Description: The composition of Cantata profana (1930) by Hungarian composer Béla Bartók--among the twentieth century's most important composers and one of the founders of comparative musicology--was inseparable from the composer's lifelong involvement with folk musics and folklore. In this volume of the Studies in Musical Genesis, Structure, and Interpretation series, László Vikárius, a leading authority on Bartók, uncovers the many layers of ethnographic, historical, and personal meaning embedded in the Cantata profana.
