Béla Bartók

A pioneer of ethnomusicology and a composer well-versed in modern techniques, as evidenced by works such as his String Quartets, Concerto for Orchestra and piano music, Béla Bartók revolutionized 20th-century music with his scientific approach to folk music and his quest for the avant-garde. Born in Nagyszentmimiklós, Kingdom of Hungary (now Sînnicolau Mare, Romania), on March 25, 1881, Béla Viktor János Bartók learned piano from his mother before studying composition with László Erkel and harmony with Anton Hyrtl. After moving to Pressburg (Bratislava), he entered the Royal Academy of Budapest in 1899, where his teachers included István Thomán, a pupil of Franz Liszt, and János Koessler. The author of several chamber works, including two unnumbered string quartets (1898) and Albumblatt for violin and piano (1902), the young Bartók was close to the nationalist movement. He wrote his first melodies on Hungarian texts, and in 1903, the symphonic poem Kossuth, in praise of the hero of the 1848 revolution. In 1904, he also composed a Piano Quintet and a Rhapsody for piano. His mastery of piano and composition were enough to earn him second prize at the Rubinstein Competition in Paris. His interest in folk music manifested itself in the collection and arrangement of popular songs, which he set out to collect on cylinders across the country with his friend Zoltán Kodály. Their work, which was published, won them recognition and opened the doors of the Royal Academy of Music. As a piano teacher, Bartók's notable pupils included Fritz Reiner, Georg Solti, György Sándor and Lili Kraus. At the same time, he continued his expeditions to Hungarian, Romanian, Slovakian, Bulgarian and Moldavian villages, and as far afield as North Africa, in search of folk tunes that he scrupulously codified. Their asymmetrical rhythms and the pentatonic scales of certain harmonies directly inspired his work, as did Debussy's innovations, particularly in the String Quartet no. 1 of 1908. The same year saw the release of piano pieces such as the fourteen Bagatelles, the ten Pièces faciles and the eighty-five from the four-volume album Pour enfants. Soloist Stefi Geyer inspired his Violin Concerto No. 1, which was not discovered and premiered until 1958. In 1909, Béla Bartók married one of his students, Márta Ziegler, who gave him a son named Béla, but the couple divorced in 1923. In 1911, Bartók completed his three Burlesques, worked on his Six Romanian Folk Dances and wrote a famous Allegro barbaro with hammered chords. This was also the year of his only opera, Bluebeard's Castle, whose libretto, written by Béla Balasz, was inspired by Maurice Maeterlinck's poem Ariane et Barbe-Bleue, itself based on Charles Perrault's fairy tale. In addition to the Hungarian language, it uses the pentatonic scale of traditional local music. After the government's rejection of the first version, the opera was premiered in Budapest on May 24, 1918, without any mention of the librettist's revolutionary ideas. Bartók and Bálász also collaborated on the ballet The Prince of the Woods, composed during the First World War and premiered on May 12, 1917. New collections of folk songs lead to the composition of the Sonatina on Romanian Folk Tunes, the six Romanian Folk Dances, the Romanian Noëls, the three Hungarian Folk Songs, the Oriental Dance and the Improvisations on Peasant Songs. Bartók, who completed his String Quartet No. 2 in 1917, turned to atonality in the three Etudes for piano (1918) and the two Sonatas for violin and piano (1921-1922). In 1923, he remarried another of his pupils, Edith "Ditta" Pászstory, with whom he toured as a two-piano concert pianist. Their son Péter was born the following year. The ballet-pantomime inspired by a Chinese fairy tale, The Wonderful Mandarin, begun in 1918 and completed in 1924, premiered at the Cologne Opera on November 27, 1926, but was withdrawn due to its erotic content. Bartók went on to write a Suite for orchestra, premiered in 1928, and an adaptation for two pianos. This fruitful period of maturity saw the birth of two great Piano Concertos, the first performed by the composer under Wilhelm Furtwängler in 1927 and the second with Hans Rosbaud in 1933. Equally important are the String Quartets No. 3 and No. 4, among the pinnacles of the genre. After a first trip to the United States, he dedicated his two Rhapsodies for violin and orchestra to soloists Josef Szigeti and Zoltán Szekely respectively. After leaving his teaching post, his String Quartet No. 5 was premiered in Washington in 1935 by the Kolisch Quartet. The following year, Bartók travelled to Turkey to collect local songs, and on his return opposed the authoritarian regime of Regent Miklós Horthy, requesting that his works not be performed at Nazi concerts. Taking refuge in Switzerland with the conductor Paul Sacher, he fulfilled two of the latter's commissions, the two masterpieces created by the Basel Chamber Orchestra: Music for strings, percussion and celesta (January 21, 1937), a true milestone of the 20th century, and Divertimento for string orchestra (June 11, 1940). In 1938, in Basel, the composer and his wife premiered a Sonata for two pianos and percussion. The same year, he dedicated the piece Contrastes, for violin, clarinet and piano, to violinist Josef Szigeti and American clarinettist Benny Goodman. On August 8, 1940, Bartók gave a final concert in Budapest, before going into exile in the United States in October. Without a permanent position, he carried out research for Columbia University, gave concerts and lectures, but lived modestly, as American audiences were not very receptive to his music. Stricken with leukemia, he worked on his last works, including commissions from friends such as the splendid Concerto for Orchestra , commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky, who premiered it with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in New York on December 1, 1944, and the Sonata for solo violin, commissioned by Yehudi Menuhin. He sketched out a Viola Concerto for William Primrose and completed Piano Concerto No. 3 for his wife, which was in fact premiered posthumously on February 8, 1946 by his pupil György Sándor, conducted by Eugene Ormandy of the Philadelphia Orchestra. On September 26, 1945, Béla Bartók died in New York at the age of 64. Buried in Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, his remains were transferred to Budapest in 1988.