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Béla Bartók
Béla Viktor János Bartók (/ˈbeɪlə ˈbɑːrtɒk/; Hungarian:  [ˈbeːlɒ ˈbɒrtoːk];
25 March 1881 – 26 September 1945) was a Hungarian composer, pianist
and an ethnomusicologist. He is considered one of the most important
composers of the 20th century; he and Liszt are regarded as Hungary's
greatest composers (Gillies 2001). Through his collection and analytical
study of folk music, he was one of the founders of comparative musicology,
which later became ethnomusicology.

Contents Béla Bartók in 1927

Biography
Childhood and early years (1881–98)
Early musical career (1899–1908)
Middle years and career (1909–39)
Personal life
Opera
Folk music and composition
World War II and last years in America (1940–45)
Statues
Compositions
Youth: Late-Romanticism (1890–1902)
New influences (1903–11)
New inspiration and experimentation (1916–21)
"Synthesis of East and West" (1926–45)
Musical analysis
Catalogues and opus numbers
Discography
Media
References
Further reading
External links

Biography

Childhood and early years (1881–98)

Bartók was born in the small Banatian town of Nagyszentmiklós in the Kingdom of Hungary, Austria-Hungary (since
1920 Sânnicolau Mare, Romania) on 25 March 1881. Bartók had a diverse ancestry. On his father's side, the Bartók
family was a Hungarian lower noble family, originating from Borsodszirák, Borsod (Móser 2006a, 44).

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Although his paternal grandmother was from a Catholic Serbian family, Bartók's father, also named Béla, considered
himself to be an ethnic-born Hungarian. Béla Bartók's mother, Paula (née Voit), an ethnic German, spoke Hungarian
fluently (Hooker 2001, 16). She was a native of Turčiansky Svätý Martin (now Martin, Slovakia). Paula also had Magyar
(Teréz Fegyveres) and Slavic (Polereczky: Magyarized Slavic) ancestors.

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 (Gillies 1990, 6). 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.

Béla was a small and sickly child and suffered from severe eczema until the age of five.(Gillies 1990, 5) In 1888, when
he was seven, his father (the director of an agricultural school) died suddenly. His mother then took him and his sister,
Erzsébet, to live in Nagyszőlős (today Vinogradiv, Ukraine) and then to Pozsony (present-day Bratislava, Slovakia).

He gave his first public recital aged 11 in Nagyszőlős, to a warm critical reception (Griffiths 1988,). Among the pieces he
played was his own first composition, written two years previously: a short piece called "The Course of the Danube" (de
Toth 1999). Shortly thereafter László Erkel accepted him as a pupil (Stevens 1964, 8).

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 which 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.

From 1907, he also began to be influenced by the French composer Claude

Bartók's signature on his high-
school-graduation photograph,
dated 9 September 1899
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
(1908), which contains folk-like elements.

In 1907, Bartók began teaching as a piano professor at the Royal Academy. This position freed him from touring
Europe as a pianist and enabled him to work in Hungary. Among his notable students were Fritz Reiner, Sir Georg
Solti, György Sándor, Ernő Balogh, and Lili Kraus. After Bartók moved to the United States, he taught Jack Beeson and
Violet Archer.

In 1908, he 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. They made some
surprising discoveries. Magyar folk music had previously been categorised as Gypsy music. The classic example is
Franz Liszt's famous 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.

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Bartók and Kodály quickly 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 his 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 profoundly 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 Romanticism elements.

Middle years and career (1909–39)

Personal life
In 1909, at the age of 28, Bartók married Márta Ziegler (1893–1967), aged 16. Their son, Béla Bartók III, was born on
22 August 1910. After nearly 15 years together, Bartók divorced Márta in June 1923. Two months after his divorce, he
married Ditta Pásztory (1903–1982), a piano student, ten days after proposing to her. She was aged 19, he 42. Their
son, Péter, was born in 1924 (Vetter 2007, 22).

