Bartók, Béla (bā`lə bär`tŏk, Hung. bā`lô bôr`tōk), 1881–1945, Hungarian composer and collector of folk music. He studied (1899–1903) and later taught piano at the Royal Academy, Budapest. In 1905 he and Zoltán Kodály began to collect folk music of Eastern Europe, and throughout his life Bartók devoted much attention to folk music of varied origin. As a composer he gained his first success with his mime play The Wooden Prince (1914–16). An opera, Duke Bluebeard's Castle (1911), and a ballet, The Miraculous Mandarin (1919), also gained notice. He became better known, however, for his compositions for piano, for violin, and for orchestra. Among his piano works are a set of progressive studies called Mikrokosmos (1926–39), three piano concertos (1929, 1931, 1945), and a sonata for two pianos and percussion (1927). Bartók's important orchestral works include Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936) and Concerto for Orchestra (1943). Among his most important achievements are his six string quartets. Utilizing in varying degrees folk elements, atonality, and traditional techniques, Bartók achieved an original modern style, which has had a great influence on 20th-century music. In 1940 he emigrated to the United States and was commissioned by Columbia Univ. to transcribe a large collection of Yugoslav folk melodies. He spent his last years in poverty and neglect, but after his death his fame grew steadily. Among his studies of folk music that have been published in English are The Hungarian Folk Song (tr. 1931) and Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs (with A. B. Lord, 1951).

Bibliography

See his letters, ed. by J. Demeny (1971); biographies by H. Stevens (rev. ed. 1964), A. Fassett (1958, repr. 1971), and P. Griffiths (1984); study by E. Antokoletz (1989).

Bartók, Béla

Béla Bartók, photograph by Fritz Reiner.

(credit: Mrs. Fritz Reiner)

(born March 25, 1881, Nagyszentmiklós, Hung., Austria-Hungary—died Sept. 26, 1945, New York, N.Y., U.S.) Hungarian composer, pianist, and ethnomusicologist. He was an accomplished pianist at an early age. In 1904 he set about researching Hungarian folk music, having discovered that the folk-music repertory generally accepted as Hungarian was in fact largely urban Roma (Gypsy) music (see Rom). His fieldwork with the composer Zoltán Kodály formed the basis for all later research in the field, and he published major studies of Hungarian, Romanian, and Slovakian folk music. He worked folk themes and rhythms into his own music, achieving a style that was at once nationalistic and deeply personal. He also toured widely as a virtuoso pianist. In 1940 he immigrated to the U.S., where he had great difficulty making a living. His works include the opera Bluebeard's Castle (1911), six celebrated string quartets (1908–39), the didactic piano set Mikrokosmos (1926–39), Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (1937), Concerto for Orchestra (1943), and three piano concertos (1926, 1931, 1945).