Béla Bartók

Nagyszentmiklós, Pressburg, and the prodigy years, 1881–1898

Béla Viktor János Bartók was born on 25 March 1881 in Nagyszentmiklós, a Banat town then in the Kingdom of Hungary and now Sânnicolau Mare in Romania. His father, also Béla, directed an agricultural school; his mother, Paula Voit, taught piano. The child could pick dance rhythms out of his mother's playing before he could speak in full sentences, played forty pieces at four, and began lessons with his mother at five.

His father died suddenly in 1888, when the boy was seven, and his mother moved the family through a series of towns, settling in Pressburg, now Bratislava. At eleven Bartók gave his first public recital, playing among other things his own composition The Course of the Danube, written at nine. In 1899 he entered the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest, studying piano under István Thomán, a pupil of Franz Liszt, and composition under János Koessler.

Strauss, the nanny's songs, and the discovery of folk music, 1902–1908

Two encounters set the course. In 1902 the Budapest premiere of Richard Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra electrified him; he said afterward that at last he saw the way that lay before him. His 1903 symphonic poem Kossuth, on the hero of the 1848 revolution, is written in Strauss's language. Then, at a holiday resort in the summer of 1904, he overheard a young nanny, Lidi Dósa from Transylvania, singing folk songs to the children in her care. He never stopped following that sound.

At the Academy he had met Zoltán Kodály, who became a lifelong friend and collaborator. In 1908 the two went into the countryside with a phonograph to record old Hungarian melodies from the peasants who still sang them. What they found overturned the received idea, fixed by Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies, that Hungarian music meant the popular art songs played by Romani café bands. The old village melodies were built on pentatonic scales, kin to the folk musics of Central Asia, Anatolia and Siberia. Charles Seeger later called Bartók one of the greatest field collectors of the century's first half.

In 1907 Kodály brought Claude Debussy's scores back from Paris, and Bartók found in them the harmonic permission the folk material needed: proof that modern music could live outside the major-minor system. The same year he joined the Liszt Academy as a piano professor, a post that spared him the touring virtuoso's life. His String Quartet No. 1 (1908) is the first work where the folk discoveries clearly sound.

Bluebeard's Castle, the ballets, and the quartets, 1909–1939

In 1909, at twenty-eight, Bartók married Márta Ziegler, sixteen; their son Béla was born the next year. In 1911 he wrote his only opera, Bluebeard's Castle, dedicated to Márta: one castle, two singers, seven doors, and the argument that people cannot control their fates. The Hungarian Fine Arts Commission rejected it as unstageable, and the disappointment pushed him almost entirely into folk-music collecting for several years, with expeditions through the Carpathian Basin and, in 1913, Algeria. The First World War ended the fieldwork, and he returned to composing with the ballet The Wooden Prince and the String Quartet No. 2.

His pantomime score The Miraculous Mandarin, begun in 1918 under the influence of Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg and Strauss, was kept off the stage until 1926 by its sexual subject matter. In 1923 he divorced Márta and married the piano student Ditta Pásztory, ten days after proposing; their son Péter was born in 1924. The mature masterpieces came in a steady line: the Third and Fourth String Quartets in 1927–28, the Fifth in 1934, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta in 1936, the Sixth Quartet in 1939. In 1936 he travelled to Turkey to collect folk music around Adana with the composer Ahmet Adnan Saygun.

Politics pressed in throughout. After participating in the 1919 revolution, he was pressured by the Horthy government to strike the name of his librettist Béla Balázs, who was Jewish and blacklisted, from Bluebeard's Castle. After 1933 he refused to perform in Germany and left his German publisher. His will of October 1940 asked that no street or square in Hungary be named for him while any still bore the names of Hitler or Mussolini.

New York, the last concertos, and death, 1940–1945

Bartók sent his manuscripts abroad first, then followed, reluctantly, with Ditta, reaching New York by steamer from Lisbon on the night of 29–30 October 1940. America knew him as a pianist and scholar more than as a composer; concert demand was thin, and he worked on a Columbia University research fellowship, cataloguing Serbian and Croatian folk song. He was proud about money, refused most offered help, and, though often short of cash, never fell into the destitution of legend.

His health began failing in 1940 with a stiffening shoulder, then fevers; in April 1944 the diagnosis came back leukemia, too late to treat. The dying man's late works are the paradox of his career. Serge Koussevitzky's commission produced the Concerto for Orchestra, premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in December 1944 to immediate acclaim, quickly his most popular work. Yehudi Menuhin commissioned the Sonata for Solo Violin. The Third Piano Concerto, written as a surprise birthday present for Ditta, was three days of orchestration short of finished when he died.

Bartók died of complications of leukemia in a New York hospital on 26 September 1945, aged 64. Ten people attended the funeral. He was buried at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York; in 1988, at the request of the Hungarian government and his sons, his remains were returned to Budapest and reburied beside Ditta at Farkasréti Cemetery after a state funeral. His pupil Tibor Serly completed the Third Piano Concerto and assembled the sketched Viola Concerto.

How Bartók composed

Bartók described three ways a composer could use peasant music. He could quote the melody and set it, invent imitations of it, or absorb the idiom so completely that it becomes, in Bartók's phrase, a musical mother tongue, present with no melody quoted at all. His own work runs through all three, from the eighty set folk tunes of For Children to the late scores where the village is in the grammar rather than the themes. The synthesis he aimed at, stated in his own words, was Bach's counterpoint, Beethoven's form and Debussy's harmony, on folk foundations.

The signature sounds are easy to name. Uneven Bulgarian dance rhythms. Drumming, percussive piano writing. Melody built on old five-note scales. And the slow movements of hushed, eerie night sounds, heard at their purest in Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. As a scholar he collected thousands of melodies across at least six countries, insisting on the phonograph for accuracy. His six string quartets are commonly placed beside Beethoven's as the spine of the form.

Reception and changing reputation

In his lifetime Bartók's fame ran far behind his achievement, above all in the American years, when little of his music was played. The reversal after 1945 was total. The quartets, the Concerto for Orchestra and the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta entered the standard repertoire. Hungary put his face on its money, and in 1988 brought his body home for a state funeral.

His longer influence is a road not taken by the century's other modernisms. The critic Anthony Tommasini's summary is the standard one. Facing Schoenberg's formulations, Bartók showed another way, a blend of tonality, unorthodox scales and atonal wandering. He empowered generations of composers to build on the folk and classical traditions of whatever culture they came from. The discipline of ethnomusicology counts him among its founders.