Music: Bartok's First

At the start of his great career, when Composer Bela Bartok was about to become a piano instructor at the Budapest Academy of Music, he fell in love with a former academy student. 17-year-old Violinist Stefi Geyer. The 26-year-old Bartok expressed his devotion in two mistily adolescent letters and in one piece of music—Concerto No. 1 for Violin and Orchestra—that conveyed his emotions far more cogently than any words. That was in 1907. For reasons unknown. Violinist Geyer never played the work publicly, and at her death in 1957, twelve years after Bartok died, she left the manuscript to Swiss Conductor...