Béla Bartók Mini-Sculpture

Béla Bartók was seven when his father died, and the family's next address was Nagyszőlős — today Vynohradiv, a Tisza-side town a hundred-odd kilometres east of Uzhhorod, where his mother found work teaching. Three years later, aged eleven, he gave the first public recital of his life there. One of the pieces was his own, written at nine: a short thing called The Course of the Danube.

So the composer on the Uzh embankment is not a borrowed celebrity. He started here, and he came back — the second time carrying a machine.

The machine in his hands

The object the bronze figure is holding is a phonograph, and it is the whole argument for putting him here. From 1908 Bartók and Zoltán Kodály went out into the villages with an Edison cylinder recorder and got peasants to sing into the horn — not to be charming about it, but because the songs were going out of use and nobody had written them down. Over a working life he took down thousands of melodies: Hungarian, Slovak, Romanian, Bulgarian, and material from as far off as Moldavia and Algeria.

Transcarpathian accounts credit him with around eighty Ruthenian songs gathered in these valleys. He is the reason a number of them still exist in any form at all. Kolodko gave him the recorder rather than a baton or a keyboard, which is the honest choice: the tie between Bartók and this region is fieldwork, not performance.

A radio frequency on a plaque

The miniature was unveiled on 25 September 2015, the eve of the seventieth anniversary of his death — he died in New York on 26 September 1945, of leukaemia. Beside the figure the city fixed a small plaque giving the frequency of Bartók Rádió, the Hungarian classical station that carries his name, so the piece quietly points at something still audible rather than only at a dead man.

One local story has the figure turned deliberately, its back to the old synagogue further along the embankment. Nothing confirms the intention. The building is worth knowing about regardless: dedicated in 1904, Moorish and Byzantine Revival, it became a state concert hall in 1947, after the Carpathian Jewish community that built it had been destroyed in 1944. It is where you would go to hear Bartók played in Uzhhorod.

Finding it

Pravoslavna naberezhna 12, on the river railing opposite the Consulate General of Hungary. This is the quieter of the two embankments, and the miniature sits at hand height on the rail itself, small and dark and easy to walk past if you are watching the water instead.

Kolodko has been screwing these bronzes onto Uzhhorod since 2010 and there are now more than a hundred, most of them strung along these two riverbanks. The practical advice is to walk the railings rather than the road, and to get down to Bartók's level for a photograph — from standing height the phonograph, which is the point of the thing, disappears.