Béla Viktor János Bartók (pronounced /ˈbeɪlɒˈbɑːrtɒk/; Hungarian: [ˈbɒrtoːk ˈbeːlɒ]; born March 25, 1881; died September 26, 1945) was a Hungarian composer, pianist, and researcher who studied folk music. He is widely regarded as one of the most important composers of the 20th century. Along with Franz Liszt, he is considered Hungary’s greatest composer. Some of his well-known works include the opera Bluebeard’s Castle, the ballet The Miraculous Mandarin, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, the Concerto for Orchestra, and six string quartets. Bartók helped create the field of comparative musicology, which later became known as ethnomusicology, by collecting and analyzing folk music from around the world. According to Anthony Tommasini, Bartók inspired many composers to use folk music and classical traditions from different cultures in their work. His music is often described as blending traditional folk melodies with modern or experimental styles.

Biography

Béla Bartók was born on March 25, 1881, in Nagyszentmiklós, a town in the Kingdom of Hungary (now called Sânnicolau Mare, Romania). His father’s family was a Hungarian lower noble family from Borsodszirák, Borsod. His paternal grandmother was a Catholic woman of Bunjevci origin but identified as Hungarian. His father, also named Béla, lived from 1855 to 1888. His mother, Paula (born Voit), was born in Turócszentmárton (now Martin, Slovakia). She spoke Hungarian fluently and had German, Hungarian, and Slovak or Polish ancestry.

Béla showed musical talent early in life. His mother said he could recognize different dance rhythms she played on the piano before he could speak in full sentences. By age four, he could play 40 piano pieces. His mother began teaching him formally the next year.

In 1888, when Béla was seven, his father died suddenly. His mother moved Béla and his sister, Erzsébet, to Nagyszőlős (now Vynohradiv, Ukraine) and later to Pressburg (now Bratislava, Slovakia). At age 11, Béla gave his first public performance in Nagyszőlős. He played his own composition, "The Course of the Danube," which he had written two years earlier. Soon after, László Erkel accepted him as a student.

From 1899 to 1903, Bartók studied piano with István Thomán, a former student of Franz Liszt, and composition with János Koessler at the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest. There, he met Zoltán Kodály, who became a lifelong friend. In 1903, Bartók wrote his first major orchestral work, Kossuth, a symphonic poem honoring Lajos Kossuth, a hero of the 1848 Hungarian Revolution.

The music of Richard Strauss, whom Bartók met in 1902 at a Budapest performance of Also sprach Zarathustra, influenced his early work. In 1904, while visiting a resort, Bartók heard a nanny named Lidi Dósa sing folk songs. This experience inspired his lifelong study of folk music.

Starting in 1907, Bartók was influenced by French composer Claude Debussy, whose works Kodály had brought from Paris. His large orchestral pieces still reflected the styles of Johannes Brahms and Richard Strauss, but he began writing smaller piano pieces that showed his growing interest in folk music. His String Quartet No. 1 in A minor (1908) was the first to clearly include folk-like elements. He later taught piano at the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest. His students included Fritz Reiner, Sir Georg Solti, and others. After moving to the United States, he taught Jack Beeson and Violet Archer.

In 1908, Bartók and Kodály traveled to collect Magyar folk melodies. They discovered that these melodies used pentatonic scales, similar to those in Asian traditions like Central Asia, Anatolia, and Siberia. This was different from how Magyar folk music had previously been categorized as Gypsy music, such as in Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies. Bartók and Kodály incorporated folk melodies into their compositions, using them verbatim or creating pieces based on authentic songs. An example is Bartók’s For Children, a collection of 80 folk tunes with piano accompaniment. His music combined folk elements, classicism, and modernism. He was especially interested in the asymmetrical rhythms and harmonies of Bulgarian music. His early works blended nationalist themes with late Romantic styles.

In 1909, at age 28, Bartók married Márta Ziegler, who was 16. Their son, Béla Bartók III, was born the next year. They divorced in 1923. Two months later, Bartók married Ditta Pásztory, a piano student, when he was 42 and she was 19. Their son, Péter, was born in 1924.

