AN DIE NAHE GELIEBTE.

Felicie Fábián, three years younger than Bartók, studied piano and composition at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music in Budapest. Her name appears more and more frequently in Bartók's letters from the beginning of the 1899 academic year, and their intense relationship, lasting until 1903, is also evidenced by three compositions associated with Felicie. Liebeslieder is the earliest of these, written during 1900, lacking an opus number, and unpublished during Bartók's lifetime. Its lyrics and musical style suggest German Romantic models which, indeed, played a decisive role in the young composer's orientation. This is confirmed by an important source: until 1903, the composer kept detailed lists of all the works he had studied, heard or wanted to study in the future. Lieder appear in the list of pieces he had already known from the spring of 1898 onwards; before that, Bartók makes no mention of the genre, and from the end of 1900 the Lied almost disappears from the list. Since during this period the young composer studied a number of songs or song cycles by Schubert and Schumann, certain songs by Brahms, and even Wagner's Valkyrie, we can agree with scholars who compare Liebeslieder to these works. Although some others think that the influence of Hugo Wolf, Richard Strauss and Franz Liszt can be traced in Liebeslieder, their names do not appear in Bartók's list yet, so we can rather speak of coincidental similarities or common stylistic bases. However, the analyses often disregard a no less important figure from the list: Beethoven, who was not only considered by Bartók to be an unavoidable figure in symphonic, chamber and piano works, but the young composer also studied his Lieder. In this paper, I explore the influence of Beethoven's only song cycle on Bartók's Liebeslieder, surfacing primarily in structural features, including the tonal plan, the use of other unifying elements, and the heightened significance of the piano part. We can also find shared phases in the compositional process, like the treatment of poetic texts, which may have remained hidden from Bartók at that time, but which are, perhaps, even more intriguing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]