Opera
In 1911, Bartók wrote what was to be his only opera, Bluebeard's Castle, dedicated to Márta. He entered it for a prize by
the Hungarian Fine Arts Commission, but they rejected his work as not fit for the stage (Chalmers 1995, 93). 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 the librettist Béla Balázs from the
opera (Chalmers 1995, 123), as he 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 he was passionately devoted to
Hungary, its people and its culture, he never felt much loyalty to the government or its official establishments.

Folk 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. He collected first in the Carpathian
Basin (then the Kingdom of Hungary), where he notated Hungarian,
Slovak, Romanian, and Bulgarian folk music. He also collected in Moldavia,
Wallachia, and (in 1913) Algeria. The outbreak of World War I forced him
to stop the expeditions; and he returned to composing, writing the ballet
The  Wooden  Prince (1914–16) and the String Quartet No. 2 in (1915–17),
both influenced by Debussy.
Béla Bartók using a phonograph to
record folk songs sung by peasants
Raised as a Catholic, by his early adulthood Bartók had become an atheist.
in what is now Slovakia
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." As an adult, Béla III later became lay president of the Hungarian Unitarian Church (Hughes 1999–
2007).

Bartók wrote another ballet, The Miraculous Mandarin, influenced by Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, as well as
Richard Strauss. A modern story of prostitution, robbery, and murder, it was started in 1918, but not performed until
1926 because of its sexual content. He next wrote his two violin sonatas (written in 1921 and 1922 respectively), which
are harmonically and structurally some of his most complex pieces.

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In 1927–28, 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 (1936) and Divertimento for
String Orchestra (1939). The Fifth String Quartet was composed in 1934, and the Sixth String Quartet (his last) in
1939.

In 1936 he travelled to Turkey to collect and study folk music. He worked in collaboration with Turkish composer
Ahmet Adnan Saygun mostly around Adana (Özgentürk 2008; Sipos 2000).

World War II and last years in America (1940–45)

In 1940, as the European political situation worsened after the outbreak of World War II, Bartók was increasingly
tempted to flee Hungary. He was strongly opposed to the Nazis and Hungary's siding with Germany. After the Nazis
came to power in the early 1930s, Bartók refused to give concerts in Germany and broke away from his publisher there.
His anti-fascist political views caused him a great deal of trouble with the establishment in Hungary. Having first sent
his manuscripts out of the country, Bartók reluctantly emigrated to the U.S. with his wife Ditta in October that year.
They settled in New York City after arriving on the night of October 29–30, 1940 via a steamer from Lisbon. After
joining them in 1942, their son, Péter Bartók, enlisted in the United States Navy where he served in the Pacific during
the remainder of the war and later settled in Florida where he became a recording and sound engineer. His oldest son,
Béla Bartók III, remained in Hungary where he survived the war and later worked as a railroad official until his
retirement in the early 1980s.

Although he became an American citizen in 1945, shortly before his death (Gagné 2012, 28), Bartók never felt fully at
home in the USA. He initially found it difficult to compose. Although well known in America as a pianist,
ethnomusicologist and teacher, he was not well known as a composer. There was little American interest in his music
during his final years. He and his wife Ditta gave some concerts, although demand for them was low. Bartók, who had
made some recordings in Hungary, also recorded for Columbia Records after he came to the US; many of these
recordings (some with Bartók's own spoken introductions) were later issued on LP and CD (Bartók 1994, 1995a, 1995b,
2003, 2007, 2008).

Supported by a research fellowship from Columbia University, for several years, Bartók and Ditta worked on a large
collection of Serbian and Croatian folk songs in Columbia's libraries. Bartók's economic difficulties during his first
years in America were mitigated by publication royalties, teaching and performance tours. While his finances were
always precarious, he did not live and die in poverty as was the common myth. He had enough friends and supporters
to ensure that there was sufficient money and work available for him to live on. Bartók was a proud man and did not
easily accept charity. Despite being short on cash at times, he often refused money that his friends offered him out of
their own pockets. Although he was not a member of the ASCAP, the society paid for any medical care he needed
during his last two years. Bartók reluctantly accepted this (Chalmers 1995, 196–203).

