not to see what I had done because he did not want to be influenced by anybody else’s decisions.

DP: You are referring to the cross influence discussed in such detail in your book and concurrently indicating his own level of integrity.

DM: Absolutely. He wanted his revision to be totally without cross influence, he said he wanted to deal with what he saw in the manuscript only, and that he would be very pleased, after he had finished his work and I had finished mine, that we compared notes, but that he didn’t want to do that during the formative stage. That was really pretty interesting. However, that aside, he was very willing to share other information. I sent him many questions about family circumstances, other concerns and details, and he replied to everything, including information on some things I didn’t think he might be willing to share but in fact he was. I think he wanted the story to be told.

DP: Would you comment on the Peter Bartók/Nelson Dellamaggiore/Paul Neubauer collaboration? How did each of these contribute to what has been called the “Peter Bartók” or “Paul Neubauer Revision?”

DM: I went to Peter Bartók’s home in Florida; he actually was in Hungary at the time I visited but I did work for a full day with Nelson Dellamaggiore and we spent the whole day discussing this. My understanding of the process was that Paul approached Peter Bartók, saying that he was interested in doing the revision and Peter Bartók then involved Dellamaggiore, I guess you would say, to do the mechanical work and assist in the decision-making. Nelson Dellamaggiore’s background is as a composer and arranger, and he works full time for Bartók Records so it was his job to take the manuscript and turn it into a fair copy. So he did that: he actually went through and painstakingly transcribed the whole score exactly as it was on the manuscript and put it in an easily readable edition. He and Peter Bartók together worked out structurally where things should go and I think must have spent many, many hours making decisions. Peter Bartók was certainly involved in that process but I believe Nelson Dellamaggiore was doing the mechanical work. Nelson did share with me that they had made a log of what they did…it was a bar by bar decision making process, of which he actually gave me a copy. It is many, many pages long—I don’t know how many pages—but absolutely detailed such things as why they decided to give this to the bassoon here etc. It was incredibly detailed—it was basically their thinking recorded in a log. He gave me a copy to take away which I’ve still got. I see that it has never been published and it’s not part of the facsimile edition. It was for their private use, which is why I haven’t quoted it at all, and was given to me to help me in my work.

DP: At what point did you begin to think that you had a book? At what point did you say to yourself, “I have the personal interest, curiosity, ambition, and motivation to do this.”?

DM: It was at the point when I was near submission of my PhD, I suppose, (in the Ph.D. you are so absorbed in what you are doing, you can’t think far beyond it) and I was thinking that this thesis will go to some examiners, it will come back, it will go out to the library and probably nobody will read it because it will be totally inaccessible. I couldn’t make it accessible publicly because it had things in there for which Peter Bartók gave limited permission. He said I could include my revision within the thesis but it had to remain in the library context and it could not be published in any form. So I thought, well…that’s going to make things difficult for the library if anyone who wants to use it and learns they cannot because it is under library restriction. At that point I thought there were so many viola players that want to know the story—the only way is to actually take it back, start again, redraft it into a book form and include what I am allowed to include and leave out what I am not.

DP: Wouldn’t you think that you also would have more than just a little bit of curiosity from Bartók scholars?

DM: Well, interestingly one of my Ph.D. supervisors was Malcolm Gillies who was one of the panelists in the discussion at the University of Texas during Congress XXV and Malcolm, of course, is one of the world authorities on Bartók; it was through Malcolm that I made contact with László Somfai in Budapest, head of the Bartók archives. I was invited to attend in Hungary—I think it was 1995 or 96—a big Bartók conference in Szombathely. Most of the significant Bartók scholars were there—Elliott Antokoletz, Somfai, Benjamin Suchoff, Sándor Kovács and others were presenting, so I had three full days of solid Bartók where the viola concerto wasn’t even in the picture.

DP: Which leads very nicely into my next question: Budapest does not exactly enjoy convenient access from Wellington. How many places did your research take you during the course of your investigation?

DM: Well I was in Budapest on two different occasions, went twice to Banff to work with Zoltan Szekely, and went to Florida of course. There was a conference in Switzerland which I attended with Csaba Erdélyi in which he was focusing on Bartók and asked if I would be there. I went to Australia a number of times to work with Malcolm Gillies—that’s what comes to mind immediately—and I was in Bloomington to interview Atar Arad at the Bloomington Congress (1995). There have been a lot of other important encounters along the way and it’s quite hard to remember them all, but these are the ones that come to mind.

