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Bela Bartok - A brief look at his life and work

"Many people think it is a comparatively easy task to write a composition on found folk tunes...This way of thinking is completely erroneous. To handle folk tunes is one of the most difficult tasks; equally difficult, if not more so, than to write a major original composition. If we keep in mind that borrowing a tune means being bound by its individual peculiarity, we shall understand one part of the difficulty. Another is created by the special character of folk tune. We must penetrate it, feel it, and bring out its sharp contours by the appropriate setting...It must be a work of inspiration just as much as any other composition." Belá Bartók

Belá Bartók was born in an ethnically diverse region of Hungary called Nagyszentmiklós (Great St Nicholas), in the district of Torontál, (now Sînnicolau Mare, Romania) on the 25th March 1881. Mrs. Bartók was a musician and teacher and she gave Belá his first piano lessons. A smallpox inoculation gave the infant Belá a rash that persisted until he was five years old. Because of this he spent his early years at home away from other children, often listening to his mother playing the piano. Belá showed an earl interest in music—

Belá also had a precocious musical ability and he was composing dances at the age of nine. His father Belá senior, the headmaster of an agricultural school, had a wide range of cultural pursuits. His main interest however was music and he was a leading light in the Nagyszentmiklós Music Society. He even learned to play the cello so that he could be in the orchestra. Belá senior died in 1888 when young Belá was only nine years old, leaving his wife Paula to bring up the family.

Soon after her husbands death Paula found a teaching job at a school in Nagyzöllös (now in Czechoslovakia) and they remained there for three years. During these three years Belá’s musical development began to take shape, he composed short piano pieces, which attracted the attention of local musicians. Mrs. Bartók, sensibly wanted Belá to have a normal, all round education and sent him to stay with her sister Emma in Nagyvárád where he was sent to school. He returned to Nagyzöllös about a year later. Mrs. Bartók managed to secure a years paid leave from her teaching post and took the opportunity to go to Pozsony (now Bratislova), a much more fashionable and cultured town, to find a better job for herself and a better education for her children. She did not find a job on this occasion. After a couple more relocations, in 1894, her luck changed, and she found a job in the teacher training college in Pozsony. The family settled in Pozsony for five years: these years were a time of consolidation and refection for the Bartók family. The trauma of Belá senior’s death was finally laid to rest and they began to feel at home again at last. Belá began to mature both physically and musically, and as his schooldays drew to a close there was little doubt that the rest of his life lay in music.

In 1894, the family moved to Bratislava, where Belá attended the Gymnasium where Ernö Dohnányi 1877-1960 was an elder pupil at the time. Here he studied the piano with Laszlo Erkle and Anton Hyrtl and he composed some sonatas and quartets. Bartók did so well that he was offered a scholarship to the Vienna Conservatory, but he turned it down and instead followed Ernö Dohnányi to the Budapest Academy where he attended from 1889-1903. Here he studied piano with Istvan Thoman (a pupil of Franz Liszt), and composition with Janos Koessler. In 1902 he had a life changing experience; in his autobiography, Selbstbiographic, he wrote: —

In 1903 under the influence of Richard Strauss, he wrote his first major work a symphonic poem called Kossuth, honouring Lajos Kossuth, hero of the Hungarian revolution of 1848 although this piece was greatly influenced by Richard Strauss it also had Hungarian motifs influenced by Liszt.

1904 was a momentous year for Bartók: It was around this time that he began to make a career playing, and composing for, the piano, writing a piano quintet and two outstanding Listian pieces (Rhapsody op.1 and Scherzo op.2). In the same year while staying in Gerlice Puszta, he overheard Lidi Dósa, a Hungarian servant girl from Székely, sing the song Piros alma (Red Apple). He was spellbound and asked her if she knew any other songs: from that moment on Bartók became gripped with folk song. It was also in 1904 that his famous collaboration with Zoltán Kodály, collecting authentic Hungarian folk music began. The work of Kodály and Bartók was to continue for two decades. Even though they were students there at the same time, Bartók and Kodály never actually met at the Academy of Music. They met at the home of Mrs. Emma Gruber, an Intellectual, brilliant piano play, and very talented composer. She was the wife of Herik Gruber a local businessman and amateur violinist, Mrs. Gruber would arrange musical evenings in her flat which would be attended by all the leading musicians, together with their protégés: Kodály and Bartók were both invited to these evenings, and it was here that they met for the first time becoming firm friends from the start. The collaboration of these two men was to create an entirely new branch of science and shape the future of Hungarian musical culture.

Kodály had already begun to collect recordings of Hungarian folk music using an Edison cylinder. Unlike Kodály though, Bartók also became interested in other folk traditions, he studied the folk music of the Romanians, Slovakians, Serbians, Croatians, Bulgarians, Turks, and North Africans as well as Hungarians. The next year 1905 he was appointed Thoman’s successor as piano teacher at the Budapest academy and this gave him the freedom to continue his folksong collecting, mainly in Transylvania.

