Bela Bartok

Classical Music / Composers Datebook:  March 25

 

Brief biography of Hungarian composer Bela Bartok, folk music collector. While some of his classical music contemporaries, like Schoenberg and Stravinsky, were creating new music, Bartok was forging something new and something old.  With Kodaly, Bartok set off to collect folk songs and dances.

 

 

Bela Bartok (1881-1945), was a Hungarian composer born in Nagyszentmiklos, on the 25th of March, 126 years ago. His works, much influenced by Hungarian folk music, combine folk elements with mathematical concepts of rhythm, tone, harmony and melody. They spring from the folk songs and dances of southern and eastern Europe, with their exotic echoes of North Africa and the Middle East. Bartok is one of the greatest 20th century classical music composers.

Early Years

Bartok learned the piano mainly from his mother. A child prodigy, he studied music at the Budapest Conservatory, having appeared in public as a pianist at the age often. Initially influenced by Liszt, he wrote the symphonic poem Kossuth Overture (1903), which performed under Hans Richter in Manchester in 1904.

Collecting Folk Music with Zoltan Kodaly

Bartok took folk music more seriously. He feared that in a rapidly changing world, with more and more people moving from the countryside into the cities, such a musical heritage might be lost forever.

In 1905 he began to collect folk tunes through scientific study, with his friend and colleague Zoltan Kodaly. Together, they traveled noting down and recording hundreds of folk songs and dances. Their rhythms, harmonies and melodies became the basis for many of his works. They analyzed and systematically classified folk songs. They discovered that the true Magyar folk music differed greatly from that of the Hungarian gypsies whose music had been regarded as the only Hungarian folk music that time. Their researches extended to Slovak, Romanian, Balkan and adjoining countries.

Musical Career

The folk tunes provided abundant ideas for his compositions. From 1907, Bartok taught at the Budapest Academy, a post he relinquished in 1934 in order to devote more time to his ethnomusicological research.

During the outbreak of World War I, he intensified his creativity when found unfit for military service. He toured as a pianist and gained international acclaim in Europe and the USA, along with a growing recognition of the originality of his work.

In 1922, Bartok was made an honorary member of the International Society for Contemporary Music. Some of his most demanding music was written in the years 1917-34: ballet The Miraculous Mandarin, two piano concertos, and string quartets nos. 2-5.

Emigration to the USA

The increasing political isolation in his homeland encouraged Bartok to pursue a career abroad. A year after his mother's death in 1939, he left Hungary and settled in the USA. He worked at the classification of Yugoslav folk music at Harvard, alongside his collection of Romanian melodies.

Later Career and Illness

Bartok's health declined from 1942. He suffered from leukemia and was no longer in demand as a composer or pianist. To alleviate his financial hardship, a 1943 commission from the Koussevitzky Foundation for the Concerto for Orchestra was provided. He managed to achieve a number of major works despite his terminal illness. He died in New York in 1945.

Music and Works

Bartok's genius is more fully revealed in his innovative approach to the keyboard. His orchestral is relatively popular, and especially the six string quartets which are widely regarded as the best since Beethoven's.

Some of his works include the ballets The Wooden Prince and The Miraculous Mandarin, six string quartets, a Divertimento for string orchestra, concertos for piano, violin, and viola, a one-act opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle, and graded teaching pieces for piano; also songs and folksong arrangements. Considered his most famous work is Concerto for Orchestra where Bartok displays his mastery of orchestration while giving radiant expression to his passion for folk songs and dances.

Photo credit:

Bela Bartok in 1927. Wikipedia Commons / Public Domain 

Resources:

Oxford Companion to Music, Oxford: OUP, 2002

The Grove Concise Dictionary of Music, edited by Stanley Sadie.  London: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1994

Note:  I originally published a longer article at Suite101 (now close), June 10, 2007. This piece is a brief version.

(c) March 2009. Updated March 25, 2024. Tel. Inspired Pen Web.