DP: Write a Bartók book and see the world?

DM: Exactly…and there is a bit of a story I probably should tell you as you won’t know to ask about it. In 1989 I was in Banff for three months attending the winter program. That’s when I learned the Bartók Viola Concerto. It’s an interesting story because I had always wondered if one had nothing else to do all day how much one could achieve. I decided to learn the Bartók concerto and to do it in twenty one days, going from not having any of it under the fingers to having it fully memorized. I actually learned the concerto working backwards. I learned the last page in one day until it was memorized and then went back a page—by day twenty one I had in fact memorized the complete concerto and performed it in a concert with a pianist.

DP: And this would have been the Tibor Serly version?

DM: Well, it was in the sense that we played from his music, but I had changed all the notes to agree with the manuscript. I already had a copy of the manuscript by then. It was at this point that I went to Zoltan Székely and informed him what I was doing. I wanted his comment on the changes I was making…and he was not happy with what I was doing. He said you can’t do this and I said but this is what the manuscript says. He said there is no manuscript and I said, well, here it is and gave it to him. He was totally shocked—I mean he just sort of said it was like he had received from his friend a letter that he didn’t know existed. He then said, “I’m sorry—I cannot deal with this. Can you please leave this with me and come back in a week or two when I’ve had time to look at everything?” So I did. We went away and came back in two weeks and he said, “Now I want you to play again what you did.” So I played it again and he was a completely different man. He was saying, “Yes, this is the right thing here and I don’t know about this,” but he had had time to absorb what he had seen on the page and had a totally different attitude. What he could say was, “For so many years I have taught this piece and now I realize that so much was wrong.” It was really quite sad in a way.

DP: Since we have discussed Peter Bartók, tell us what you can about your association with Csaba Erdélyi, whose revision was performed at the Wellington Congress and which you hosted.

DM: Csaba and I didn’t know one another in the early nineties. We became aware of each other and met at the Bloomington Congress (1995). I became aware that he had done a revision and he became aware that I had done a revision. We were both aware that we couldn’t go anywhere with our revisions because of copyright restrictions, so rather than become competitors we decided I guess to discuss the decisions we had made. I said, “Well look—I’m not going to try to publish a revision but I am going to write a thesis and possibly a book.” So I said, “Why don’t you ‘go for it’ with your revision and I’ll ‘go for it’ with a kind of scholarly account and we will keep each other informed on what we are doing?” That’s what happened. Then when New Zealand was awarded the Viola Congress in 2001, this was the obvious opportunity for Csaba to perform. I was well down the track with my book by then. He could perform in New Zealand where it was now legal to perform his own revision, so he performed and recorded with the New Zealand Symphony his own revision, the only country in the world left where you can actually do that. I say that because Australia apparently this year is going to change the ceiling this year to seventy five years and New Zealand will be the only country left with fifty.

DP: Therefore this would extend the copyright in Australia until 2024?

DM: Yes. So that’s the relationship with Csaba. In the book I do compare his revision with the others but I haven’t had back any response on his feelings about what I said about comparing the revisions…nothing at all at this point.

DP: Those of us who do academic research are well aware that there are surprises along the way and sometimes an encounter with our personal bias. Did you experience anything of this nature?

DM: I think at the beginning I had set out to try and find fault with Tibor Serly. That was a bias if you like because he had made some decisions with which I did not agree; therefore I was looking for things. But there wasn’t any point, and of course I was made aware by the Bartók scholars that doing a literal ‘translation,’ if you like, of the manuscript into a performing edition, which is really what we all had done, actually doesn’t give you an authentic Bartók work. You have to then take it to further stages, and of course Tibor Serly attempted to do that. And he is the one who probably has made the best attempts actually to try and transform a first sketch into a full work so I ended up with quite a lot of respect for what he had done. Although on one hand I was criticizing some things, on the other hand I had to accept that actually he did take the initiative to try to develop it. We’ve all come along since and tried to be more “authentic,” and we are being more authentic in that we are presenting the sketch literally. What we hear in these performances is a sketch which has been only minimally developed.

DP: In this regard, you know that I personally consider Chapter 7 on “Authenticity” the heart of the book. Given future research, more sophisticated techniques in this area, and perhaps a more comprehensive understanding of Bartók’s mind, do you think we will ever have something that you refer to in the book as a possible authentic version?

