Béla Bartók

Béla Bartók (1881-1945), Hungarian composer, one of the most original figures in 20th-century music.

Born March 25, 1881, in Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary (now Sînnicolau, Romania), Bartók studied in Pressburg (now Bratislava, Slovakia) and in Budapest, where he taught piano at the Royal Academy of Music (1907-1934) and worked with the Academy of Sciences (1934-1940). In 1940 Bartók emigrated to the United States. He did research at Columbia University (1940-1941) and taught music in New York, living in financial stress. He died of leukaemia in New York on September 26, 1945.

Bartók acknowledged his musical debt to the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt and the French composer Claude Debussy, and his tone poem Kossuth (1904) shows the influence of the German composer Richard Strauss. About 1905 Bartók realized that what generally passed as Hungarian folk music was actually Roma music arranged according to conventional Central European standards. With his friend the Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály, Bartók systematically collected and analysed Hungarian and other folk music, a collaboration that resulted in 12 volumes containing 2,700 Magyar, 3,500 Magyar-Romanian, and several hundred Turkish and North African folk songs.

Bartók rarely incorporated folk songs into his compositions; rather, he assimilated into a powerful personal style the scales and melodic contours and the driving, often asymmetrical rhythms of Balkan and Hungarian folk music. His music always has a tonal centre, but this is usually established in personal, only partially traditional ways. Much of his music is chromatic (using notes foreign to a given key) and often highly contrapuntal, interweaving melodic lines and letting dissonance fall where it may; yet he also used chords for their sonority and was highly sensitive to pianistic and orchestral colours. A brilliant pianist, he wrote many teaching pieces for the piano. The six-volume Mikrokosmos (1935), consisting of 150 progressively graded piano pieces, constitutes a summary of his development, as do his six string quartets, considered among the most important string quartets since those of Beethoven.

Bartók's other works include the eight Romanian Dances from Hungary (1915), for piano (also orchestrated and arranged for various instruments); the Allegro barbaro (1911) for piano; the opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle (1911); the ballets The Wooden Prince (1914-1916) and The Miraculous Mandarin (1919); three piano concertos (1926, 1931, 1945); Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (1937); and Concerto for Orchestra (1943). Also notable are his violin concerto no. 2 (1938), Music for Two Pianos and Percussion (1937), and his viola concerto, unfinished at his death and completed by the viola player Tibor Serly.