Béla Bartók

Béla Bartók was born on 25 March 1881 at Nagyszentmiklós, a small town in the Kingdom of Hungary, now Sânnicolau Mare in Romania. His father ran an agricultural school and played the cello; his mother, Paula, was a schoolteacher and pianist. A frail child, often ill, Béla showed an exceptional ear early on: at four he could play some forty songs on the piano. His father died in 1888, and his mother, who had to teach to support the family, moved several times before settling in Pozsony (Bratislava), where Béla went to school.

In 1899 he entered the Budapest Academy of Music, studying piano with István Thomán, a former pupil of Liszt, and composition. He became a brilliant pianist. Like many young Hungarians of the time, he was driven by strong national feeling against Austrian cultural dominance. In 1903 he composed a large tone poem, Kossuth, in homage to the hero of the Hungarian revolution of 1848. He also discovered with enthusiasm the music of Richard Strauss and then Debussy.

In 1904, on holiday, he heard a young Transylvanian maid, Lidi Dósa, sing songs from her village. He then realised that genuine Hungarian folk music was very different from the Gypsy tunes believed to be Hungarian, such as those in Liszt’s Rhapsodies. From 1906, with his friend the composer Zoltán Kodály, he travelled through the villages of Hungary, Transylvania, Slovakia and Romania, recording peasant songs on wax cylinders with a phonograph. He collected thousands, travelling as far as Algeria (1913) and Turkey (1936).

This discovery transformed his own music: he adopted its ancient modes, irregular, asymmetrical rhythms and raw energy. In 1907 he became professor of piano at the Budapest Academy, a post he held for nearly thirty years. In 1909 he married one of his pupils, Márta Ziegler, and in 1923 another pupil, the pianist Ditta Pásztory, with whom he played in duo. He composed For Children (1909), piano pieces based on folk songs, and his only opera, Bluebeard’s Castle (1911), not staged until 1918.

His often dissonant, percussive music baffled audiences, but he had success with the ballet The Wooden Prince (1917). He composed the Romanian Folk Dances (1915); a pantomime, The Miraculous Mandarin (1926), deemed so violent that it was banned after its premiere in Cologne; and six string quartets regarded as the most important of the twentieth century. He also made many tours as a pianist in Europe and the United States.

Bartók attached great importance to teaching. Between 1926 and 1939 he composed Mikrokosmos, a collection of 153 piano pieces graded by difficulty from the simplest to the most virtuosic, designed partly for his son Péter. In 1936 he composed the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, whose mysterious Adagio Stanley Kubrick later used in the film The Shining, and in 1937 the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. Opposed to Nazism, he refused to let his music be broadcast on German and Italian radio.

In 1940, after his mother’s death, he went into exile in the United States with his wife. The early days were hard: his health declined, he found little work and lived modestly in New York, where he studied a collection of Serbo-Croatian songs at Columbia University. In 1943 the conductor Serge Koussevitzky commissioned the Concerto for Orchestra, which was an immense success. Suffering from leukaemia, he worked on his Piano Concerto No. 3, intended for his wife, until his last days. He died in New York on 26 September 1945. In 1988 his remains were brought back to Budapest.