The first symptoms of his health problems began late in 1940, when his right shoulder began to show signs of
stiffening. In 1942, symptoms increased and he started having bouts of fever, but no underlying disease was diagnosed,
in spite of medical examinations. Finally, in April 1944, leukemia was diagnosed, but by this time, little could be done
(Chalmers 1995, 202–207).

As his body slowly failed, Bartók found more creative energy, and he produced a final set of masterpieces, partly thanks
to the violinist Joseph Szigeti and the conductor Fritz Reiner (Reiner had been Bartók's friend and champion since his
days as Bartók's student at the Royal Academy). Bartók's last work might well have been the String Quartet No. 6 but
for Serge Koussevitzky's commission for the Concerto for Orchestra. Koussevitsky's Boston Symphony Orchestra
premièred the work in December 1944 to highly positive reviews. The Concerto for Orchestra quickly became Bartók's
most popular work, although he did not live to see its full impact. In 1944, he was also commissioned by Yehudi
Menuhin to write a Sonata for Solo Violin. In 1945, Bartók composed his Piano Concerto No. 3, a graceful and almost

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neo-classical work, as a surprise 42nd birthday present for Ditta, but he died just over a month before her birthday,
with the scoring not quite finished. He had also sketched his Viola Concerto, but had barely started the scoring at his
death, leaving completed only the viola part and sketches of the orchestral part.

Béla Bartók died at age 64 in a hospital in New York City from

complications of leukemia (specifically, of secondary polycythemia) on 26
September 1945. His funeral was attended by only ten people. Among them
were his wife Ditta, their son Péter, and his pianist friend György Sándor
(Anon. 2006).

Bartók's body was initially interred in Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New Béla Bartók's portrait on 1,000
Hungarian forint banknote (printed
York. During the final year of communist Hungary in the late 1980s, the
between 1983 and 1992; no longer
Hungarian government, along with his two sons, Béla III and Péter,
in circulation)
requested that his remains be exhumed and transferred back to Budapest
for burial, where Hungary arranged a state funeral for him on 7 July 1988.
He was reinterred at Budapest's Farkasréti Cemetery, next to the remains of Ditta, who died in 1982, the year after his
centenary (Chalmers 1995, 214).

The two unfinished works were later completed by his pupil Tibor Serly. György Sándor was the soloist in the first
performance of the Third Piano Concerto on February 8, 1946. Ditta Pásztory-Bartók later played and recorded it. The
Viola Concerto was revised and published in the 1990s by Bartók's son, Peter (Maurice 2004,); this version may be
closer to what Bartók intended (Chalmers 1995, 210).

Concurrently, Peter Bartók, in association with Argentinian musician Nelson Dellamaggiore, worked to reprint and
revise past editions of the Third Piano Concerto (Somfai 1996).

Statues
A statue of Bartók stands in Brussels, Belgium near the central train
station in a public square, Spanjeplein-Place d'Espagne (Anon. 2014;
Dicaire 2010, 145)
A statue stands outside Malvern Court, south of South Kensington
Underground Station, and just north of 7 Sydney Place, where he
stayed when performing in London. An English Heritage blue plaque,
unveiled in 1997, now commemorates Bartók at 7 Sydney Place
(Anon. & n.d.(a); Jones 2012).
A statue of him was installed in front of the house in which Bartók
spent his last eight years in Hungary, at Csalán út 29, in the hills above
Budapest. It is now operated as the Béla Bartók Memorial House
(Bartók Béla Emlékház) (Tudzin 2010).
A bust and plaque located at his last residence, in New York City at
309 W. 57th Street, inscribed: "The Great Hungarian Composer / Béla
Bartók / (1881–1945) / Made His Home In This House / During the Last
Year of His Life".
A bust of him is located in the front yard of Ankara State Conservatory,
Ankara, Turkey right next to the bust of Ahmet Adnan Saygun.
A bronze statue of Bartók, sculpted by Imre Varga in 2005, stands in
the front lobby of the Royal Conservatory of Music, 273 Bloor Street Statue of Bartók in Makó, Hungary
West, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
A statue of Bartók, sculpted by Imre Varga, stands near the River
Seine in the public park at Square Bela Bartok, 26 Place de Brazzaville, in Paris, France (Anon. & n.d.(b)).
Also to be noted, in the same park, a sculptural transcription of the composer's research on tonal harmony, the
fountain/sculpture Cristaux designed by Jean-Yves Lechevallier in 1980.
An expressionist sculpture by Hungarian sculptor András Beck in Square Henri-Collet, Paris 16th.
A statue of him also stands in Targu Mures city centre.

