This last bagatelle was written in the wake of Bartók's breakup with the virtuoso violinist Steffi Geyer, a breakup initiated by her. The first piece the composer produced after the unexpected jilting was the Thirteenth Bagatelle, a melancholy, truly dispirited effort expressing the blackness of utter depression. In this waltz, on the other hand, one finds Bartók roaming a surreal land in a detached, emotionally shell-shocked state of mind.

The piece begins in a rapid waltz rhythm, a giddy, manic theme soon heard over the top of it. The music here sounds both hesitant and harried, its thematic material seemingly fragmented and discursive. The rhythm eventually gives way to a variant, then fades altogether, as the music turns playful but ultimately corrosive. Near the end of this two-minute piece, the rhythm returns in a descending pattern—even more manic than before—but the opening theme seems to slip and slide, and never manages to reappear. Repeated hearings divulge the thematic and structural depth of this piece, which must be counted among the better bagatelles in the set. Bartók later orchestrated it as the second of his Two Portraits (1907 - 1911).

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Bartók wrote that this bagatelle and four others in the set (Nos. 1, 9, 11 and 13) were "experimental." But his remark is misleading, as all of these are works of the highest craftsmanship. What he meant to convey was that they exhibited unusual stylistic features, but were not test balloons for new ideas he was in the process of evolving. In the Bagatelle No. 8, it was Bartók's chromaticism that divulged unusual characteristics, mainly in its highly inventive mixtures, amid rather sparse textures throughout.

At slightly over two minutes, this is one of the longer bagatelles: the 14 together run around 22 or 23 minutes. The piece begins with a descending motif that will return in different guises and sprout new material. All of it will remain in a somber emotional world, where atmosphere, not melody, takes hold of the listener with the cold caresses of its mesmerizing notes. Spiritually, this bagatelle is related to the austere No. 1 and gloomy No. 6, both pieces on the same excellent level as this strange and gripping work.

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As was the case for many composers early in the twentieth century, Bartók's Fourteen Bagatelles was originally rejected by publishers on the grounds that it was too modern sounding for the public of that time. For Bartók, these pieces represented a change in direction, a turning away from Western classical influences towards the East. The Fourteen Bagatelles were composed shortly after Bartók began studying and transcribing Eastern European folk music, and after he had first heard the music of Claude Debussy, who was also interested in non-Western music and whose music reflected a new harmonic esthetic. Bartók's Bagatelles, then, are the result of his efforts to synthesize Eastern European folk scales and rhythms with what one might call quasi-Debussyian harmonies.

Ultimately, as Bartók attempted to systematize a method of composition using folk idioms, a number of characteristic scales emerged. Notable among these, and in evidence in the Bagatelles, are minor pentatonic scales, as derived from Hungarian folk music, and Dorian, Aeolian, and Phrygian modal scales. Bartók also borrowed and adapted rhythmic figures common to folk song and folk dance traditions. The Bagatelles are, for the most part, short pieces, each with its own character; however, throughout the fourteen pieces, a number of stylistic features remain consistent, including the use of ostinato patterns, melodies with many repeated notes, and harmonic passages of a decidedly experimental character. Many musicologists have noted that the Bagatelles are important because they contain virtually all of the important elements of Bartók's compositional style.

The then undesirable "modernism" of the Bagatelles, responsible for the difficulty in publishing them, may be attributed to several factors: the use of folk-derived scales, which Bartók used to create non-triadic harmonies; the spare, stripped-down esthetic of these little pieces, which amounted to a rejection of late nineteenth-century Romanticism and the pianistic bombast associated with it; and finally, the experimental quality of the work, with the result being that a number of the Bagatelles reflect Bartók's knowledge of the music of his contemporaries, and also foreshadow later developments by these other composers. This includes, in particular, the music of Arnold Schoenberg. The presence of fourth chords in Bartók's music is often connected to Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony, and some musicologists have suggested that the Bagatelles also owe much to Schoenberg's Op. 11 piano pieces; however, the Bagatelles predate the Op. 11 pieces by a year, and there is actually some evidence of Schoenberg knowing Bartók's music first. Whatever the case may be, it is clear that even though these two composers—two of the most important composers of the twentieth century—were not directly connected in the early years of the century, their respective styles seem to have developed, unconsciously, along very similar lines.

Given that Schoenberg's music met with fierce resistance in his native Vienna, it is perhaps not surprising that Bartók's Bagatelles would have also been regarded with some disfavor at first glance. The Bagatelles were eventually published, however, and the work has lived up to the significance attributed to it by Bartók, who insisted that with the Bagatelles, he had at last created something entirely new.

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