The Hungarian composer Béla Bartók was the son of a director of the government agricultural school. His mother began giving him piano lessons at age five. When his father died in 1888, the family moved to Bratislava and he began formal music instruction.
Although he was accepted at the prestigious Vienna Conservatory, he opted instead to go to the Royal Academy in Budapest. While there, he befriended Zoltán Kodály, another important Hungarian composer. Both composers had a strong interest in creating a national music. To that end, they began collecting Hungarian folk music. This interest had an impact on Bartók’s compositional style.
After completing his training at the Royal Academy, Bartók began a series of concert tours. In 1907 he accepted a position as piano teacher at the Budapest Academy, a position he held for more than thirty years.
In the late 1930s, because of political unrest and the Nazis, he decided to leave Hungary and emigrated to the United States. He was given an appointment at Columbia University in New York. While there he developed leukemia. He died in 1945 at age sixty-four.
Most of Bartók’s music was instrumental or written for the stage. His melodic writing was highly influenced by Hungarian folk music, but he never really used folk tunes as themes. His music was also rhythmically charged, an influence of Hungarian dance music. He frequently used compositional devices such as fugue and canon as well as sonata form. In this sense, his music is neoclassical.
QUESTIONS AND TOPICS
1. Bartók became interested in Hungarian folk music as a young man. His interest in this music was shared by Kodály, who later developed a method of teaching children using native music, a method that has been adopted for American schoolchildren. Unlike Kodály’s, however, Bartók’s interest in folk music was almost universal. He studied many of the eastern European folk traditions as well as the folk music of Turkey and some of the North African cultures. He used Edison’s phonograph to record some of this music, which he would later transcribe. Today he could be described as an ethnomusicologist.
2. Like his countryman Kodály, Bartók also had an interest in teaching children. Because of his interest in teaching his son properly, he created some short, simple piano pieces. Soon this led to the creation of the Mikrokosmos. This six-volume collection of 153 works is arranged in order of difficulty.
3. In 1938, through the urging of a close friend, the violinist Joseph Szigeti, Bartók composed a chamber piece commissioned by the jazz clarinetist Benny Goodman. The piece, a three-movement piano trio called Contrasts, was performed and recorded by Goodman, Szigeti, and Bartók.
4. Bartók’s set of six string quartets is an important addition to the quartet repertoire. Although Brahms, Mendelssohn, Schonberg, and other nineteenth-century composers contributed to this genre, it can be argued that Bartók’s contribution was by far the most important since Beethoven’s.
FURTHER TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. How does the rhythmic vitality of Bartók’s music compare with that of Stravinsky’s music?
2. What are some of the folklike elements in Bartók’s music?