Béla Bartók

Béla Viktor János Bartók, born 25 March 1881 and died 26 September 1945, was a Hungarian composer, pianist, and ethnomusicologist. Alongside Franz Liszt, he is counted among Hungary’s greatest composers and is seen as a major figure in 20th-century music. His best-known works include the opera *Bluebeard’s Castle*, the ballet *The Miraculous Mandarin*, *Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta*, the *Concerto for Orchestra*, and six string quartets. By gathering and closely studying folk music, he helped establish comparative musicology, later called ethnomusicology. According to critic Anthony Tommasini, Bartók “has empowered generations of subsequent composers to incorporate folk music and classical traditions from whatever culture into their works,” and was “a formidable modernist who in the face of Schoenberg’s breathtaking formulations showed another way, forging a language that was an amalgam of tonality, unorthodox scales and atonal wanderings.” His music is often described as blending traditional peasant folk music with avant-garde elements.

Bartók was born in the Banatian town of Nagyszentmiklós, then in the Kingdom of Hungary within Austria-Hungary (now Sânnicolau Mare, Romania), on 25 March 1881. His father’s side came from a Hungarian lower noble family originally from Borsodszirák, Borsod. His paternal grandmother, a Catholic of Bunjevci origin, considered herself Hungarian. His father, also named Béla, was born in 1855 and died in 1888; his mother, born in 1857 and died in 1939, spoke fluent Hungarian. She was from Turócszentmárton (now Martin, Slovakia) and had German, Hungarian, and Slovak or Polish ancestry. Béla showed musical talent very early: his mother said he could tell apart different dance rhythms she played on the piano before he could speak in full sentences. By age four he could play 40 piano pieces, and his mother began formal lessons the next year. When he was seven, his father—director of an agricultural school—died suddenly. His mother then moved Béla and his sister Erzsébet to Nagyszőlős (now Vynohradiv, Ukraine) and later to Pressburg (now Bratislava, Slovakia). At age 11, Béla gave his first public recital in Nagyszőlős, which received positive reviews; among the pieces he played was his own first composition, written two years earlier: a short piece called “The Course of the Danube.” Soon after, a teacher accepted him as a pupil.

From 1899 to 1903, Bartók studied piano with István Thomán, a former student of Franz Liszt, and composition with János Koessler at the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest. There he met Zoltán Kodály, who made a strong impression and became a lifelong friend and colleague. In 1903 he wrote his first major orchestral work, *Kossuth*, a symphonic poem honoring Lajos Kossuth, hero of the 1848 Hungarian Revolution. Richard Strauss’s music, which he encountered at the 1902 Budapest premiere of *Also sprach Zarathustra*, strongly influenced his early work. In the summer of 1904, while at a holiday resort, Bartók overheard a young nanny named Lidi Dósa from Kibéd in Transylvania singing folk songs to children; this sparked his lifelong dedication to folk music. Starting in 1907, he came under the influence of Claude Debussy, whose compositions Kodály had brought back from Paris. Though his large orchestral works still followed Johannes Brahms and Strauss, he wrote small piano pieces showing a growing interest in folk music. The first clear sign of this shift was the String Quartet No. 1 in A minor (1908), which contains folk-like elements. He began teaching piano at the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, which freed him from touring Europe as a pianist. Notable students included Fritz Reiner, Sir Georg Solti, György Sándor, Ernő Balogh, Gisela Selden-Goth, and Lili Kraus; after moving to the United States, he taught Jack Beeson and Violet Archer. In 1908, Bartók and Kodály traveled into the countryside to collect and study old Hungarian folk melodies. Their interest matched a contemporary social focus on traditional national culture. Hungarian folk music had previously been labeled “Gypsy music,” as in Franz Liszt’s *Hungarian Rhapsodies* for piano, based on popular art songs played by Romani bands. Bartók and Kodály instead found that old Hungarian folk melodies used pentatonic scales similar to those in Asian folk traditions from Central Asia, Anatolia, and Siberia. They began incorporating such peasant music into their compositions, often quoting folk melodies directly or writing pieces derived entirely from authentic songs—for example, Bartók’s two volumes *For Children* for solo piano, which contain 80 folk tunes with his accompaniments. His style became a synthesis of folk music, classicism, and modernism, influenced by the folk music of Hungary, Romania, and other nations; he was especially fond of the asymmetrical dance rhythms and pungent harmonies of Bulgarian music. Most of his early works blend nationalist and late Romantic elements.

In 1909, at age 28, Bartók married 16-year-old Márta Ziegler. Their son was born the next year. After nearly 15 years, he divorced Márta in June 1923. Two months later, he married Ditta Pásztory.