As a child, Bartók was raised as a Catholic. By adulthood, he became an atheist. Later, he joined the Unitarian faith in 1916. Though not religious, he loved nature and collected insects as a hobby. His son, Béla III, later became president of the Hungarian Unitarian Church.

In 1911, Bartók wrote his only opera, Bluebeard’s Castle, dedicated to Márta. The opera uses symbolism to show how fate and unconscious motivations affect people. It was rejected by the Hungarian Fine Arts Commission for being unsuitable for the stage. Bartók revised the score for its 1918 premiere and rewrote the ending. After the 1919 revolution, he had to remove the name of the Jewish librettist, Béla Balázs, from the opera due to pressure from the Horthy regime. Bluebeard’s Castle was revived only once, in 1936, before Bartók left Hungary. Though he loved Hungary and its culture, he never felt loyal to its government.

After being rejected by the Fine Arts Commission, Bartók focused on collecting and arranging folk music for several years. He used a phonograph to record folk songs accurately. He collected music in the Carpathian Basin, where he noted Hungarian, Slovak, Romanian, and Bulgarian folk melodies. His partnership with Kodály using a phonomotor helped classify and record hundreds of folk songs. Bartó

Music

Bartók’s music shows two major changes in 20th-century music: the end of the traditional harmony system used by composers for 200 years; and the return to using national music as inspiration, a trend started by composers like Mikhail Glinka and Antonín Dvořák in the late 1800s. To find new ways to create harmony, Bartók studied Hungarian folk music and other folk traditions from the Carpathian Basin, Algeria, and Turkey. This helped shape modern music that used local musical styles and techniques.

One of Bartók’s styles is called "Night music," which he used in slow parts of his ensemble or orchestral works during his mature period. This style uses "strange, harsh sounds that go along with nature sounds and lonely melodies." An example is the third movement (Adagio) of his Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. His music can be grouped based on the different stages of his life.

Bartók’s early works were written in a classical and early romantic style, influenced by popular and Romani music. Between 1890 and 1894 (when he was 9 to 13 years old), he wrote 31 piano pieces. While most were simple dances, some showed more complex forms, like his ten-part A Duna folyása ("The Course of the Danube," 1890–1894), which he performed in his first public recital in 1892.

At Catholic grammar school, Bartók studied music from composers like Bach to Wagner. His style then became similar to Schumann and Brahms. After joining the Budapest Academy in 1890, he composed little, but he studied orchestration and Wagner’s operas. In 1902, Bartók was inspired by Richard Strauss’s tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra, which he said "showed me the way forward." He also studied and memorized Strauss’s A Hero’s Life.

Under Strauss’s influence, Bartók wrote Kossuth in 1903, a symphonic poem about Hungary’s 1848 independence war, showing his growing interest in national music. In 1904, he began collecting folk songs after hearing a nanny sing Transylvanian melodies. He later collected folk music from other groups in the Carpathian Basin, like Slovaks, Romanians, and Serbs. His music used fewer romantic elements and focused more on folk traditions.

Bartók first heard Debussy’s music in 1907 and admired it. In 1939, he said Debussy’s influence is seen in his Fourteen Bagatelles (1908), which impressed composer Ferruccio Busoni. Until 1911, Bartók wrote many different types of music, from romantic styles to folk arrangements and his modernist opera Bluebeard’s Castle. After 1911, he focused on folk music research and stopped composing, except for arrangements.

His mood improved in 1915 after meeting Klára Gombossy, which was discovered later by Denijs Dille. He began composing again, creating works like the Suite for piano (Opus 14, 1916) and The Miraculous Mandarin (1919). He also finished The Wooden Prince (1917).

World War I deeply affected Bartók, as regions he loved were separated from Hungary, including Transylvania and Bratislava. Political issues also limited his folk music research outside Hungary. He wrote Eight Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs (1920) and the Dance Suite (1923), the year of his second marriage.

In 1926, Bartók needed a major piano and orchestra piece for touring. He was inspired by Henry Cowell’s use of intense piano clusters. He asked Cowell for permission to use the technique, which was granted. Before writing his first Piano Concerto, he composed the Sonata, Out of Doors and Nine Little Pieces, all using clusters. His style became more distinct in his later years. His final period, called "Synthesis of East and West," combined Eastern and Western musical ideas. His mature works were fewer but large-scale, with most using classical forms.

