I think there is some quote of Bartok somewhere where he expresses his great distaste for the Shostakovich work, but I can't remember the source of this. That would suggest other than that he's perceiving an 'equal irony'.
I suppose what I was asking is exactly that: whether such a source exists.
Would be interested if anyone knows for certain!
Here's what a quick bit of digging uncovers:
The ambiguity about this stems from comments like the following:
‘[Fritz] Reiner had made him [Bartók] listen to this work [Shostakovich Seventh Symphony] on a radio broadcast;” ‘When it was over he never said whether he liked it or not. He was a taciturn man.’ He did indeed rarely give vent to any derogatory views on the music of his contemporaries, but here he breaks his silence musically to scorn the Shostakovich theme with laughter in high woodwind and violinist, blow raspberries at it with trombone glissandos, guy it in barrel-organ style and turn it upside down, after which interruption the intermezzo is resumed.’ (Paul Griffiths –
Bartók (London: Dent, 1984), pp. 177-178).
Here are various related quotes on the issue:
Bartok – letter to Wilhelmine Creel – Seattle, December 17, 1944.
‘The first performance of my orchestra work, written in Sept 1943 for the Koussevitzky Foundation took place on Dec. 1.2. in Boston. We went there for the rehearsals and performances – after having obtained the grudgingly granted permission of my doctor for this trip. It was worth wile [sic], the performance was excellent. Koussevitzky is very enthusiastic about the piece, and says it is ‘the best orchestra piece of the last 25 years’ (including the works of his idol Shostakovich!)’
Béla Bartók –
Letters, collected, selected, edited and annotated by János Demény, translated Peter Balabán and István Faraks, revised translation Elisabeth West and Colin Mason (London: Faber & Faber, 1971), p. 342.
In an essay about his Russian tour:
‘Shostakovich is most esteemed among the ‘younger’ composers, but this time I heard none of his works.’ (Béla Bartók –
Essays, selected and edited by Benjamin Suchoff (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), p. 495. The only other mention of Shostakovich in this collection refers to possible transliterations of his name).
In same volume, in Bartók’s Harvard Lectures of 1943, Bartók writes in the context of a discussion of a Mondrian painting that ‘this reduction of means to little more than nothing seems an exaggeration to me. I am only a musician, and I am not competent to judge paintings. But this kind of reduction of means seems to be a rather poor device for satisfactory artistic communication.’ (p. 358, preceding a discussion of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, to Bartók ‘the two leading composers of the past decades’). Peter Laki suggests that this is ‘an oblique criticism of the Shostakovich Seventh Symphony’ (see Laki -
Bartók and his World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 55 n. 33)
In David Cooper and Julian Rushton -
Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996):
‘Doráti declares that Bartók admitted to him that ‘he was caricaturing a tune from Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony . . . . which was then enjoying great popularity in America, and in his view, more than it merited. “So I gave vent to my anger”, he said.’ (p. 54)
(more from this source later. There is another book on the work by Benjamin Suchoff which I don't have access to at the moment)
‘In a 1942 broadcast of Shostakovich’s (‘Leningrad’) Seventh Symphony Bartók was very surprised to hear repetitions of a theme that ‘sounded like a Viennese cabaret song’, and was to satirize the work by using a variant of this theme as an interruption (from bar 76)..’ (Elliott Antokoletz – ‘Concerto for Orchestra’, in Malcolm Gillies (ed) –
The Bartók Companion (London: Faber & Faber, 1993), pp. 533-534.)
Leon Botstein writes that:
‘The antimodernist agitation in the Soviet Union of the 1930s and the Zhdanov decrees of 1948 therefore enhanced the idea that the radical musical modernism of the Second Viennese School was the legitimate aesthetic strategy by which to challenge twentieth-century terror, oppression, and exploitation. Musical modernism could unmask false consciousness and express genuine freedom and individuality. Dmitry Shostakovich’s music, particularly the Seventh Symphony, caricatured by Bartók in the Concerto for Orchestra, had been popular in the 1940s in America as emblematic of the Soviet-American alliance against Hitler. But the 1950s Helm could write that Bartók’s satirical use “may, in fact, constitute the only reason for remembering the Shotakovich Seventh Symphony in the future.’ (Leon Botstein – ‘Out of Hungary: Bartók, Modernism, and the Cultural Politics of Twentieth-Century Music’, in Peter Laki –
Bartók and his World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 7. Helm citation comes from Everett Helm – ‘The Music of Béla Bartók’, in Howard Hartog (ed) -
European Music in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1957), p. 32)).
‘In view of the contrast between two performances for Bartók and twenty-eight for Shostakovich that year, the famous Shostakovich parody in the Concerto for Orchestra can hardly come as a surprise (Tibor Tallián – ‘Bartók’s Reception in America, 1940-1945', in Laki, p. 112. Tallián also points out to what extent Shostakovich was praised in reviews from the time as ‘a kind of diplomatic emissary, ex-officio, for the Soviet government’ (which was then a US ally) (ibid).
Importantly:
‘According to the composer’s son, Péter Bartók[16], while the Concerto for Orchestra was in progress Bartók heard a broadcast of the Seventh Symphony of Shostakovich; he found the so-called ‘crescendo theme’ so ludicrous that he decided to burlesque it in his own work. The latter part of the Shostakovich theme appears in all its vapidity.’
[16] In a radio interview, CBS, 19 September 1948. In a letter to the author, Péter Bartók points out that the part of the theme Bartók used was not original with Shostakovich: ‘But in any case I could mention that the famous theme was played much before the Seventh Symphony was written, in the form of Viennese cabaret songs . . . [In the Concerto for Orchestra] the first half of the theme is missing. That half did not originate in Vienna.’
Halsey Stevens –
The Life and Music of Béla Bartok , third edition, prepared by Malcolm Gillies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 282, 322 n. 16.
John McCabe. in
Bartók Orchestral Music (London: BBC, 1974), also hears the passage as a parody, as do all other writers I have read. There is a qualification from Gyorgy Sandor which I will post later.
