Bela Bartok, a great Hungarian composer

Bela Bartok was born on 25^th March 1881 in the village of Nagyszentmiklos in Hungary. However, the upheavals caused by wars and other events in Central Europe in the intervening years mean that this village, and several other places associated with Bartok, are no longer in Hungary. His birth village is now in Romania and named Sannicolaul-Mare.

Bartok’s father was the director of an agricultural college and a talented amateur pianist, although he died when Bela was only seven. Along with his younger sister, Bela spent his early life moving from place to place as his mother tried to find permanent work as a teacher. His health was poor, and childhood illnesses stunted his growth and prevented him from mixing with people of his own age.

Bela showed early musical ability and he began composing at the age of nine. He gave his first concert as a pianist when aged ten.

He entered the Budapest Music Academy in 1898 but ill health forced him to interrupt his studies three times and he gave up composing until 1902, when he discovered the music of Richard Strauss which inspired him to produce a flood of new pieces, including the “Kossuth” Symphony.

In 1904 he first became seriously aware of Hungarian folk music, and he began to tour the region armed with recording equipment with which he collected hundreds of examples of songs and music sung and played by peasant people. His trips eventually took him as far as North Africa and Turkey. As well as making an extremely valuable collection of recordings from the ethnographic point of view, this music influenced everything he was to write from 1908 onwards.

In 1907 Bartok began teaching at the Budapest Academy and he continued to do so until 1934. However, he only taught piano and refused to teach composition, preferring not to share his increasingly experimental techniques. Having moved away from his “Straussian” period he was now producing works that were not so easily understood by his audiences and he faced growing opposition. Works from this period included his opera “Duke Bluebeard’s Castle”, the ballet “The Miraculous Mandarin” and a lot of piano music.

By the early 1920s the future was looking more promising for new styles of music, and in 1922 he made a prominent contribution to an international festival of modern music at Salzburg. He toured widely as a concert pianist and composed new works for performance, including piano concertos and solo piano works such as the “Improvisations”. He also wrote pieces that did not involve the piano, notably a series of highly regarded string quartets. He made his first visit to the United States in 1927.

The 1930s were a difficult period for Bartok as he watched the rise of the Nazis and deplored the support they received from the government of Hungary. As a protest he refused to give concerts in Germany. However, this did not prevent him from producing some of his greatest works, including the fourth and fifth string quartets, the “Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta” and the “Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion”.

With the outbreak of war in 1939, and the death of his mother, Bartok reluctantly decided to make a fresh start and emigrated with his family to the United States, settling in New York where he spent the rest of his life. He never really took to life in the States, where he was celebrated as a performer but less well received as a composer.

He had a late flowering with three major works between 1943 and 1945, namely the “Concerto for Orchestra”, a sonata for solo violin and his third piano concerto. However, by this time his health was failing, from undiagnosed leukaemia, and he died in New York on 26^th September 1945 at the age of 64.

Bela Bartok is one of the greats of 20^th century music, having a truly original style that owed little to earlier traditions except those of folk music. The music of his maturity combined passion with constructions that were highly intellectual. Some of his works strained tonality to the limit, but he never gave way to complete atonality, nor did he dabble with Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method. Even today much of his music is an acquired taste but, once acquired, it is extremely rewarding.

In his personal life Bartok was quiet and introverted, the passionate side of his nature only being revealed at the keyboard. He was awkward in company and preferred that of women to men. He was twice married, both times to pupils who were much younger than himself.

© John Welford