Béla Bartók

Composer

• Born: March 25, 1881
• Birthplace: Nagyszentmiklós, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Sînnicolau Mare, Romania)
• Died: September 26, 1945
• Place of death: New York, New York

Hungarian composer and pianist

Bartók was one of the great champions of Hungarian music. He dispelled the misconceptions about Hungarian folk music that prior to his own work had been commonly associated with Roma, or Gypsy, music alone.

Areas of achievement Music, scholarship

Early Life

Béla Bartók (BAY-lah BAHR-tohk) was born in Nagyszentmiklós (now Sînnicolau Mare) in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in an area that is now part of Romania. Béla was the elder of two children born to Béla Bartók and Paula Yoit. He was named for his father, who was director of a government agricultural school in Nagyszentmiklós. The son suffered various illnesses throughout his growth years. He was later to suffer periodic bouts with bronchial infection and pneumonia that occasionally interfered with his musical career. Young Bartók’s natural talent and interest for music were encouraged from the earliest age. His father, active in the musical life of the community, was an amateur musician who played the piano and the cello. His mother was a teacher and a talented amateur pianist. His mother gave him his first piano lesson when he was five years old.

Bartók’s father died in 1888 when the boy was only seven years old, leaving Paula Bartók to support their two children through her teaching. The family moved several times during the next few years as Paula tried to provide the best educational and musical opportunities for her son. The family first moved to Nagyszóllós, which later became part of the Soviet Union, in 1889. It was there that Bartók composed his first pieces, several short compositions for the piano. In 1892, he gave his first public performance for a charity benefit. In 1894, the family finally settled in Pozsony, which is now Bratislava, Slovakia.

There, Bartók pursued his education at the gymnasium and began his study of the piano with various pianists. In Pozsony, Bartók was able to attend concerts and operas and participate in public performances himself. Bartók’s years at Pozsony were productive ones that saw him complete a number of works for piano and also works in the category of chamber music. During this time, Bartók fell under the influence of Ernó Dohnányi, a composer/pianist, several years his senior, who had preceded him at the gymnasium and who had gone on to study at the Royal Academy of Music at Budapest.

Shortly before completing his studies at the gymnasium in Pozsony, Bartók, with his mother, traveled in December of 1898 to Vienna, where he auditioned for admission to the Vienna Conservatory. Full admission and scholarship notwithstanding, Bartók elected to follow in the footsteps of his friend and role model, Dohnányi, and attend the Royal Academy of Music at Budapest. There, he studied piano with István Thomán, a former pupil of Franz Liszt, and composition with Janos Koessler. Bartók, who passed through the program with relative ease and was graduated in 1903, was viewed by the faculty as a virtuoso pianist more than as a talented and promising young composer.

Bartók became interested in the music of Liszt and Richard Wagner while he was a student at the academy, eventually turning to the music of Richard Strauss for inspiration. His interest in Strauss was the result of having heard Strauss’s tone poem Thus Spake Zarathustra (1896) performed in Budapest in 1902. He subsequently arranged a piano transcription of Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben (1898), which he performed for the academy faculty, and went on to compose a symphonic poem, the Kossuth Symphony (1903). The symphony, which is divided into ten sections, was a patriotic composition that caused quite a controversy over the composer’s deliberate distortion of the Austrian national anthem found in the work. The work was first performed in Budapest in 1904.

Life’s Work

Central to the development of Bartók’s mature style was his study of the Hungarian folk song. He first became interested after having heard a peasant song sung by a young woman in 1904. His early study soon revealed to him a significant difference between the Hungarian folk music and the Roma (Gypsy) music often mistaken as such by well-intentioned composers like Liszt and Johannes Brahms. The collection and study of Hungarian folk songs reflected, in part, Bartók’s strong sense of patriotism, even as the Kossuth Symphony earlier had celebrated the Hungarian uprising against Austrian oppression in 1848. His research quickly led him into contact with Zoltán Kodály in 1905, a fellow Hungarian composer who was also doing research on Hungarian folk music. In 1906, the two traveled separately to remote regions of Hungary, taking down and recording folk songs, the final result being a collaboration and publication of twenty folk songs with piano accompaniment that was entitled Hungarian Folksongs (1907). For the next several years, Bartók continued his research of Hungarian folk songs, expanding the scope of his research to include folk songs of neighboring regions in Central Europe, including Romania and Czechoslovakia, among others. He ultimately collected thousands of songs from that general region.

His study and analysis of Hungarian folk songs led to the development of a highly personal style as he attempted to merge elements of folk music and art music together. Characteristic of his style are melodies based on modes or unusual scale structures and irregular rhythm patterns and measure groupings such as are often found in folk music. While his style is often diverse and complex, frequently utilizing much dissonance, some element of folk music is usually to be found in his works.

In 1907, Bartók’s former professor, Thomán, retired, and Bartók was appointed to the faculty. The appointment provided Bartók with the financial stability necessary to pursue a career of research, performance, and composition. One of the first works to reveal Bartók’s individual style was the opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, which was composed in 1911 for a competition but which was not performed until 1918. The work is generally seen as the first of a trilogy, the other two works being the ballet The Wooden Prince (1917) and the pantomime The Miraculous Mandarin (1926). The first performance of The Wooden Prince marked Bartók’s first public success, with the first performance of Duke Bluebeard’s Castle the following year firmly establishing him as an international figure.

