Bartók and Boosey & Hawkes: The American Years
Keyword(s):
New York
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By mid-1940 Bartók had decided to live in the United States. For how long and under what conditions, he did not really know. But, from his short tour of April and May 1940, he had come to believe that the prospects for his performing, compositional and ethnomusicological work werebrighter in New York than in Hungary, where a Nazi take-over seemed only a matter of time. The Bartóks' departure from their homeland was an unhappy affair, not just because of the myriad hassles of arranging visas and boxing up a lifetime's work, but also because of a lastminute quarrel with Kodály over unexpected directions which Bartók had taken in their joint project on Hungarian folk music. The two would, in fact, never again directly communicate.