1881–1945 · Hungary, United States · Romantic
Béla Bartók (1881–1945) was a Hungarian composer, pianist and collector of folk music who gathered more than 30,000 folk melodies. Players know him for his Romanian folk dances and for Mikrokosmos, a school of piano playing whose pieces are arranged in order of increasing difficulty. He taught piano in Budapest and died in New York.
Béla Bartók was born on 25 March 1881 in Nagyszentmiklós, which today lies in Romania. His father directed an agricultural school and his mother was a teacher. The boy's musical gift showed very early: according to his mother, he could tell apart the dance rhythms she played on the piano before he had learned to speak in full sentences. By the age of four he could play forty pieces on the piano, and the following year his mother began to teach him in earnest. She was his first piano teacher.
In 1888, when the boy was seven, his father died. His mother moved the family to Nagyszőlős (now Vynohradiv in the Zakarpattia region of Ukraine) and worked there in a primary school. It was in that town, in 1892, when Béla was eleven, that he first played in public, at a charity concert. He performed the first movement of Beethoven's Sonata No. 21 and a piece of his own, "The Course of the Danube". The concert was a success.
After that concert the head of the local school gave his mother a year's leave for a trip to Pozsony (now Bratislava). There the young Bartók took piano and harmony lessons from László Erkel. In the autumn of 1893 the lessons came to an end: his mother was appointed to a school in the Slovak town of Banská Bystrica.
In January 1899 Bartók was heard in Budapest by Professor István Thomán, a pupil of Liszt. That autumn the young man entered the capital's academy of music, where Thomán taught him piano and Hans Koessler taught him composition. He studied there from 1899 to 1903. At the academy Bartók met Zoltán Kodály, who impressed him deeply and became his lifelong friend and colleague.
In 1902, at the Budapest premiere of Richard Strauss's tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra, Bartók came to know Strauss's music, which strongly influenced his early work. In 1903 he wrote his first large orchestral piece, the symphonic poem Kossuth, in honour of the hero of the 1848 Hungarian revolution, Lajos Kossuth.
In the summer of 1904, at a holiday resort, Bartók overheard a young nanny from Transylvania singing folk songs to the children she looked after. This awoke an interest in folk music that stayed with him for the rest of his life. In 1908 he travelled into the countryside with Kodály to collect and study old Hungarian melodies.
Before then, Hungarian folk music had generally been classed as "Gypsy music": Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies, for example, are based on popular songs played by Romani bands. Bartók and Kodály found that the old Hungarian tunes were built on pentatonic scales, similar to those in the folk music of Central Asia, Anatolia and Siberia.
All his life Bartók collected the folk music of the Balkans, Central Europe, Asia Minor and North Africa: more than 30,000 Hungarian, Romanian, Slovak, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, Turkish and other melodies. He found the phonograph an essential tool for recording them, and in 1913 he also collected in Algeria. The First World War forced him to stop the expeditions. In 1936 he recorded folk melodies in Anatolia, where Ahmed Adnan Saygun helped him.
From 1907 Bartók was professor of piano at the Budapest academy of music. He combined teaching with concert giving, and he played the works of Ferenc Liszt particularly often and with particular brilliance. His pupils included Fritz Reiner, Georg Solti and György Sándor.
In 1909 Bartók married Márta Ziegler, and their son Béla was born in 1910. In 1923 he married for the second time, to a young pupil, the pianist Ditta Pásztory; their son Péter was born in 1924. Bartók was brought up in a Catholic family and in 1916 he became a Unitarian. Outside music he loved nature and built up a large collection of insects.
In the 1920s he toured widely as a pianist in Europe and the United States, and in 1929 he gave concerts in Moscow and Leningrad.
His only opera, Bluebeard's Castle, dates from 1911 and is dedicated to Márta. He entered it for a competition run by the Hungarian fine arts commission, which turned it down as unsuitable for performance. In 1917 he revised the score and rewrote the ending for the 1918 production. After the commission's refusal Bartók composed very little for a couple of years and concentrated on collecting and arranging folk melodies; his return to composition came with the ballet The Wooden Prince (1914–1916) and his Second String Quartet (1915–1917).
In 1919, under the Hungarian Soviet Republic, Bartók took part in the Directorate of Musicians and, together with Kodály, drew up a plan for democratic reform of musical life. After the republic fell, the regime of Miklós Horthy persecuted him for his part in the revolution: he was put on blacklists and had to remove the name of the librettist Béla Balázs from his opera. Unlike many other Hungarian socialists, however, he did not emigrate.
Bartók began the ballet The Miraculous Mandarin in 1918, but the sexual content of its story kept it from the stage until 1926. In 1921 and 1922 he wrote his two sonatas for violin and piano, among his most complex works in harmony and structure.
