Born in Hungary in 1881, Bela Bartok

Bela Bartok was one of the most important composers of the twentieth century, a Hungarian composer, pianist, and ethnomusicologist whose innovative fusion of folk music and art music opened new horizons in Western music.

Born in 1881 in Nagyszentmiklos in the Banat region of Austria-Hungary (now Sannicolau Mare, Romania), his father, a director of an agricultural school, died when Bartok was seven. Raised by his mother, he showed prodigious talent, able to play forty pieces on the piano by age four.

At the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest, he studied piano under Istvan Thoman, a former student of Liszt, and composition under Janos Koessler. There he met Zoltan Kodaly, who became a lifelong friend and collaborator. In 1904, overhearing a Transylvanian nanny singing folk songs became the catalyst for his lifelong dedication to folk music.

With Kodaly, Bartok traveled through the villages of Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Turkey, and North Africa, recording thousands of folk songs on phonograph cylinders. This pioneering work in comparative musicology laid the foundations for the discipline that became ethnomusicology. He transmuted the modes and rhythms of collected folk music into high art, forging a modernist path distinct from Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique.

Major works include the opera Bluebeard's Castle, the ballet The Miraculous Mandarin, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, six string quartets, the Concerto for Orchestra, and the pedagogical piano collection Mikrokosmos.

Repelled by the rise of fascism, he emigrated to the United States in 1940. Despite financial hardship and declining health, he produced late masterpieces including the Concerto for Orchestra and the Third Piano Concerto. He died of leukemia in New York on September 26, 1945, at sixty-four.