Bela Bartok

Bela Bartok was born on March 25, 1881, in Nagyszentmiklos, a small town in the Kingdom of Hungary that is now Sannicolau Mare in Romania ^[1]. His father, also named Bela, directed an agricultural school and played several instruments; his mother, Paula Voit, taught school and gave the boy his first piano lessons. The father died in 1888, when Bartok was seven, and the family began a series of moves as Paula sought teaching posts to support her two children ^[2].

The boy's musical gifts appeared early. He could pick out dance tunes on the piano before he could speak in full sentences, according to family accounts, and by age nine he was writing short pieces of his own ^[1]. He gave his first public recital in 1892 in Nagyszollos, performing his own composition, a descriptive piano piece about the course of the Danube. Childhood illness, including a persistent skin condition and repeated bouts of pneumonia, kept him isolated for long stretches, and he grew into a reserved, intensely private young man ^[2].

In 1894 the family settled in Pozsony (now Bratislava), then one of Hungary's liveliest musical towns. There Bartok studied piano with Laszlo Erkel, son of the composer of the Hungarian national opera, and heard orchestral and chamber music regularly for the first time ^[1]. When the moment came to choose a conservatory, he turned down Vienna in favor of the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest, following the example of his slightly older contemporary Erno Dohnanyi. The choice tied his future to Hungarian musical life ^[3].

At the Budapest Academy, which he entered in 1899, Bartok trained as a virtuoso pianist under Istvan Thoman, a pupil of Liszt, while studying composition with Janos Koessler ^[3]. His earliest large works leaned on Liszt, Brahms, and above all Richard Strauss, whose tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra struck him with great force when he heard it in 1902. The symphonic poem Kossuth (1903), a nationalist portrait of the leader of the 1848 Hungarian revolution, made his name in Budapest and caused a scandal at its Vienna reading because it parodied the Austrian imperial anthem ^[2].

The decisive turn came in 1904. While staying at a resort in Gerlicepuszta, Bartok overheard a young woman named Lidi Dosa singing songs from her Transylvanian village. He realized that what urban Hungarians called folk music, the popular verbunkos and Gypsy cafe style used by Liszt and Brahms, was not the music of the peasantry at all ^[4]. Genuine village song was older, stranger, and built on modes and rhythms foreign to the conservatory. In 1905 he began systematic collecting trips, and the following year he and his friend Zoltan Kodaly published a joint volume of twenty Hungarian folk songs ^[4].

Over the next decade and a half Bartok carried an Edison phonograph into villages across Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, and later Turkey and North Africa, recording singers on wax cylinders and transcribing melodies with painstaking accuracy ^[5]. By the end of his life he had collected, transcribed, or analyzed many thousands of melodies, and his classification methods helped establish ethnomusicology as a scholarly discipline ^[5]. The fieldwork transformed his composing. Pieces such as the Allegro barbaro (1911) and the Fourteen Bagatelles (1908) fused peasant modes with harsh modern harmony, and in 1907 he joined the Budapest Academy faculty as a professor of piano, a post that gave him a stable base for both careers ^[3].

Any list of Bela Bartok achievements begins with the stage works of the 1910s. His only opera, Duke Bluebeard's Castle (composed 1911, premiered 1918), sets a symbolist libretto by Bela Balazs as a dark psychological dialogue for two singers and orchestra ^[2]. The ballet The Wooden Prince (1917) brought him his first major Budapest success, while the pantomime The Miraculous Mandarin, completed in 1924, proved so violent in subject that its 1926 Cologne premiere was shut down by the city's mayor, the future chancellor Konrad Adenauer ^[6].

Between the wars Bartok produced the instrumental works on which his reputation chiefly rests. The six string quartets, written between 1908 and 1939, trace his entire development and are often ranked with Beethoven's as a summit of the medium ^[1]. Commissions from the conductor Paul Sacher in Basel yielded Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936) and the Divertimento (1939), and the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (1937) opened new territory in scoring. His Second Piano Concerto (1931) and Second Violin Concerto (1938) joined the standard repertoire within his lifetime ^[2].