Later during a visit to Algeria he had the inspiration that he might begin the process of bringing together, collating and organising the folk tunes of the world before they were lost forever. This as he recalled, ended any desire on his part for the kind of career others had projected for him. After this the main activity of his life was to collect, examine and catalogue as much of the world’s folk music as he could.

In 1907 the first fruit of the Bartók/Kodály collaboration was published. They edited a collection of folk songs, containing specimens of true Hungarian melodies arranged for voice and piano, for the purpose of drawing attention to the public of the importance of their project. At the same time this appeal to the Hungarian people was published and circulated.

The circular was addressed first and foremost to the people that had an interest in the project and were willing to put a little money into it. It is not known how many were circulated but it is thought that the two men launched a ferocious campaign among their acquaintances and those that they thought might be interested. The appeal was not a great success sales were slow and unpromising. According to a postscript found on the last page of a copy of the second edition,

For two years from 1912-1914 Bartók practically gave up composition and devoted his time to collecting, arranging and studying folk music, until WWI put an end to his expeditions. Even though it was a German (Richard Strauss) that awoke a musical freedom in him, Bartók had an aversion to Teutonic influences and he fiercely resented the Hapsburg domination of Hungary; he even refused to speak German, unless it was absolutely necessary. The reason for this aversion is plain—

During the period between the two world wars both he and Kodály, for political reasons, were temporarily suspended from their Academy posts.

Bartok's multi-ethnic fascination brought about problems for him, particularly after World War I when Slovakia and Romania were no longer a part of Hungary. Areas that he had previously been free to travel around, and to do his research in, were no longer open to him. What is more, he was the subject of a good deal of criticism for his “unpatriotic" interest in nations hostile to Hungary. Bartók grew to be very nostalgic for the cultural diversity of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire and he dreamed of the "brotherhood of people, brotherhood in spite of all wars and conflicts."

In 1923 Bartók and his first wife Márta were divorced, and he immediately married one of his piano students, Ditta Pásztory. They had a son, Péter, born in 1924. For Péter’s music lessons Bartók began composing a six-volume collection of graded piano pieces, Mikrokosmos.

In the 1930s Bartók refused to perform or to have his works broadcast in Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy, even though he lost a huge amount of performance fees, and in 1931 the Reich Music Chamber demanded an investigation of the 'Aryanism' of Bartók. That same year he went to the French Embassy to accept the Légion d'honneur, but when awarded the Corvin Medal, also in 1931, he stayed away from the award ceremony because he would have had to accept it from the hand of Hungary's dictator, Admiral Horthy.
When Austria was seized, the AKM (Authors, Composers, and Publishers), which collected performance fees, was taken over by the Nazis; composers, including Bartók and Kodály were asked to fill out a questionnaire about their ancestry and allegiance, asking, "are you of German blood, related race, or non Aryan". Neither Bartók nor Kodály filled out the form.

In 1940 Bartók and his second wife with sadness left war torn Europe and set up home in New York USA where he held university appointments at Columbia and Harvard. Here he was given a research grant to work on a collection of Yugoslavian folksong. In New York they kept themselves living a quiet and modest lifestyle. 

By 1943 Belá had contracted Leukaemia and with his health failing and his finances somewhat uncertain the American Society for Composers, Authors and Publishers paid his medical expenses and helped him to get the best treatment. To ease Bartók's financial burden the conductor Fritz Reiner and violinist József Szigeti persuaded Serge Koussevitzky, the conductor to have as his foundation commission an orchestral piece to be written by Bartók. The result was the Concerto for Orchestra in 1943, which has endured as Bartók’s most popular piece.

In 1944 he wrote one of his last pieces the Sonata for solo violin for Yehudi Menuhin. 
Bartók died of Leukaemia in West Side Hospital, New York in 1945 with his wife Ditta and his son Péter each holding one of his hands. He was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in New York. In 1988 Belá Bartók, Junior, by now a lay president of the Hungarian Unitarian Church, was able to have his father's remains transferred to Budapest. A statue of Bartók stands in front of the second Unitarian church in Budapest

End

Notes:
(i) Stevens, H. The life and Times of Belá Bartók, 1964 (revised edition) Oxford University Press, New York
(ii) This is taken from the text of a lecture given by Dr. Vikár given at the Twelfth International Kodály Symposium in Assisi, Italy in August 1995. László Vikár, a distinguished ethnomusicologist himself, was a student of Kodály's in the 1950s and subsequently served for many years as Kodály's research assistant. He is the former head of the Folk Music Research Group of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
(iii) From, Hungarian Folksongs (For Song and Piano) by Béla Bartók – Zoltán Kodály, © Edito Musica Budapest, 1970 reprint Translated by Nancy Bush and Ilona Lukács, with commentaries by Denijs Dille, Bodsey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd. London
(iv) Stevens, H. The life and Times of Belá Bartók, 1964 (revised edition) Oxford University Press, New York 85

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About the author: Terry Herbert - freelance writer and researcher. From the mid 1960s until the 90s worked as a Research Librarian for the Daily Express and then at the Press Association both in Fleet Street, London. Now semi-retired he is a freelance writer.