DM: I think that what hasn’t happened so far is we haven’t had someone who is thoroughly inside Bartók’s language to actually do this job. The Bartók Estate, Peter Bartók, or whoever there has the authority—hasn’t actually given the authority to a thoroughly grounded composer for this task. So far we haven’t had someone involved like György Kurtág, a Hungarian composer who is totally inside this language—this whole understanding of Hungarian folk idioms, the language itself—that’s what hasn’t happened and I think it would have to be someone with that kind of background who could transform the sketch into something that would really sound like a mature Bartók work.

DP: What did you find to be your most difficult challenge during the project—what was the most difficult piece of evidence to uncover? What comes to your mind that was particularly difficult?

DM: I think trying to figure out what happened between Bartók’s death to the solo viola part there in the sketch and what actually came out of the Boosey & Hawkes edition of 1950—there was so much difference that the hard thing to actually crack was who did what. What did Tibor Serly do, what did Primrose do, what did Burton Fisch do?

DP: You mention Burton Fisch and his involvement with the concerto —this was the biggest surprise that I found in the book. Here was a name I had not read or heard in talking to people any number of times, but yet, considering that he played the concerto before Primrose received the manuscript, his reading must have been totally authentic compared to the changes that took place later in the construction.

DM: That is correct. As I have said, it was the only “uncontaminated” performance before Primrose. That is a loaded term, but I should say there was no cross influence—Burton Fisch was influenced only by Tibor Serly.

DP: And he (Fisch) used pizzicato passages later adopted by Atar Arad, though each appears to have reached the same conclusions independently.

DM: Yes, I would say so, but I would expect that Burton Fisch was instructed by Tibor Serly to play that passage pizzicato. That’s what Tibor Serly thought it should be because it was like in the string quartets, and in fact you can’t play four strings at once with the bow. So it is very likely that strummed pizzicato was Bartók’s intention. My guess, which I think is probably accurate, is that Primrose decided that he did not want to do the pizzicato and that’s where the arco came in. So that was a Primrose decision—to play that section arco.

DP: Let me close by asking about your next writing project. Do you have something in mind?

DM: Yes, I do. I’m right now working on getting permission from the Mitchell Library in Sidney to publish a diary of Alfred Hill. He has a diary that goes for four years while he was at Leipzig at the Conservatorium. It is a daily account of lessons, impressions, rehearsals and encounters as he sat in the orchestra; he writes about Brahms conducting one day, the next week it is Bruch, then it is Strauss, Tchaikovsky etc.. We hear an account of what these people were like in rehearsal at a time when they may not have yet become the “great” greats. They were of course already great but you know how another hundred years adds another level of greatness. At that time they were visiting teachers, just people. It is an interesting kind of an angle on these personalities and we all know their names—they all are in there because they all visited. It is an 18-20 year-old boy sitting in the orchestra describing his encounters in absolutely beautiful writing.

DP: That sounds fascinating, but I have to ask—are we discussing another eighteen years of your life in this project?

DM: Oh no. I am collaborating with the Mitchell Library and the proper authorities in Australia—we are very close, I believe, to getting the permission because they all want it to happen. We simply have to dot the “i’s” and cross the “t’s,” and once that happens I want to flesh it out, this life in Leipzig. I will have to travel to Leipzig and do a bit of research on that. Then I think we will make a book, and give it a commentary, and read the diary through it, and I think it will be completely fascinating reading.

DP: Fascinating indeed and I am rather captivated already by what you and Alfred Hill have in store for us.

DM: I’m always looking for a new project to discuss but, in the meantime, I am busy enough being a viola player.

DP: We have been discussing the circumstances and challenges confronted by Donald Maurice in his effort over two decades to piece together the remarkable story of Bartóks swansong. While the viola concerto itself was “enticingly incomplete” as Donald described it, I strongly suspect the same could be said of the story behind it with its near legendary proportions…until now. Thank you, Donald, on behalf of all violists for your efforts on this book, and thank you for sharing your time with us today.

~Dr. Dwight Pounds is a frequent contributor to the JAVS as a writer and photographer and has served on the AVS Executive Board for over 25 years in various capacities. He was the third AVS Vice President, first IVS Executive Secretary, and is author of The American Viola Society: A History and Reference. He earned his doctorate from Indiana University where he studied viola with William Primrose and Irvin Ilmer. Dr. Pounds is Professor Emeritus from Western Kentucky University.