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Compositions
Bartók's music reflects two trends that dramatically changed the sound of music in the 20th century: the breakdown of
the diatonic system of harmony that had served composers for the previous two hundred years (Griffiths 1978, 7); and
the revival of nationalism as a source for musical inspiration, a trend that began with Mikhail Glinka and Antonín
Dvořák in the last half of the 19th century (Einstein 1947, 332). In his search for new forms of tonality, Bartók turned
to Hungarian folk music, as well as to other folk music of the Carpathian Basin and even of Algeria and Turkey; in so
doing he became influential in that stream of modernism which exploited indigenous music and techniques (Botstein &
[n.d.], §6).

One characteristic style of music is his Night music, which he used mostly in slow movements of multi-movement
ensemble or orchestral compositions in his mature period. It is characterised by "eerie dissonances providing a
backdrop to sounds of nature and lonely melodies" (Schneider 2006, 84). An example is the third movement (Adagio)
of his Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta.

His music can be grouped roughly in accordance with the different periods in his life.

Youth: Late-Romanticism (1890–1902)

The works of his youth are of a late-Romantic style. Between 1890 and 1894 (nine to 13 years of age) he wrote 31 piano
pieces with corresponding opus numbers. He started numbering his works anew with "opus 1" in 1894 with his first
large-scale work, a piano sonata in G minor (Gillies 2001). Up to 1902, Bartók wrote in total 74 works which can be
considered in Romantic style. Most of these early compositions are either scored for piano solo or include a piano.
Additionally, there is some chamber music for strings.

New influences (1903–11)

Under the influence of Richard Strauss, especially Also sprach Zarathustra (Stevens 1993, 15–17), Bartók composed in
1903 Kossuth, a symphonic poem in ten tableaux. In 1904 followed his Rhapsody for piano and orchestra which he
numbered opus 1 again, marking it himself as the start of a new era in his music. An even more important occurrence
of this year was his overhearing the eighteen-year-old nanny Lidi Dósa from Transylvania sing folk songs, sparking
Bartók's lifelong dedication to folk music (Stevens 1993, 22). When criticised for not composing his own melodies
Bartók pointed out that Molière and Shakespeare mostly based their plays on well-known stories too. Regarding the
incorporation of folk music into art music he said:

The question is, what are the ways in which peasant music is taken over and becomes transmuted into
modern music? We may, for instance, take over a peasant melody unchanged or only slightly varied,
write an accompaniment to it and possibly some opening and concluding phrases. This kind of work
would show a certain analogy with Bach's treatment of chorales. ... Another method ... is the following:
the composer does not make use of a real peasant melody but invents his own imitation of such melodies.
There is no true difference between this method and the one described above.  ... There is yet a third
way ... Neither peasant melodies nor imitations of peasant melodies can be found in his music, but it is
pervaded by the atmosphere of peasant music. In this case we may say, he has completely absorbed the
idiom of peasant music which has become his musical mother tongue. (Bartók & 1931/1976, 341–44)

Bartók became first acquainted with Debussy's music in 1907 and regarded his music highly. In an interview in 1939
Bartók said

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Debussy's great service to music was to reawaken among all musicians an awareness of harmony and its
possibilities. In that, he was just as important as Beethoven, who revealed to us the possibilities of
progressive form, or as Bach, who showed us the transcendent significance of counterpoint. Now, what I
am always asking myself is this: is it possible to make a synthesis of these three great masters, a living
synthesis that will be valid for our time? (Moreux 1953, 92)

Debussy's influence is present in the Fourteen Bagatelles (1908). These made Ferruccio Busoni exclaim 'At last
something truly new!' (Bartók 1948, 2:83). Until 1911, Bartók composed widely differing works which ranged from
adherence to romantic-style, to folk song arrangements and to his modernist opera Bluebeard's Castle. The negative
reception of his work led him to focus on folk music research after 1911 and abandon composition with the exception of
folk music arrangements (Gillies 1993, 404; Stevens 1964, 47–49).

