Bartok's Attempt at Cooperation with the State Institute for Folk Song in Czechoslovakia and Its Political Connotations

The study presents new discoveries about contacts between Bela Bartok and the Czech and Slovak cultural milieu. The subject matter of the study is the processing of materials from the collection of the State Institute for Folk Song, where Bartok was in contact with important Czechoslovak composers and musicologists (Leos Janacek, Dobroslav Orel, Zdenek Nejedly et al.). In Prague in 1925, Bartok presented a plan for cooperation, within the framework of which he offered to resume his activity as a collector in Slovakia. The study presents Bartok's previously unknown research plans, and it reveals both the overt and the hidden societal and political circumstances that prevented his plans from ever being realized.