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Béla Bartók (1881–1945)Through his collection and analytical study of folk music, he was one of the founders of comparative musicology, which later became ethnomusicology.

Bartók’s music reflects two trends that dramatically changed the sound of music in the 20th century: (1)  the breakdown of the diatonic system of harmony that had served composers for the previous two hundred years, (2)  and the revival of nationalism as a source for musical inspiration, a trend that began with Mikhail Glinka and Antonín Dvořák in the last half of the 19th century. In his search for new forms of tonality, Bartók turned to Hungarian folk music, as well as to other folk music of the Carpathian Basin and even of Algeria and Turkey; in so doing he became influential in that stream of modernism which exploited indigenous music and techniques.

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Bartok is significant  for his contribution to the field of ethnomusicology. He spent considerable time and energy going into the countryside to record the folk music of specific regions in eastern Europe. His study of these folk traditions greatly influenced his composition as he increasingly incorporated the scales and rhythms he studied in the countryside into his own concert music. He was influenced by both Schoenberg and Stravinsky. Like them  he was forced by conflict in Europe to move to the United States. He stated that his music remained tonal but some of  his music  used scales derived from folk idioms rather than the major and minor scales of tonal music. We hear in Bartok’s music a mixture of modernist dissonance and nationalist elements.

 Early Years (1881–98)

Béla gave his first public recital at age 11 to a warm critical reception. Among the pieces he played was his own first composition, written two years previously: a short piece called “The Course of the Danube.”

Early Musical Career (1899–1908)

From 1899 to 1903, Bartók studied piano  and composition  at the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest. There he met Zoltán Kodály, who influenced him greatly and became his lifelong friend and colleague. The music of Richard Strauss, whom he met in 1902 at the Budapest premiere of Also sprach Zarathustra,strongly influenced his early work.

From 1907, he also began to be influenced by the French composer Claude Debussy, whose compositions Kodály had brought back from Paris. Bartók’s large-scale orchestral works were still in the style of Johannes Brahms and Richard Strauss, but he wrote a number of small piano pieces which showed his growing interest in folk music.

In 1907, Bartók began teaching as a piano professor at the Royal Academy. Fritz Reiner, Sir Georg Solti, György Sándor, Ernő Balogh, and Lili Kraus  were among his notable students.

In  the summer of 1904  Bartók overheard a young nanny, Lidi Dósa from Kibéd in Transylvania, sing folk songs to the children in her care. This sparked his lifelong dedication to folk music.  The first piece to show clear signs of this new interest is the String Quartet No. 1 in A minor (1908), which contains folk-like elements.  In 1908, Bartok and another Hungarian composer, Kodály,  traveled into the countryside to collect and research old Magyar folk melodies. Their growing interest in folk music coincided with a contemporary social interest in traditional national culture.  Bartók and Kodály discovered that the old Magyar folk melodies were based on pentatonic scales, similar to those in Asian folk traditions, such as those of Central Asia, Anatolia and Siberia.

Both Bartók and Kodály quickly set  incorporating elements of such Magyar peasant music into their compositions. They both frequently quoted folk song melodies verbatim and wrote pieces derived entirely from authentic songs. Bartók’s style in his art music compositions was a synthesis of folk music, classicism, and modernism. His melodic and harmonic sense was profoundly influenced by the folk music of Hungary, Romania, and other nations. He was especially fond of the asymmetrical dance rhythms and pungent harmonies found in Bulgarian music. Most of his early compositions offer a blend of nationalist and late Romanticism elements.

Middle Years and Career (1909–39)

Figure 2. Béla Bartók using a gramophone to record folk songs sung by peasants in what is now Slovakia.In 1911, Bartók wrote what was to be his only opera, Bluebeard’s Castle, dedicated to his first wife  Márta.  For the next two or three years  Bartók wrote little, preferring to concentrate on collecting and arranging folk music.  The outbreak of World War I forced him to stop the folk music  research expeditions. He returned to composing, writing the ballet The Wooden Prince (1914–16) and the String Quartet No. 2 in (1915–17), both influenced by Debussy.