In 1926 Bartók needed a substantial piece for piano and orchestra to tour with in Europe and America. He heard the American composer Henry Cowell, who used dense tone clusters on the piano, at a concert and later asked his permission to use the technique; Cowell agreed. While preparing his First Piano Concerto, Bartók wrote a Sonata, the suite Out of Doors and Nine Little Pieces for solo piano, in which clusters are prominent.
The Third and Fourth String Quartets, written in 1927–1928, were followed by his mature style. Among the works of this period are the Divertimento for String Orchestra (1939) and Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936). The Fifth Quartet was written in 1934 and the Sixth, his last, in 1939.
When the Nazis came to power, Bartók refused to perform in Germany. After the Anschluss he left the Austrian composers' union and moved his manuscripts to Switzerland. In 1940, with the Second World War under way, he emigrated reluctantly: in October 1940 he settled in New York with his wife, Ditta.
In New York he lectured and continued his research at Columbia University, worked with Benny Goodman, Koussevitzky, Yehudi Menuhin and Fritz Reiner, and made many recordings. Together with Ditta he studied a sizeable body of Serbian and Croatian folk songs. Yet he never quite felt at home in the United States. Composing came hard to him at first; Americans knew him as a pianist, ethnomusicologist and teacher rather than as a composer, and they showed little interest in his music.
His health began to fail late in 1940, with a stiffening in the right shoulder. In 1942 the symptoms grew worse and bouts of fever began. At first doctors suspected a return of the tuberculosis of his youth, but examinations found no underlying disease. Only in April 1944 was leukaemia diagnosed, and by then little could be done.
As his body failed, Bartók began composing again. Koussevitzky commissioned a Concerto for Orchestra, which the Boston Symphony Orchestra first performed in December 1944 and the reviews were very favourable; it was soon his most popular piece. In 1944 Yehudi Menuhin commissioned a Sonata for Solo Violin, and in 1945 the composer received American citizenship.
In 1945 Bartók wrote his Third Piano Concerto as a surprise birthday present for his wife, Ditta, but died just over a month before the day, leaving the orchestration incomplete. He died on 26 September 1945 in a New York hospital from leukaemia, and only ten people attended his funeral. The unfinished Third Piano Concerto and the Viola Concerto were completed by his pupil Tibor Serly.
Bartók was first buried in the state of New York. In 1988, at the request of the Hungarian government and his two sons, his remains were taken to Budapest: he was laid to rest in Farkasréti Cemetery following a state funeral held on 7 July 1988. The Kossuth Prize was awarded to him posthumously in 1948, and the International Peace Prize in 1955.
Bartók did not join any of the fashionable avant-garde movements of his day, such as twelve-tone music, and he worked in almost every genre. He wrote six string quartets (1909, 1917, 1927, 1928, 1934, 1939), the one-act opera Bluebeard's Castle, the ballets The Miraculous Mandarin and The Wooden Prince, the Concerto for Orchestra, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, three concertos for piano and orchestra and two for violin and orchestra.
Typical of the mature Bartók is his "night music", used mostly in the slow movements of multi-movement works for ensemble or orchestra. It is marked by uneasy dissonances set against the sounds of nature and by lonely melodies. The Adagio that forms the third movement of Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta shows it well.
A large part of Bartók's legacy is piano music: Allegro barbaro, the suite Out of Doors and the collection Mikrokosmos, with 153 pieces in six volumes. It is a school of piano playing written in a modern musical language, and its pieces run in order of increasing technical difficulty. Bartók composed it for his son Péter's lessons.
Bartók's other piano works include Seven Sketches (Op. 9b), Four Dirges (Op. 9a), Three Hungarian Folk Songs from the Csík District, Romanian Christmas Carols, Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs and a Dance Suite.
In many works Bartók drew on authentic folk music: Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Slovak, Yugoslav and Gypsy. Often, though, he did not borrow tunes but wrote in a folk style of his own: in the orchestral suite Hungarian Sketches only the last of the five pieces rests on a folk original, and the rest are skilful imitations. In the piano suite For Children, in two volumes, he wrote accompaniments to folk tunes. Bulgarian music appealed to him above all for its asymmetrical dance rhythms and sharp harmonies.
Among Bartók's works in greatest demand with a wide audience are the Romanian folk dances (the piano version dates from 1915, the orchestral one from 1917). The site has sheet music for Romanian Folk Dance No.2 - Peasant Costume for solo piano, at the Intermediate level. Bartók's opus numbers are inconsistent and confusing, so his works are usually identified by the catalogues of András Szőllősy (Sz) and László Somfai (BB).