Béla Bartók (1881-1945) was a groundbreaking Hungarian pianist and composer known for his amazing classical pieces for piano and orchestra, string quartets, and songs. A lot of his work features traditional Hungarian and other European folk themes. He was also a passionate researcher and collector of folk music, and many people think he’s one of the best musicians Hungary has ever had.
Early Life
Béla Bartók was born on March 25, 1881, in Nagyszentmiklós, which is now called Sânnicolau Mare and is in Romania today, but back then it was part of Hungary in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His dad was a teacher at a local agricultural college, while his mom taught piano. Sadly, his dad passed away when Béla was just seven, so he and his mom moved to Pressburg, known as Pozsony to Hungarians, which is now Bratislava in Slovakia. Béla started learning piano from his mom at five and quickly showed he had a real knack for it; by eleven, he was already performing publicly and had begun composing at nine.
Instead of taking a free scholarship to study at the music academy in Vienna, Béla chose to enroll at the Royal Hungarian Academy of Music in Budapest in 1898, graduating in 1903. He initially made a living as a concert pianist, but starting in 1907, he became a piano professor at the Academy. While this job gave him some financial security, it wasn’t exactly what he wanted; he admitted he was more of a reluctant teacher and would have preferred to focus on research instead. Throughout this time, he kept composing, drawing inspiration from composers like Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms, Richard Strauss (especially his symphonic poem Also sprach Zarathustra), and Igor Stravinsky.
Music historian H. C. Schonberg summed up Bartók’s personality and determination nicely:
Bartók was a small, delicate guy with a powerful inner drive, ready to follow his own path even if no one played his music. He had a strong sense of integrity and a deep humanism that fueled him, and he wouldn’t stray from his pursuit of truth.
Folk Music
Bartók was really into Hungarian folk music, which is quite different from the Romani tunes that composers like Brahms and Liszt liked. He dropped his first song collection in 1906. His job at the Academy gave him more time to dig into research, so he explored folk music from other places too, especially Romania, Slovakia, and Transylvania. Bartók gathered a huge collection of folk songs, both by printing them and recording them on wax cylinders straight from local singers, so they could be played later on a phonograph and organized properly. This collecting project, which included writing scholarly articles and publishing collections for the public, was something he worked on with fellow Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály. He also created his own song anthologies for singers with piano accompaniment.
You can hear Hungarian folk influences in his short piano works like The Ten Easy Pieces (1908), the 14 Bagatelles (1908) for piano, and Allegro barbaro (1911). These influences are especially clear in his last two string quartets. Bartók showed his support for Hungarian traditions in other ways too, like when he composed Dance Suite (Táncszvit) to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Buda and Pest coming together in 1873. He later made a piano arrangement of this piece.
Bartók also created new versions of traditional folk songs, like For Children, which he finished in 1909. It’s a collection of 85 easy piano pieces. The Classical Music Encyclopedia explains how Bartók approached traditional themes:
For some of the melodies he collected, he wrote arrangements that kept the original tunes intact while adding some adventurous harmonies. But Bartók wanted more than just quoting; he aimed to absorb the complex modal structure of peasant melodies, seeing it as a way to break free from the strict rules of major and minor keys. (387)
Stage Works
Back in 1911, the composer decided to dive into opera and created a one-act piece called A kékszakállú herceg vára (Duke Bluebeard’s Castle). It’s based on a French folktale about a guy with a beard who kills his wives, but the librettist Béla Balázs gave it a twist, turning it into a story about despair and loneliness. Here’s a quick rundown of the plot from The New Oxford Companion to Music:
Bluebeard (bass) brings his new wife Judith (soprano) to his dark castle. She urges him to open his secret doors one by one, and when she discovers his deepest secret, she ends up joining his other wives behind the last door, leaving Bluebeard all alone again. (584)
The opera was submitted for a competition but didn’t make the cut with the judges. Bartók had to wait until 1918 for it to finally hit the stage in Budapest, which only happened after he gained some recognition from his successful one-act ballet, A fából faragott királyfi (The Wooden Prince), that premiered in 1917. In 1919, he felt inspired to create another ballet called A csodálatos mandarin (The Miraculous Mandarin). But once again, he faced a long wait before it was performed publicly, with its premiere happening in Cologne in 1926. This ballet stirred up quite a bit of controversy due to its edgy themes, especially a scene where the main character is lured by a prostitute into a robber’s den, gets stabbed and hanged, but still insists on having sex with her before he dies. Because of this uproar, it wasn’t shown in Hungary until 1946. Just like with The Wooden Prince, Bartók also put together an orchestral suite from the original score of The Miraculous Mandarin.
International Success
Starting in 1918, a publishing house in Vienna that collaborated with big-name composers like Arnold Schoenberg took on Bartók’s works. His Dance Suite, released in 1923, marked his first major hit. Throughout the 1920s and ’30s, Bartók toured as a concert pianist, often debuting his own compositions. This included pieces like the First Piano Concerto (1926), Out of Doors suite (1926), Nine Little Pieces (1926), and the Second Piano Concerto (1931). He also created music for others, notably Contrasts for the famous American clarinetist Benny Goodman and Hungarian violinist József Szigeti.