New inspiration and experimentation (1916–21)

His pessimistic attitude towards composing was lifted by the stormy and inspiring contact with Klára Gombossy in the
summer of 1915 (Gillies 1993, 405). This interesting episode in Bartók's life remained hidden until it was researched by
Denijs Dille between 1979 and 1989 (Dille 1990, 257–77). Bartók started composing again, including the Suite for
piano opus 14 (1916), and The Miraculous Mandarin (1918) and he completed The Wooden Prince (1917).

Bartók felt the result of World War I as a personal tragedy (Stevens 1993, 3). Many regions he loved were severed from
Hungary: Transylvania, the Banat where he was born, and Pozsony where his mother lived. Additionally, the political
relations between Hungary and the other successor states to the Austro-Hungarian empire prohibited his folk music
research outside of Hungary (Somfai 1996, 18). Bartók also wrote the noteworthy Eight Improvisations on Hungarian
Peasant Songs in 1920, and the sunny Dance Suite in 1923, the year of his second marriage.

"Synthesis of East and West" (1926–45)

In 1926, Bartók needed a significant piece for piano and orchestra with which he could tour in Europe and America. In
the preparation for writing his First Piano Concerto, he wrote his Sonata, Out of Doors, and Nine Little Pieces, all for
solo piano (Gillies 1993, 173). He increasingly found his own voice in his maturity. The style of his last period—named
"Synthesis of East and West" (Gillies 1993, 189)—is hard to define let alone to put under one term. In his mature
period, Bartók wrote relatively few works but most of them are large-scale compositions for large settings. Only his
voice works have programmatic titles and his late works often adhere to classical forms.

Among his masterworks are all the six string quartets (1908, 1917, 1927, 1928, 1934, and 1939), the Cantata Profana
(1930, Bartók declared that this was the work he felt and professed to be his most personal "credo" (Szabolcsi 1974,
186), the Music  for  Strings,  Percussion  and  Celesta (1936), the Concerto for Orchestra (1943) and the Third Piano
Concerto (1945).

Bartók also made a lasting contribution to the literature for younger students: for his son Péter's music lessons, he
composed Mikrokosmos, a six-volume collection of graded piano pieces.

Musical analysis
Paul Wilson lists as the most prominent characteristics of Bartók's music from late 1920s onwards the influence of the
Carpathian basin and European art music, and his changing attitude toward (and use of) tonality, but without the use
of the traditional harmonic functions associated with major and minor scales (Wilson 1992, 2–4).

Although Bartók claimed in his writings that his music was always tonal, he rarely uses the chords or scales of tonality,
and so the descriptive resources of tonal theory are of limited use. George Perle (1955) and Elliott Antokoletz (1984)
focus on alternative methods of signaling tonal centers, via axes of inversional symmetry. Others view Bartók's axes of
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symmetry in terms of atonal analytic protocols. Richard Cohn (1988)

argues that inversional symmetry is often a byproduct of another atonal
procedure, the formation of chords from transpositionally related dyads.
Atonal pitch-class theory also furnishes the resources for exploring
polymodal chromaticism, projected sets, privileged patterns, and large set
types used as source sets such as the equal tempered twelve tone aggregate,
octatonic scale (and alpha chord), the diatonic and heptatonia  secunda
seven-note scales, and less often the whole tone scale and the primary
pentatonic collection (Wilson 1992, 24–29).