Important works include his six string quartets (1909, 1917, 1927, 1928, 1934, and 1939), the Cantata Profana (1930), which he called his most personal work, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936), the Concerto for Orchestra (1943), and the Third Piano Concerto (1945). He also wrote Mikrokosmos, a six-volume set of piano pieces for his son, which helped teach younger students.

Musical analysis

Paul Wilson identifies two important features of Bartók's music from the late 1920s onward: the influence of the Carpathian Basin and European art music, and his changing approach to tonality. However, Bartók did not use the traditional harmonic functions linked to major and minor scales.

Although Bartók wrote that his music was always tonal, he rarely used the chords or scales typically associated with tonality. This made it difficult to describe his music using traditional tonal theory. George Perle (1955) and Elliott Antokoletz (1984) studied how Bartók used alternative methods to indicate tonal centers, such as axes of inversional symmetry. Others analyzed these axes using methods for atonal music. Richard Cohn (1988) argued that inversional symmetry often results from another atonal technique, the creation of chords from transpositionally related dyads. Atonal pitch-class theory also helps analyze concepts like polymodal chromaticism, projected sets, privileged patterns, and large set types, such as the equal-tempered twelve-tone aggregate, octatonic scale (and alpha chord), diatonic and heptatonia secunda seven-note scales, and less frequently the whole-tone scale and primary pentatonic collection.

Bartók rarely used the complete set of twelve notes (the simple aggregate) to shape musical structure, though there are exceptions, such as the second theme in the first movement of his Second Violin Concerto. He once said he wanted to show Schoenberg that all twelve tones could be used while still remaining tonal. In the first eight measures of the last movement of his Second Quartet, the twelfth note (G♭) appears for the first time on the last beat of measure 8, marking the end of the first section. In the opening of the Third String Quartet, the accompaniment (strings) includes C♯–D–D♯–E, while the remaining notes are used in the melody (violin 1) and often appear as 7–35 (diatonic or "white-key" collection) and 5–35 (pentatonic or "black-key" collection), as in no. 6 of the Eight Improvisations. There, the left hand plays the primary theme on the black keys, while the right hand uses triads from the white keys. In measures 50–51 of the third movement of the Fourth Quartet, the first violin and cello play black-key chords, while the second violin and viola play stepwise diatonic lines. Earlier, in the Suite for Piano, Op. 14 (1914), Bartók used a form of serialism based on compound interval cycles, some of which are maximally distributed, multi-aggregate cycles. Ernő Lendvai analyzed Bartók’s works as relying on two opposing tonal systems—the acoustic scale and the axis system—and also using the golden section as a structural principle.

Milton Babbitt, in his 1949 review of Bartók’s string quartets, criticized Bartók for using tonality and non-tonal methods that were unique to each piece. Babbitt noted that "Bartók’s solution was a specific one, it cannot be duplicated." Bartók’s use of "two organizational principles"—tonality for large-scale relationships and piece-specific methods for moment-to-moment thematic elements—posed a challenge for Babbitt, who worried that "highly attenuated tonality" required extreme non-harmonic methods to create a feeling of closure.

Catalogues

Cataloging Béla Bartók's musical works is challenging. Bartók used opus numbers to label his compositions three times, with the last series ending in 1921 with his Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 1, Op. 21. He stopped this practice because it became hard to tell original compositions from works based on folk music, and to distinguish between major and minor pieces. After Bartók's death, three cataloging systems were created—two complete and one partial. The first and most commonly used system is András Szőllősy's chronological list, labeled Sz. numbers 1 to 121. Later, Denijs Dille reorganized Bartók's early works (Sz. 1–25) thematically, assigning them DD numbers 1 to 77. The most recent catalog is by László Somfai, which lists works in chronological order using BB numbers 1 to 129. This system includes updates from the Béla Bartók Thematic Catalogue.

On January 1, 2016, Bartók's compositions entered the public domain in the European Union.