Another ballet, The Miraculous Mandarin  was influenced by Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, as well as Richard Strauss. A modern story of prostitution, robbery, and murder, it was started in 1918, but not performed until 1926 because of its sexual content. He next wrote his two violin sonatas (written in 1921 and 1922 respectively), which are harmonically and structurally some of his most complex pieces.

In 1927–28, Bartók wrote his Third and Fourth String Quartets, after which his compositions demonstrated his mature style. Notable examples of this period are Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936) and Divertimento for String Orchestra BB 118 (1939). The Fifth String Quartet was composed in 1934, and the Sixth String Quartet (his last) in 1939.

In 1936 he traveled to Turkey to collect and study folk music. He worked in collaboration with Turkish composer Ahmet Adnan Saygun mostly around Adana.

World War II and the  Years in America (1940–45)

In 1940, as the European political situation worsened after the outbreak of World War II, Bartók was  was strongly opposed to the Nazis and Hungary’s siding with Germany. In the early 1930s, Bartók refused to give concerts in Germany and broke away from his publisher there. His anti-fascist political views caused him a great deal of trouble with the establishment in Hungary. Having first sent his manuscripts out of the country, Bartók reluctantly emigrated to the U.S. in October 1940. They settled in New York City.

Bartók never became fully at home in the USA. He initially found it difficult to compose. Although well known in America as a pianist, ethnomusicologist and teacher, he was not well known as a composer.

The first symptoms of his health problems began late in 1940. In 1942, symptoms increased and he started having bouts of fever, but no underlying disease was diagnosed. Finally, in April 1944, leukemia was diagnosed, but by this time, little could be done.

As his body slowly failed, Bartók found more creative energy, and he produced a final set of masterpieces, partly thanks to the violinist Joseph Szigeti and the conductor Fritz Reiner who had been Bartók’s friend and champion since his days as Bartók’s student at the Royal Academy.

Bartok’s last work

Bartók’s last work might well have been the String Quartet No. 6 but for Serge Koussevitzky’s commission for the Concerto for Orchestra. Koussevitsky’s Boston Symphony Orchestra premièred the work in December 1944 to highly positive reviews. The Concerto for Orchestra quickly became Bartók’s most popular work.

Béla Bartók died at age 64 on September 26, 1945. His funeral was attended by only ten people. Among them were his wife Ditta, their son Péter, and his pianist friend György Sándor.

Musical Analysis

Although Bartók claimed in his writings that his music was always tonal, he rarely uses the chords or scales of tonality, and so the descriptive resources of tonal theory are of limited use.  Ernő Lendvai (1971) analyses Bartók’s works as being based on two opposing tonal systems, that of the acoustic scale and the axis system, as well as using the golden section as a structural principle.

Concerto for Orchestra Video sound files. The following are  videos of the Concerto For Orchestra  plus separate movements  II, IV, and V  of Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra.  The listener can hear the first movement in this first video – then hear some of the movements separately  without listening and finding separate movements in the entire work.

Bela Bartok  Concerto for orchestra – I. Introduzione ( 1 / 5 )

Bartók Béla : concerto for orchestra – II. Giuoco delle coppie  – Game of Couples( 2 / 5 ). Note that two instruments are playing  the melody starting with the bassoons at 0:14. Listen carefully and note which instruments follow at 0:36, 1:04, and 1:25

Bartok Bela – Concerto for Orchestra –  III  Elegia

Bartok Bela –  Concerto for Orchestra – IV Intermezzo (Listen to the  lyrical interrotto section at 1:02.  In this passage from the Intermezzo the timpanist plays a chromatic bass line, which requires using the pedal to change pitches.)

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Bartók Béla : Concerto for Orchestra – V. Finale ( 5 / 5 )

The Concerto for Orchestra is his one of his best-known works, though in it he adopts a style that is less dissonant and modern than he had been known for in previous works. Please listen to the discussion of the piece at this NPR site. The two commentators spend a good deal of time talking about thIS movement we have on our playlist, the fourth movement titled “Interrupted Intermezzo.” One claim made in the audio discussion is that Bartok is parodying a piece by another one of our composers, Shostakovich. As you can see from the wikipedia article on the piece, that view is not universally held.