Bartok was also a dedicated teacher through the keyboard rather than the composition classroom. Mikrokosmos, a graded series of 153 piano pieces completed in 1939, leads students from first exercises to concert works and doubles as a compendium of his musical language ^[3]. As a scholar he published major studies of Hungarian, Romanian, and Slovak folk music, and his 1936 fieldwork in Anatolia, undertaken with the Turkish composer Ahmed Adnan Saygun, extended his comparative method beyond Europe ^[5].

Bartok married twice. In 1909 he wed Marta Ziegler, a sixteen year old piano pupil; their son Bela was born in 1910. The marriage ended in divorce in 1923, and later that year he married another pupil, Ditta Pasztory, with whom he had a second son, Peter, in 1924 ^[2]. Ditta became his regular duo partner, and the couple performed his Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion together in Europe and America.

Those who knew Bartok described a slight, silver haired man of few words, exacting in everything from folk song transcription to correcting proofs. He disliked publicity, rarely gave interviews, and channeled his convictions into action rather than talk ^[1]. His politics were shaped by a deep opposition to chauvinism: having documented how Hungarian, Romanian, and Slovak peasant musics borrowed from one another, he insisted on what he called the brotherhood of peoples, a stance that made him enemies among nationalists at home ^[4].

His moral seriousness sharpened in the 1930s. He refused to perform in Germany after Hitler took power, blocked broadcasts of his music on German and Italian radio, and switched publishers when his Viennese house was absorbed into the Nazi economic sphere ^[6]. In 1938 he began sending his manuscripts abroad for safekeeping, telling friends that he could not remain in a country drifting into the German orbit while his mother was alive. Paula Bartok died in December 1939, removing the last tie holding him in Hungary ^[2].

In October 1940 Bartok and Ditta emigrated to the United States, traveling by train through Italy and Spain and then by ship from Lisbon to New York ^[2]. America received him politely but without warmth. Concert engagements were scarce, his music was considered difficult, and his income depended heavily on a temporary appointment at Columbia University, where he transcribed a large collection of Serbo-Croatian folk recordings made by Milman Parry ^[5]. Columbia awarded him an honorary doctorate in November 1940, yet he lived modestly in a series of small apartments and felt keenly the loss of his language and his fieldwork ^[1].

His health broke down in 1942 with fevers and unexplained weight loss, later diagnosed as leukemia, though doctors withheld the diagnosis from him ^[6]. Support arrived from fellow musicians. The conductor Serge Koussevitzky, prompted by the violinist Joseph Szigeti and the conductor Fritz Reiner, visited Bartok in the hospital in 1943 and commissioned an orchestral work for the Boston Symphony. The result, the Concerto for Orchestra, written in under two months at a sanatorium in Saranac Lake, New York, premiered in Boston in December 1944 and became his most popular score ^[2].

A late surge of energy also produced the Sonata for Solo Violin (1944) for Yehudi Menuhin and the Third Piano Concerto, intended as a birthday gift for Ditta and left seventeen bars short of completion in draft. Bartok died in West Side Hospital in New York City on September 26, 1945, at the age of sixty four ^[1]. He was buried in Ferncliff Cemetery in New York; in 1988 his remains were returned to Hungary and reinterred in Budapest with state honors ^[6].

Bartok's standing rose sharply after his death. The Concerto for Orchestra and the quartets entered the core repertoire, and by the 1950s he was routinely grouped with Stravinsky and Schoenberg as one of the three composers who defined musical modernism ^[1]. Unlike the other two, he built his innovations on peasant music rather than on neoclassicism or the twelve tone method, demonstrating that folk sources could generate a fully modern style. Composers as different as Witold Lutoslawski, Gyorgy Ligeti, and Steve Reich have acknowledged his example ^[2].

His scholarly legacy is equally durable. The analytical methods he developed for classifying melodies remain foundational in ethnomusicology, and his archives, housed in the Bartok Archives in Budapest and in collections at Columbia University and elsewhere, continue to serve researchers ^[5]. Mikrokosmos and his graded folk song arrangements are still standard teaching material for pianists worldwide.

Hungary claims him as a national figure of the first rank. Budapest's concert hall complex includes the Bela Bartok National Concert Hall, his birthplace in Sannicolau Mare maintains a memorial, and his Budapest home operates as a museum ^[6]. For readers of any Bela Bartok biography, the essential Bela Bartok facts point the same way: a composer who listened harder than almost anyone to the music of ordinary people, and who turned what he heard into some of the most original art of his century.