Included among the major works that Bartók composed are his six string quartets, which place him as the major composer in this genre in the twentieth century. He wrote extensively for the piano, frequently treating it more as a percussive instrument than a melodic one. This technique, developed by Bartók, marked a dramatic break with the way the piano had been used. The scope of his piano pieces varies from large extended works, such as the three piano concertos, to miniatures, such as the Bagatelles (1908). His most important work for piano is Mikrokosmos, which consists of 153 piano pieces in six volumes that were composed between the years 1926 and 1939. The level of difficulty ranges from the simplest pieces for beginners to works for the accomplished virtuoso.

Bartók was quite active as a concert artist and composer during the 1920’s and 1930’s, also continuing his work with folk-song research. In 1934, he left the teaching studio when the Hungarian Academy of Sciences commissioned him to prepare his collection of Hungarian folk songs for publication. In 1936, he composed Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, regarded by many as his finest work. As the decade wore on Bartók became increasingly concerned as Hungary moved closer to Nazi Germany, and, when his mother died in December of 1939, he immediately began to make plans to leave the country.

He went to the United States in 1940 and settled in New York City. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in November of 1940 by Columbia University, from which he later received an appointment to continue his research in folk music. The appointment was short-lived, however, and in 1942 he found himself without a steady source of income and in poor health. His health had been steadily deteriorating for several months, and a medical examination in 1943 incorrectly diagnosed him with polycythemia, a condition characterized by an excess of red blood cells. Later, he was diagnosed as having leukemia.

As Bartók’s health worsened and his financial problems increased because of the illness, the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers came to his assistance and provided funds for his medical care. Two of his finest works date from this period when he was fighting the disease. The Concerto for Orchestra was commissioned in 1943 by Serge Koussevitzky, conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Koussevitzky conducted its premiere performance in 1944 with Bartók present. The other work, Piano Concerto no. 3, was completed shortly before his death in 1945, after Bartók had realized that his disease was terminal. Bartók died on September 26, 1945, in West Side Hospital in New York City. He was survived by his second wife, Ditta Pásztory Bartók, a former student who concertized in duo piano works with her husband; their only child, Peter Bartók; and a son, Béla Bartók, by his first wife, Marta Ziegler.

Significance

Bartók’s importance to the twentieth century is fourfold. He was a great virtuoso pianist who concertized throughout Europe and the United States. His former teacher, Thomán, compared him to Liszt, perhaps the greatest pianist of the nineteenth century. Early in Bartók’s career, his great talent and skill as a performer placed him in the teaching studio at the Royal Academy. There he was a great influence to many aspiring young pianists, among them Fritz Reiner, who later became a world-famous conductor. Bartók became an ethnomusicologist through his study of the folk song. He collected folk songs over the years, studied and analyzed them, published them in collections, and wrote and published articles about his research in folk music. His research in this area redefined Hungarian folk music and preserved a great body of it that probably would have been lost except for his efforts in this field. Finally, through the study of folk music, Bartók developed a highly personal and original compositional style that reflected a fusion of folk music characteristics with certain characteristics of Western art music. His music has continued to increase in popularity since his death.

Bibliography

Bartók, Béla. “Autobiography.” In Béla Bartók Essays, edited by Benjamin Suchoff. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976. This brief essay is by Bartók on Bartók. It provides readers with an invaluable opportunity to see what the composer has to say about his life and works.

Bayley, Amanda, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Bartók. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Collection of essays examining Bartók’s life and music within the context of early twentieth century Hungarian history and nationalism, as well as analyzing Bartók’s interest in folk music and his musical compositions.

Griffiths, Paul. Bartók. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1984. An excellent biography. There is some technical discussion of selected works, but the book is accessible to the general reader. Appendixes contain a calendar of events in Bartók’s life, linking them with contemporary events and musicians. Includes a listing of his works by genre that offers such information as dates of composition, dates of revisions, a who, when, and where of first performances, and publishers. Contains a short selected bibliography.

Lampert, Vera, and László Somfai. “Béla Bartók.” In New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie. 6th ed., vol. 2. New York: Macmillan, 1980. This is the best article in English about Bartók, his works, and his musical style. A listing of his works and an excellent bibliography are provided.

Lesznai, Lajos. Bartók. Translated by Percy M. Young. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1973. The author has attempted to establish a factually accurate biography through inquiry of people who knew Bartók personally. There is little technical treatment of selected works, making it accessible to the general public. Includes some photographs and a short selected bibliography.

Milne, Hamish. Bartók: His Life and Times. New York: Hippocrene Books, 1982. This biography, though short, provides interesting insights into Bartók’s private and professional life and attempts to put his life into perspective with the times in which he lived. Highly recommended to the general reader.

Schneider, David E. Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition: Case Studies in the Intersection of Modernity and Nationality. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Describes how Bartók was influenced by Hungarian art music as well as folk music, and how he incorporated these influences into his compositions.

Stevens, Halsey. The Life and Music of Béla Bartók. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964. Although dated, this biography remains one of the best. The book is divided into two major sections. The first section divides Bartók’s life into three periods. The second section discusses Bartók’s music by genre. The appendix contains a chronological list of works that includes the date of first performance when possible. Contains a good but dated bibliography. Recommended to the general reader.

Related Articles in Great Events from History: The Twentieth Century

1901-1940: 1904-1905: Bartók and Kodály Collect Hungarian Folk Songs.