Discography

Bartók worked with Zoltán Kodály, a fellow musician who shared his interests, to collect folk and peasant songs from areas where people spoke Magyar, Slovak, and Romanian languages. At first, they wrote down the melodies by hand, but later they used a machine called a phonomotor, which recorded sound on wax cylinders. This machine was invented by Thomas Edison. Over the years, recordings of Bartók’s fieldwork, interviews, and piano performances have been released by the Hungarian record label Hungaroton:

• Bartók, Béla. 1994. Bartók at the Piano. Hungaroton 12326. 6-CD set.
• Bartók, Béla. 1995a. Bartók Plays Bartók – Bartók at the Piano 1929–41. Pearl 9166. CD recording.
• Bartók, Béla. 1995b. Bartók Recordings from Private Collections. Hungaroton 12334. CD recording.
• Bartók, Béla. 2003. Bartók Plays Bartók. Pearl 179. CD recording.
• Bartók, Béla. 2003. Bartók Sonata for 2 Pianos & Percussion, Suite for 2 Pianos. Apex 0927-49569-2. CD recording.
• Bartók, Béla. 2007. Bartók: Contrasts, Mikrokosmos. Membran/Documents 223546. CD recording.
• Bartók, Béla. 2008. Bartók Plays Bartók. Urania 340. CD recording.
• Bartók, Béla. 2016. Bartók the Pianist. Hungaroton HCD32790-91. Two CDs. Works by Bartók, Domenico Scarlatti, Zoltán Kodály, and Franz Liszt.

A collection of field recordings and written versions of music for two violas was released in 2014 by Tantara Records.

On 18 March 2016, Decca Classics released Béla Bartók: The Complete Works, the first full collection of all of Bartók’s compositions, including new recordings of early piano and vocal pieces that had never been recorded before. However, this 32-disc set does not include any of Bartók’s own performances.

Statues and other memorials

• A statue of Bartók is located in Brussels, Belgium, near the central train station in a public square called Spanjeplein-Place d'Espagne.
• A statue is placed outside Malvern Court, London, south of the South Kensington tube station and north of Sydney Place. A blue plaque from English Heritage, placed in 1997, now honors Bartók at 7 Sydney Place, where he stayed during performances in London.
• A statue of Bartók was placed in front of the house where he lived for his final eight years in Hungary, at Csalán út 29, in the hills above Budapest. This house is now used as the Béla Bartók Memorial House (Bartók Béla Emlékház). Copies of this statue also stand in Makó (a Hungarian city near his birthplace, now in Romania), Paris, London, and Toronto.
• A bust and plaque are located at his last home in New York City, at 309 W. 57th Street. It is inscribed: "The Great Hungarian Composer / Béla Bartók / (1881–1945) / Made His Home In This House / During the Last Year of His Life."
• A bust of Bartók is placed in the front yard of Ankara State Conservatory, Ankara, Turkey, next to the bust of Ahmet Adnan Saygun.
• In 1999, Bartók was added to the American Classical Music Hall of Fame.
• A bronze statue of Bartók, created by Imre Varga in 2005, stands in the front lobby of The Royal Conservatory of Music, 273 Bloor Street West, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
• A bronze bust of Bartók is located in Anton Scudier Central Park, Timișoara, Romania. This park has an "Alley of Personalities," started in 2009, which includes busts of famous Romanians. Sânnicolau Mare (Nagyszentmiklós in Hungarian), the town where Bartók was born in 1881, is about 58 kilometers northwest of Timișoara and is now in Romania, near the border with Hungary.
• A statue of Bartók, made by Imre Varga, stands near the Seine River in the public park at Square Béla-Bartók (26 place de Brazzaville), Paris, France.
• In the same park, a sculpture called Cristaux, designed by Jean-Yves Lechevallier in 1980, represents Bartók’s work on musical harmony.
• An expressionist sculpture by András Beck is located in Square Henri-Collet, Paris 16th arrondissement.
• A statue of Bartók also stands in the city center of Târgu Mureș, Romania.
• A seated statue of Bartók is located in front of Nákó Castle, in his hometown, Nagyszentmiklós.
• Bartók has a star on the Walk of Fame in Vienna, Austria.