Bartók

Béla Viktor János Bartók (25 March 1881 – 26 September 1945) was a Hungarian composer and pianist who is widely regarded as one of the most important figures in 20th-century music. Born in Nagyszentmiklós, then part of Austria-Hungary (now Sânnicolau Mare in Romania), he studied at the Budapest Academy of Music and developed a career that combined strong artistic innovation with a deep interest in folk music.

From the early 1900s, Bartók traveled through Hungary, Transylvania, and neighboring regions to collect and study traditional folk songs. Working with Zoltán Kodály and other colleagues, he helped establish ethnomusicology as a discipline and integrated these folk elements—melody, rhythm, and modality—into a modern musical language. His approach often employed cyclic forms that linked movements and a synthesis of folk idioms with contemporary harmonic and rhythmic techniques.

Bartók’s major works span opera, orchestral, chamber, and piano literature. Notable pieces include Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta; the piano collection Mikrokosmos; the Six Romanian Folk Dances; the cantata Cantata Profana; the string quartets; and the orchestral Concerto for Orchestra, one of his best-known works. His music is characterized by rhythmic complexity, inventive timbres, and a persistent dialogue between folk traditions and modernist ideas.

In 1940, Bartók left Hungary for the United States and settled in New York City, where he continued to compose until his death from leukemia in 1945. His legacy endures in modern classical repertoire and in the field of ethnomusicology, influencing generations of composers, performers, and researchers.