He rarely used the simple aggregate actively to shape musical structure,

though there are notable examples such as the second theme from the first
movement of his Second Violin Concerto, commenting that he "wanted to
show Schoenberg that one can use all twelve tones and still remain tonal"
Béla Bartók memorial plaque in
(Gillies 1990, 185). More thoroughly, in the first eight measures of the last Baja, Hungary
movement of his Second Quartet, all notes gradually gather with the twelfth
(G♭) sounding for the first time on the last beat of measure 8, marking the
end of the first section. The aggregate is partitioned in the opening of the Third String Quartet with C♯–D–D♯–E in the
accompaniment (strings) while the remaining pitch classes are used in the melody (violin 1) and more often as 7–35
(diatonic or "white-key" collection) and 5–35 (pentatonic or "black-key" collection) such as in no. 6 of the Eight
Improvisations. There, the primary theme is on the black keys in the left hand, while the right accompanies with triads
from the white keys. In measures 50–51 in the third movement of the Fourth Quartet, the first violin and cello play
black-key chords, while the second violin and viola play stepwise diatonic lines (Wilson 1992, 25). On the other hand,
from as early as the Suite for piano, Op. 14 (1914), he occasionally employed a form of serialism based on compound
interval cycles, some of which are maximally distributed, multi-aggregate cycles (Martins 2004; Gollin 2007).

Ernő Lendvai (1971) analyses Bartók's works as being based on two

opposing tonal systems, that of the acoustic scale and the axis system, as
well as using the golden section as a structural principle.
Fibonacci intervals (counting in
Milton Babbitt, in his 1949 critique of Bartók's string quartets, criticized semitones) in Bartók's Sonata for
Bartók for using tonality and non tonal methods unique to each piece. Two Pianos and Percussion, 3rd
Babbitt noted that "Bartók's solution was a specific one, it cannot be mov. (1937) (Maconie 2005, 26, 28,
duplicated" (Babbitt 1949, 385). Bartók's use of "two organizational citing Lendvai 1972)  Play 

principles"—tonality for large scale relationships and the piece-specific

method for moment to moment thematic elements—was a problem for
Babbitt, who worried that the "highly attenuated tonality" requires extreme non-harmonic methods to create a feeling
of closure (Babbitt 1949, 377–78).

Catalogues and opus numbers
The cataloguing of Bartók's works is somewhat complex. Bartók assigned opus numbers to his works three times, the
last of these series ending with the Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 1, Op. 21 in 1921. He ended this practice because of
the difficulty of distinguishing between original works and ethnographic arrangements, and between major and minor
works. Since his death, three attempts—two full and one partial—have been made at cataloguing. The first, and still
most widely used, is András Szőllősy's chronological Sz. numbers, from 1 to 121. Denijs Dille subsequently reorganised
the juvenilia (Sz. 1–25) thematically, as DD numbers 1 to 77. The most recent catalogue is that of László Somfai; this is
a chronological index with works identified by BB numbers 1 to 129, incorporating corrections based on the Béla
Bartók Thematic Catalogue.

On 1 January 2016, his works entered the public domain in the European Union.

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Discography
Bartók, Béla. 1994. Bartók at the Piano. Hungaroton 12326. 6-CD set.
Bartók, Béla. 1995a. Bartok Plays Bartok – Bartok at the Piano 1929–41. Pearl 9166. CD recording.
Bartók, Béla. 1995b. Bartók Recordings from Private Collections. Hungaroton 12334. CD recording.
Bartók, Béla. 2003. Bartók Plays Bartók. Pearl 179. CD recording.
Bartók, Béla. 2007. Bartók: Contrasts, Mikrokosmos. Membran/Documents 223546. CD recording.
Bartók, Béla. 2008. Bartok Plays Bartok. Urania 340. CD recording.
Bartók, Béla. 2016. Bartók the Pianist. Hungaroton HCD32790-91. Two CDs. Works by Bartók, Domenico
Scarlatti, Zoltán Kodály, and Franz Liszt.
On 18 March 2016 Decca Classics released Béla Bartók: The Complete Works, the first ever complete compilation of all
of Bartók's compositions, including new recordings of never-before-recorded early piano and vocal works. However,
none of the composer's own performances are included in this 32-disc set (Decca 2016).