Bartók traveled around Europe and even into the USSR for concerts. By 1934, he had stepped down from his teaching job to focus more on composing and collecting traditional songs. At this point, he was recognized as one of the top experts in ethnomusicology. He journeyed through Central Europe, the Balkans, Anatolia, and even North Africa to gather material for his research on genuine folk music. Finding authenticity was tough, but it was crucial for Bartók’s goal of creating something new from old traditions. He famously stated that isolating ancient elements was key to discovering what’s truly new.
His reputation was growing internationally thanks to his concert tours. In 1934, Cantata profana (also known as The Nine Enchanted Stags), which was inspired by a Romanian hunting song, premiered in London. Bartók had written both the text and music four years earlier to celebrate nations coming together. Unfortunately, many European leaders ignored the messages from artists, and World War II kicked off in 1939 with Poland’s invasion. Both Germany and the USSR were quickly advancing into Central Europe, putting Hungary in danger. After his mother passed away in 1939, Bartók made the decision to move to the United States, a place he knew well after having performed there twice before.
Musical Style & Innovations
Even though Bartók had a deep appreciation for traditional music, he was always on the lookout for fresh ideas. In the 1930s, he started to play around with math in his compositions. A lot of his pieces have precise timing and show a certain symmetry. For instance, he often structured five movements in an ABCBA format, where the ‘A’ and ‘B’ sections are transformed versions of each other instead of just being repeated (Sadie, 343). The Classical Music Encyclopedia describes his style as super rhythmic, percussive, and sharply dissonant, which helped him stand out in the European avant-garde scene (342).
Bartók also loved experimenting with different sounds from percussion instruments. In his Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, there’s a part where the percussionist has to hit the edge of a cymbal with a knife! He also liked using the cimbalom, which isn’t very common. One of his unique works is Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, composed in 1936. It’s pretty cool because he split the strings into two groups on either side of a piano, harp, celeste, and percussion section (Wade-Matthews, 51). Many people consider this piece to be Bartók’s masterpiece.
On another note, Bartók, along with Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, played a big role in bringing string quartets back into the spotlight, which had fallen out of favor in the 19th century. Bartók’s First String Quartet was written in 1908 and shows some influence from French composer Claude Debussy. Overall, Bartók created six string quartets.
More Affairs
Personal Life & Views
In 1910, Bartók tied the knot with Márta Ziegler, one of his students who was just 16 at the time. They welcomed a son that same year. However, Bartók and Márta ended up divorcing, and he remarried in 1923 to Ditta Pásztory, another former student. They had a son in 1924. As a proud Hungarian nationalist, Bartók was really keen on preserving his culture, especially since it was different from the Austrian side of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He often dressed in traditional Hungarian clothing and was totally against his kids learning German, which was the language of the Austrian part. His dislike for all things German intensified in the 1930s due to the rising threat from Nazi Germany and laws like the 1935 Nuremberg Laws that targeted Jewish people. Bartók refused to perform in Germany and didn’t want the Nazi regime, which he called a system of theft and murder, to air his music. He also cut ties with his Austrian publisher after they started sending out surveys to figure out the race and religion of their composers. Instead, he switched to Boosey and Hawkes, a British publisher.
Important Works
Béla Bartók is known for a bunch of amazing pieces, including:
- Two violin concertos from 1938 and 1945
- Three piano concertos from 1926, 1931, and 1945
- Six string quartets written in 1908, 1917, 1927, 1928, 1934, and 1939
- The opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle (A kékszakállú herceg vára) created between 1911 and 1918
- The ballet The Wooden Prince (A fából faragott királyfi) from 1918
- The pantomime ballet The Miraculous Mandarin (A csodálatos mandarin) from 1919
- An orchestral piece called Dance Suite (Táncszvit) from 1923
- A collection of 153 piano pieces titled Mikrokosmos (1926-39)
He also composed some choral music like Village Scenes and Cantata profana in 1930, along with Székely Songs in 1932. Other notable works include Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936), a Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (1937), Contrasts for clarinet, violin, and piano (1938), Divertimento for Strings (1939), and the Concerto for Orchestra from 1943.
Death & Legacy
After moving to the U.S., Bartók settled in an apartment in Forest Hills, just outside New York. For the last five years of his life, he focused on composing, performing, and diving deeper into folk music research, this time with Columbia University backing him. Even though he had left behind the chaos of war-torn Europe, he was going through a tough time personally. He missed home, dealt with health issues, and faced financial struggles as concert opportunities dwindled.
In 1943, Bartók found out he had leukemia, which led to his final public performance supported by the New York Philharmonic in January of that year. But like many artists, while his personal life was challenging, his professional life saw some big wins. His Concerto for Orchestra premiered in Boston in 1943, conducted by Serge Koussevitsky, and it’s often regarded as one of his most famous works. That same year, he wrote the Violin Sonata for the talented Yehudi Menuhin. One of his last compositions was the Third Piano Concerto, which he dedicated to his wife. Bartók passed away in New York on September 26, 1945, and among his final words were about how he wished he had more time to express himself.
Beyond his enduring popularity and efforts to promote traditional Hungarian music, Bartók also left a mark on future musicians, especially Hungarian composer György Ligeti and Polish composer Witold Lutosławski, who honored Bartók by dedicating his 1948 Funeral Music to him. Bartók’s Mikrokosmos, a collection of 153 piano pieces, became a go-to teaching resource, and his studies on folk music were compiled and published in 1976 under the title Béla Bartók Essays.
