Bela Bartok

Béla Bartók was a Hungarian composer, pianist, and ethnomusicologist whose music drew together the folk traditions of central and eastern Europe with the experimental techniques of twentieth-century modernism. He was born in 1881 in Nagyszentmiklós, then in the Kingdom of Hungary and now Sânnicolau Mare in Romania.

He studied piano and composition at the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest, where he later joined the faculty. From around 1905, with his friend Zoltán Kodály, he traveled through Hungarian, Romanian, Slovak, Bulgarian, Turkish, and North African villages with a phonograph, recording thousands of peasant melodies. The collection became the foundation of his scholarly work and a constant source for his compositions.

Among his most performed works are the six string quartets, the opera Bluebeard's Castle, the ballet The Miraculous Mandarin, the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, and the Concerto for Orchestra. He also wrote three piano concertos and a substantial body of pedagogical pieces, including the six-volume Mikrokosmos, which guides pianists from beginner exercises to demanding modern textures.

Opposed to fascism, he refused to give concerts in Nazi Germany and Italy, and after the German occupation of Austria he emigrated to the United States in 1940. He worked at Columbia University on Yugoslav folk material and died of leukemia in New York City in 1945.

The name Béla is a traditional Hungarian masculine name borne by several medieval kings of Hungary. He carried that royal Hungarian name across the boundaries of European folk traditions and into the concert halls of two continents.