RECITALS AND FAREWELL CONCERT AT THE MUSIC ACADEMY
A TWO-PIANO CONCERT OF BARTÓK AND HIS WIFE, DITTA PÁSZTORY, 24 MARCH 1939 (PHOTO: GYULA SCHÄFFER).
RECITALS AND FAREWELL CONCERT AT THE MUSIC ACADEMY
In 1934, at the intervention of Ernő Dohnányi, who was just appointed to be the Director of the Music Academy, he was relieved of his duties there and assigned, instead, to the task of working on the Hungarian folk music collection at the Academy of Sciences in Budapest. […] To my father the situation was becoming unbearable. After the German occupation of Austria he expected conditions in Hungary to be also affected. […] In an exploratory journey to the U.S.A. early in 1940 he accepted invitations to a busy concert tour with my mother for the following season. He returned to Budapest only to make final arrangements […] and played a farewell concert with my mother. Although the plans called for only a year’s concerts in the U.S.A., that farewell concert was sensed — and later proved — to have been of further significance.
(Péter Bartók, My Father, 2002)