Béla Viktor János Bartók— composer, pianist, collector of Eastern European and Middle Eastern folk music, and ethnomusicologist—was born in Nagyszentmiklós in Hungary (now Sînnicolau Mare in Romania) in 1881 and died in New York in 1945. He is considered to be one of the greatest composers of the 20th century and was one of the founders of the field of ethnomusicology: the study of folk music and the music of non-Western cultures.

After the death of his father, Bela and his mother and sister settled in Pozsony (now Bratislava, Slovakia) where Béla received thorough musical instruction and completed his grammar school studies. Following in Ernó (Ernst) von Dohnányi’s footsteps, four years his senior and also coming from Pozsony, he studied piano with Liszt pupil István Thomán, and composition with János (Hans) Koessler at the Budapest Royal Academy of Music between 1899 and 1903. There he met Zoltán Kodály and together they collected folk music from the region. This was to have a major impact on his style. Previously, Bartók’s idea of Hungarian folk music was derived from the gypsy melodies to be found in the works of Franz Liszt. In 1903, Bartók wrote a large orchestral work Kossuth, which honoured Lajos Kossuth, hero of the Hungarian revolution of 1848, and incorporated such gypsy melodies.

Upon discovering Magyar peasant folk song (which he regarded as true Hungarian folk music, as opposed to the gypsy music used by Liszt) Bartók began to incorporate folk songs into his own compositions and write original folk-like tunes, as well as frequently using folksy rhythmic figures.

It was the music of Richard Strauss, whom he met at the Budapest premiere of Also sprach Zarathustra in 1902, that had most influence. This new style emerged over the next few years. Bartók was building a career for himself as a pianist when in 1907 he landed a job as piano professor at the Royal Academy. This allowed him to stay in Hungary rather than having to tour Europe as a pianist, and also allowed him to collect more folk songs, notably in Transylvania. Meanwhile his music was beginning to be influenced by this activity and by the music of Claude Debussy that Kodály had brought back from Paris. His large scale orchestral works were still in the manner of Johannes Brahms or Richard Strauss, but he wrote a number of small piano pieces which show his growing interest in folk music. Probably the first piece to show clear signs of this new interest is the String Quartet No. 1 (1908), which has several folk-like elements in it.

In 1909, Bartók married Márta Ziegler. Their son, Béla Jr., was born in 1910.

In 1911, Bartók wrote what was to be his only opera Bluebeard’s Castle, dedicated to his wife, Márta. He entered it for a prize awarded by the Hungarian Fine Arts Commission, but they said it was unplayable, and rejected it out of hand. The opera remained unperformed until 1918, when Bartók was pressured by the government to remove the name of the librettist, Béla Balázs, from the programme on account of his political views. Bartók refused, and eventually withdrew the work. After his disappointment over the Fine Arts Commission prize, Bartók wrote very little for two or three years, preferring to concentrate on folk music collecting and arranging (in Central Europe, the Balkans, Algeria, and Turkey). However, the outbreak of World War I forced him to stop these expeditions, and he returned to composing, writing the ballet The Wooden Prince in 1914–16 and the String Quartet No. 2 in 1915–17. It was The Wooden Prince that gave him some degree of international fame.

Bartók subsequently worked on another ballet The Miraculous Mandarin, influenced by Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, as well as Richard Strauss, following this up with his two violin sonatas, which are harmonically and structurally some of the most complex pieces he wrote. He wrote his third and fourth string quartets, regarded as some of the finest string quartets ever written, in 1927–28, after which his harmonic language began to become simpler. The String Quartet No. 5 (1934) is somewhat more traditional from this point of view. Bartók wrote his sixth and last string quartet in 1939.

The Miraculous Mandarin was started in 1918, but not performed until 1926 because of its sexual content — a sordid modern story of prostitution, robbery, and murder.

Bartók divorced Márta in 1923 and married a piano student, Ditta Pásztory. His second son, Péter, was born in 1924. For Péter’s music lessons, Bartók began composing a six-volume collection of graded piano pieces, Mikrokosmos, which is popular with piano students even today.

In 1940, after the outbreak of World War II, when the European political situation worsened, Bartók was increasingly tempted to flee Hungary.

Bartók was strongly opposed to the Nazis. After they came into power in Germany, he refused to concertize there and switched away from his German publisher. His liberal views (as evident in the opera Bluebeard’s Castle and the ballet The Miraculous Mandarin) caused him a great deal of trouble from right-wingers in Hungary.

Having first sent his manuscripts out of the country, Bartók reluctantly moved to the USA with Ditta Pásztory. Péter Bartók joined them in 1942 and later enlisted in the United States Navy. Béla Bartók, Jr. remained in Hungary.

Bartók did not feel comfortable in the US, and found it very difficult to write. Also, he was not very well known in America and there was little interest in his music. He and his wife Ditta would give concerts; and for a while, they had a research grant to work on a collection of Yugoslav folk songs, but their finances were precarious, as was Bartók’s health.

His last work might well have been the String Quartet No. 6, were it not for Fritz Reiner and Serge Koussevitsky commissioning him to write the Concerto for Orchestra, which became Bartók’s most popular work and which was to ease his financial burdens. He was also commissioned by Yehudi Menuhin to write the Sonata for Solo Violin. This seemed to reawaken his interest in composing, and he went on to write his Piano Concerto No. 3, an airy and almost neo-classical work, and begin work on his Viola Concerto.

Béla Bartók died in New York City from leukemia in September, 1945. He left the Viola Concerto unfinished at his death; it was later completed by his pupil, Tibor Serly.

Reference: Amanda Bayley (Editor), The Cambridge Companion to Bartók (Cambridge Companions to Music), Cambridge University Press, 2001; Bela Bartok, Hungarian Folk Music, Ams Pr, 1981; David Cooper, Julian Rushton (Series Editor), Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra (Cambridge Music Handbooks), Cambridge University Press, 1996; Elliott Antokoletz, The Music of Bela Bartok: A Study of Tonality and Progression in Twentieth-Century Music, University of California Press; 1989; Erno Lendvai, Bela Bartok: An Analysis of His Music, John Deere Publishing; 1991; Halsey Stevens, Malcolm Gillies, The Life and Music of Bela Bartok, Oxford University Press, USA, 1993; Judit Frigyesi, Judith Frigyesi, Béla Bartók and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest, University of California Press, 2000; Peter Bartok, Bela Bartok (Composer), Béla Bartók, Concerto for Orchestra : The Masterworks Library (notes), Boosey and Hawkes, 2004; Wikipedia.

--By Sunil K Sukumaran