Bela Bartok was a composer, pianist and musicologist. He was so devoted to his studies and artistic pursuits that he stated, “If I would cross myself I would say ‘in the name of Nature, Art and Science.’” His compositions had both a nationalistic fervor and an adventurous spirit, pushing the boundaries of music in the 20th century.
Bartok was born in Hungary, in an area which is now part of Romania. Both of his parents were amateur musicians. Bartok was seven when his father passed away and his mother was forced to support the family by giving piano lessons. She was Bela’s first teacher and it didn’t take long to see that he was especially gifted. He began to compose his own original works and made his first public performance at the age of 11. The next few years saw the family on the edge of poverty as they moved from one town to another.
Although Bartok was accepted into the Vienna Conservatory, he took his friend Ernst von Dohnanyi’s advice and attended the Budapest Academy of Music. There his professors took him under their wings, and provided scores and musical experiences that his mother couldn’t. Despite sickness, Bela graduated in 1903. The Academy believed that he had a future as a pianist first and a composer second.
After schooling, Bartok became enamored with Hungarian folk music. He reached out to Zoltan Kodaly, who was already a well-renowned researcher and the two became lifelong collaborators. Bela began to travel extensively collecting folk songs from various regions and countries. He published volumes on the development of the Hungarian and Slavic folk traditions. All of these studies began to influence his compositions. However, his publishers were more interested in his researched editions of the works of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven then his original works.
This changed in the 1920s when he finally established an international reputation as a composer and toured Europe and the United States. In the next decade he took a stand against the rise of Fascism in Europe and faced attack from the press in Hungary and Romania. In light of this, he left his homeland and went back to the U.S. He lived in New York City and later in Saranac Lake, New York. He lectured at Harvard and worked on the Parry collection of Yugoslav folk music.
When the United States entered World War II, Bartok saw all connections with his homeland severed. He felt a deep longing to go home, but that wouldn’t happen. Bela’s health took a turn for the worse in the fall of 1945 and he died at the West Side Hospital in New York. Even in death, Bartok believed he had much more of offer. He made a statement to one of his doctors, “I am only sorry that I have to leave with my baggage full”.
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