Béla Bartók
Béla Viktor János Bartók was a Hungarian composer, pianist and ethnomusicologist. He is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century; he and Franz Liszt are regarded as Hungary's greatest composers. Among his notable works are the opera Bluebeard's Castle, the ballet The Miraculous Mandarin, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, the Concerto for Orchestra and six string quartets. Through his collection and analytical study of folk music, he was one of the founders of comparative musicology, which later became known as ethnomusicology. Per Anthony Tommasini, Bartók "has empowered generations of subsequent composers to incorporate folk music and classical traditions from whatever culture into their works and was "a formidable modernist who in the face of Schoenberg’s breathtaking formulations showed another way, forging a language that was an amalgam of tonality, unorthodox scales and atonal wanderings."
Biography
Childhood and early years (1881–1898)
Bartók was born in the Banatian town of Nagyszentmiklós in the Kingdom of Hungary on 25 March 1881. On his father's side, the Bartók family was a Hungarian lower noble family, originating from Borsodszirák, Borsod. His paternal grandmother was a Catholic of Bunjevci origin, but considered herself Hungarian. Bartók's father was also named. Bartók's mother, , spoke Hungarian fluently. A native of Turócszentmárton, she had German, Hungarian and Slovak or Polish ancestry.Béla displayed notable musical talent very early in life. According to his mother, he could distinguish between different dance rhythms that she played on the piano before he learned to speak in complete sentences. By the age of four he was able to play 40 pieces on the piano, and his mother began formally teaching him the next year.
In 1888, when he was seven, his father, the director of an agricultural school, died suddenly. His mother then took Béla and his sister, Erzsébet, to live in Nagyszőlős and then in Pressburg. Béla gave his first public recital aged 11 in Nagyszőlős, to positive critical reception. Among the pieces he played was his own first composition, written two years previously: a short piece called "The Course of the Danube". Shortly thereafter, accepted him as a pupil.
Early musical career (1899–1908)
From 1899 to 1903, Bartók studied piano under István Thomán, a former student of Franz Liszt, and composition under János Koessler at the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest. There he met Zoltán Kodály, who made a strong impression on him and became a lifelong friend and colleague. In 1903, Bartók wrote his first major orchestral work, Kossuth, a symphonic poem that honored Lajos Kossuth, hero of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848.The music of Richard Strauss, whom he met in 1902 at the Budapest premiere of Also sprach Zarathustra, strongly influenced his early work. When visiting a holiday resort in the summer of 1904, Bartók overheard a young nanny, Lidi Dósa from Kibéd in Transylvania, sing folk songs to the children in her care. This sparked his lifelong dedication to folk music.
Beginning in 1907, he came under the influence of French composer Claude Debussy, whose compositions Kodály had brought back from Paris. Bartók's large-scale orchestral works were still in the style of Johannes Brahms and Richard Strauss, but he wrote a number of small piano pieces which showed his growing interest in folk music. The first piece to show clear signs of this new interest is the String Quartet No. 1 in A minor, which contains folk-like elements. He began teaching as a piano professor at the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest. This position freed him from touring Europe as a pianist. Among his notable students were Fritz Reiner, Sir Georg Solti, György Sándor, Ernő Balogh, Gisela Selden-Goth, and Lili Kraus. After Bartók moved to the United States, he taught Jack Beeson and Violet Archer.
In 1908, Bartok and Kodály traveled into the countryside to collect and research old Magyar folk melodies. Their growing interest in folk music coincided with a contemporary social interest in traditional national culture. Magyar folk music had previously been categorised as Gypsy music. The classic example is Franz Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies for piano, which he based on popular art songs performed by Romani bands of the time. In contrast, Bartók and Kodály discovered that the old Magyar folk melodies were based on pentatonic scales, similar to those in Asian folk traditions, such as those of Central Asia, Anatolia and Siberia.
Bartók and Kodály set about incorporating elements of such Magyar peasant music into their compositions. They both frequently quoted folk song melodies verbatim and wrote pieces derived entirely from authentic songs. An example is Bartok's two volumes entitled For Children for solo piano, containing 80 folk tunes to which he wrote accompaniment. Bartók's style in his art music compositions was a synthesis of folk music, classicism, and modernism. His melodic and harmonic sense was influenced by the folk music of Hungary, Romania, and other nations. He was especially fond of the asymmetrical dance rhythms and pungent harmonies found in Bulgarian music. Most of his early compositions offer a blend of nationalist and late Romantic elements.
