Béla Bartók

The Hungarian composer, pianist, teacher and ethnomusicologist Béla Bartók was born at Nagyszentmiklos, now Sannicolau Mare in Romania, on 25 March 1881. He showed great musical talent at a very early age and could play forty pieces on the piano by the time he was four years old.

Following the death of his father, his mother took him to live first at Nagyszolos, now Vinogradiv in the Ukraine, and then to Pozsony or Pressburg, now Bratislava. It was there that he gave his first public recital at the age of eleven, including a performance of one of his own pieces.

At Budapest's Royal Academy of Music (1899-1903) he studied piano with Istvan Thoman (who had studied with Franz Liszt) and composition with János Koessler. It was there that he first met his lifelong friend Zoltán Kodály.

In 1902 he attended the Budapest premiere of Also sprach Zarathustra and met the work's composer, Richard Strauss, who, with Brahms, was the strongest influence on Bartók's early music. Whilst on holiday in 1904, however, Bartók first heard folksong in Transylvania, and this was the catalyst for a life dedicated to folk music, and expeditions to notate Algerian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Moldavian, Romanian, Slovakian and Wallachian music.

Another influence was Debussy, from 1907, at which time he began teaching piano at the Royal Academy. His students there included Georg Solti, Fritz Reiner and György Sándor.

World War I caused difficulties for Bartók's folksong collection activities - many of his favourite areas (including where he was born and grew up) were cut off from Hungary, and so he turned his efforts towards experimentation with extreme methods of composing.

From 1926 onwards, his mature style included a synthesis of various influences, including classicism, folk music, Bach and pre-Bachian music. In this period he tended to write large-scale works. He considered the Cantata Profana of 1930, based on a Romanian colinda, to be his most personal work, representing his own beliefs.

In 1940, when Bartók's liberal ideas started to cause trouble with the pro-German Hungarian authorities, he emigrated to the USA with his second wife, Ditta Pásztory. Things did not go well from this point onwards, however - he never settled in the USA, found it difficult to work, and the first symptoms of leukemia began to show.

When, in 1944, leukaemia was finally diagnosed, Bartók had a final burst of creativity before his death in New York on 26 September 1945, resulting in a Sonata for Solo Violin commissioned by Yehudi Menuhin, the Concerto for Orchestra (destined to become his most popular work) and the Piano Concerto No 3.

A selection of articles about Béla Bartók

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