Béla Bartók
Béla Bartók (1881-1945) was an innovative Hungarian pianist and composer most famous for his classical works for piano and orchestra, string quartets, and songs, many of which present traditional Hungarian and other European folk themes. Bartók, a prodigious scholar and collector of folk songs, is widely considered one of the greatest musicians Hungary has ever produced.
Early Life
Béla Bartók was born on 25 March 1881 in Nagyszentmiklós (now called Sânnicolau Mare), then located in the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (but today located in Romania). Béla's father was a teacher in the local agricultural college, and his mother was a piano teacher. Béla's father died when he was seven years old, and so mother and son moved to Pressburg (called Pozsony by the Hungarians), today's Bratislava in the Slovak Republic. Béla's mother taught him to play the piano from the age of five. He showed a rare talent and was already performing in public by the age of eleven; he had started composing his own pieces even earlier, at the age of nine.
Béla turned down a free scholarship to study at the music academy in Vienna and instead decided to attend the Royal Hungarian Academy of Music in Budapest from 1898. Bartók graduated in 1903. First earning a living as a concert pianist, from 1907, Bartók worked as a piano professor at the Academy. Although the post gave Bartók some financial stability, it was not quite what he had hoped for; he remarked that he was, in truth, "a reluctant teacher and would have preferred a research post" (Steen, 722). Bartók continued to compose, with early influences coming from the works of Franz Liszt (1811-1886), Johannes Brahms (1833-1897), Richard Strauss (1864-1949) – particularly his symphonic poem Also sprach Zarathustra –, and Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971).
Bartók's character and drive is here summarised by the music historian H. C. Schonberg:
Bartók was a tiny, frail man with explosive psychic force, prepared to go his own uncompromising way even if his music was never played. A stubborn integrity and an all-encompassing humanism animated the man, and he would not swerve from his ideal of truth.
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Béla Bartók, 1903
Unknown Photographer (Public Domain)
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