Middle years and career (1909–1939)
Personal life
In 1909, at the age of 28, Bartók married Márta Ziegler, aged 16. Their son,, was born the next year. After nearly 15 years together, Bartók divorced Márta in June 1923. Two months after his divorce, he married Ditta Pásztory, a piano student, ten days after proposing to her. She was aged 19, he 42. Their son,, was born in 1924.Raised as a Catholic, by his early adulthood Bartók had become an atheist. He later became attracted to Unitarianism and publicly converted to the Unitarian faith in 1916. Although Bartók was not conventionally religious, according to his son Béla Bartók III, "he was a nature lover: he always mentioned the miraculous order of nature with great reverence". He had a large collection of insects, one of his main interests outside music. As an adult, Béla III later became lay president of the Hungarian Unitarian Church.
Opera
In 1911, Bartók wrote what was to be his only opera, Bluebeard's Castle, dedicated to Márta. In creating Bluebeard's Castle, Bartók uses symbolism to show parallels between unconscious motivation and fate. The opera in showing fate has a strong interaction between the characters and gives the idea that people are not able to control what the outcome will be. He entered it for a prize by the Hungarian Fine Arts Commission, but they rejected his work as not fit for the stage. In 1917 Bartók revised the score for the 1918 première and rewrote the ending. Following the 1919 revolution, in which he actively participated, he was pressured by the Horthy regime to remove the name of librettist Béla Balázs from the opera, as Balázs was of Jewish origin, was blacklisted, and had left the country for Vienna. Bluebeard's Castle received only one revival, in 1936, before Bartók emigrated. For the remainder of his life, although devoted to Hungary, its people and its culture, he never felt much loyalty to the government or its official establishments.File:Bartok recording folk music.jpg|thumb|upright=1.3|Béla Bartók using a phonograph to record Slovak folk songs sung by peasants in Zobordarázs |leftFolk music and composition
After his disappointment over the Fine Arts Commission competition, Bartók wrote little for two or three years, preferring to concentrate on collecting and arranging folk music. Bartók undertook this task with great skill and persistence; later, the folk music scholar Charles Seeger would describe him as "one of the greatest field collectors of the first half of the 20th century." Bartók found the phonograph an essential tool for collecting folk music for its accuracy, objectivity, and manipulability. He collected first in the Carpathian Basin, where he notated Hungarian, Slovak, Romanian, and Bulgarian folk music. The developmental breakthrough for Bartok arrived when he collaboratively collected folk music with Zoltán Kodály through the medium of a phonomotor, on which they studied classification possibilities and recorded hundreds of cylinders. Bartok's compositional command of folk elements is expressed in such an authentic and undiluted a manner because of the scales, sounds, and rhythms that were so much a part of his native Hungary that he automatically saw music in these terms. He also collected in Moldavia, Wallachia, and Algeria. The outbreak of World War I forced him to stop the expeditions, but he returned to composing with a ballet called The Wooden Prince and the String Quartet No. 2 in, both influenced by Debussy.Bartók's score for The Miraculous Mandarin, another ballet, was influenced by Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg and Richard Strauss. Though started in 1918, the story's sexual content kept it from being performed until 1926. He next wrote his two violin sonatas, which are among his most harmonically and structurally complex pieces.
In March 1927, he visited Barcelona and performed the Rhapsody for piano Sz. 26 with the Orquestra Pau Casals at the Gran Teatre del Liceu. During the same stay, he attended a concert by the at the Palau de la Música Catalana. According to the critic, "he was very interested in the sardanas, above all, the freshness, spontaneity and life of our music he wanted to know the mechanism of the tenoras and the tibles, and requested data on the composition of the cobla and extension and characteristics of each instrument".
In 1927–1928, Bartók wrote his Third and Fourth String Quartets, after which his compositions demonstrated his mature style. Notable examples of this period are Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta and Divertimento for String Orchestra. The Fifth String Quartet was composed in 1934, and the Sixth String Quartet in 1939. In 1936 he travelled to Turkey to collect and study Turkish folk music. He worked in collaboration with Turkish composer Ahmet Adnan Saygun mostly around Adana.