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Béla Bartók

Hungarian composer and pianist

The Hungarian composer and pianist Béla Bartók was born in Nagyszentmiklós (now Romania) on March 25, 1881. He died of leukemia in New York on September 26, 1945.
Bartók received his first musical lessons from his mother, who was a proficient pianist. At the age of eleven he played piano in public for the first time. In 1894 the family moved to Pressburg (now Bratislawa), where Béla took piano lessons with László Erkel. He also studied harmony with Anton Hyrtl. In 1899 Bartók entered the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest. In 1903 Bartók graduated.

Exhausting European tours

Bartók embarked on exhausting European tours, playing work that displayed the strong influences of German composer Richard Strauss and the Hungarian Fransz Liszt.
The composer was deeply engaged with Hungarian folk music. With his friend, Zoltan Kodály, Bartók published a collection of Hungarian folk songs.

Piano

He was appointed as a professor of the piano at the Budapest Academy of Music in 1907. Bartók would hold this position until 1934. In 1911 he formed the New Hungarian Musical Society.
In the late 1920s Bartók toured through the United States of America and Russia.

Compositions

In his own compositions he soon began to feel the fascination of tonal colors and impressionistic harmonies like the French composer Debussy. He made use of strong asymmetrical rhythmic figures suggesting the modalities of Slavic folk music, but Bartók rarely incorporated folk songs into his compositions.

United States

After the outbreak of the Second World War Bartók left Europe and moved to the United States, where he remained until his death in 1945.
Among his most famous work is "Mikrokosmos" (1935). This work consists of 150 progressively graded piano pieces. "Duke Bluebeard's Castle" (1911), "Rumanian Dances from Hungary" (1915) and "Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta" (1937) are other important compositions.