THE BARTÓK
CABIN
With volunteer support and proceeds raised from summer concerts, Historic Saranac Lake saved the modest cabin, where Béla Bartók stayed on Riverside Drive. Through concerts, tours and school programs, Historic Saranac Lake celebrates the works of this world-renowned composer and raises awareness about his time in Saranac Lake. In March, 2022, Historic Saranac Lake was honored to receive a donation from the estate of Peter Bartók of an extensive collection of personal items that belonged to Béla Bartók. We are planning to exhibit the Bartók Collection at the Trudeau Building, in the future expanded museum.
In 2023, Historic Saranac Lake made significant repairs to the cabin. It will be available to tour by appointment starting in June of 2024 though fall of 2024.
THE BARTÓK FUND
ABOUT THE BARTÓK CABIN
In 1945 the great Hungarian composer Béla Bartók spent the last summer of his life in Saranac Lake, writing two pieces, his Third Piano Concerto and Viola Concerto. Some 70 years later, Bartók’s reputation has soared, and the cabin on Riverside Drive where he stayed has been saved from near collapse.
Ill with polycythemia, a form of leukemia, Bartók was sent by his doctors to Saranac Lake for the summer of 1943. That summer the Bartóks stayed with Mrs. Margaret Sageman, who owned a large cure cottage at 32 Park Avenue and lived in a smaller bungalow behind it. In less than two months there, Bartók composed his Concerto for Orchestra. He returned to the Sageman Cottage in 1944.
In the summer of 1945, the Bartóks moved into a four-room cabin on Riverside Drive. Mrs. M. A. Levy, with whom the couple had become friends in previous summers, had helped them find it, next door to her house. The cabin stood in the back yard of a house rented by Maks Haar, who worked for Lederle drug company, and his wife, the former Ida Weinstock, who had been raised in Saranac Lake. For fifteen dollars a month, Maks and Ida sublet the cabin to the Bartóks, who inscribed the Haars’ guest book: “We are happy indeed to stay in this wonderful quiet place.”
It is not known when the rustic cabin was built, though it seems likely to have been a summer curing facility for tuberculosis patients when the house was a cure cottage called Balsam Manor. No historic photos of the house show the cabin, though it may have been present when they were taken. Maryland Avenue behind the cabin was still undeveloped in 1945, and Ida Haar remembered going for walks with Bartók in the woods there.
Bartók described the cabin as “a small makeshift place” and “a hovel or hut.” It was very simply furnished “with two cots, a small table, chairs that are gone long ago,” and no piano, according to their son, Peter. The composer brought with him “a minimum of necessities, two kinds of manuscript paper (one for pencil, one for India ink) and writing instruments.”
Bartók wrote about the cabin in a letter to Peter on July 7, calling it “very quiet, but very simple—the bath water must be heated in a stove—the ice-box must be fed real, natural ice.” These comments were high praise from Bartók, who greatly valued quiet, simplicity and closeness to nature. Peter observed that “my father was obviously contented; his surroundings were as spartan as the interior of a Hungarian peasant cottage—reminder of a world with such fond associations for him.” Here, wrote Peter, “he found the peaceand tranquillity suitable for composing.”
In these plain rooms, Bartók wrote his last two works, the Viola Concerto and the Third Piano Concerto. The quiet natural environment of Saranac Lake truly nurtured Béla Bartók’s creative genius, making it possible for him to compose important works of modern, classical music.