Media

References
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cover/blue-plaques/search/bartok-bela-1881-1945)". English Heritage website (Accessed 19 October 2012).
Anon. n.d.(b). "Square Béla Bartók in Paris (http://www.eutouring.com/square_bela_bartok.html)" Eutouring.com
website (2 August) (accessed 4 July 2014).
Anon. 2006. "Gyorgy Sandor, Pianist and Bartok Authority, Dies at 93 (http://www.juilliard.edu/update/journal/j_arti
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Anon. 2014. Location Map (http://www.brusselsremembers.com/). Brussels Remembers: Memorials of Brussels
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Antokoletz, Elliott. 1984. The Music of Béla Bartók: A Study of Tonality and Progression in Twentieth-Century
Music. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-04604-8.
Babbitt, Milton. 1949. "The String Quartets of Bartók". Musical Quarterly 35 (July): 377–85. Reprinted in The
Collected Essays of Milton Babbitt, edited by Stephen Peles, with Stephen Dembski, Andrew Mead, and Joseph
N. Straus, 1–9 (http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s7616.pdf). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.
ISBN 0-691-08966-3.
Bartók, Béla. 1981. The Hungarian Folk Song (https://books.google.com/books?id=DxsJAQAAMAAJ&q=szuhafo+
bartok&dq=szuhafo+bartok), second English edition, edited by Benjamin Suchoff, translated by Michel D.
Calvocoressi, with annotations by Zoltán Kodály. The New York Bartok Archive Studies in Musicology 13. Albany:
State University of New York Press.
Bayley, Amanda (ed.). 2001. The Cambridge Companion to Bartók (https://books.google.com/books?id=4uInwtVV
fxMC&pg=PA16). Cambridge Companions to Music. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
ISBN 0-521-66010-6 (cloth); ISBN 0-521-66958-8 (pbk).
Botstein, Leon. [n.d.] "Modernism", Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (Accessed April 29, 2008), (subscription
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Chalmers, Kenneth. 1995. Béla Bartók. 20th-Century Composers. London: Phaidon Press. ISBN 0-7148-3164-6
(pbk).
Cohn, Richard, 1988. "Inversional Symmetry and Transpositional Combination in Bartok." Music Theory Spectrum
10:19–42.
de Toth, June. 1999. "Béla Bartók: A Biography". Bela Bartok Biography Liner notes to Béla Bartók: Complete
Piano Works (http://www.bartokcds.com/bio.html) 7-CD set, Eroica Classical Recordings.
Decca. 2016. “Béla Bartók: Complete Works: Int. Release 18 Mar. 2016: 32 CDs, 0289 478 9311 0 (http://www.de
ccaclassics.com/gb/cat/4789311)”. Welcome to Decca Classics: Catalogue, www.deccaclassics.com (accessed 19
August 2016).

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Dicaire, David. 2010. The Early Years of Folk Music: Fifty Founders of the Tradition. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland.
ISBN 9780786457373.
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universitaires de Namur. ISBN 2-87037-168-3 ISBN 978-2-87037-168-8.
Einstein, Alfred. 1947. Music in the Romantic Era. New York: W. W. Norton.
Gagné, Nicole V. 2012. Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music. Historical Dictionaries
of Literature and the Arts. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press. ISBN 978-0-8108-6765-9.
Gillies, Malcolm (ed.). 1990. Bartók Remembered. London: Faber. ISBN 0-571-14243-5 (cased) ISBN 0-571-
14244-3 (pbk).
Gillies, Malcolm (ed.). 1993. The Bartók Companion. London: Faber. ISBN 0-571-15330-5 (cloth), ISBN 0-571-
15331-3 (pbk); New York: Hal Leonard. ISBN 0-931340-74-8.
Gillies, Malcolm. 2001. "Béla Bartók". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited
by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan Publishers. Also in Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy
(Accessed May 23, 2006), (subscription access) (http://www.grovemusic.com).
Gollin, Edward. 2007. "Multi-Aggregate Cycles and Multi-Aggregate Serial Techniques in the Music of Béla
Bartók". Music Theory Spectrum 29, no. 2 (Fall): 143–76.
Griffiths, Paul. 1978. A Concise History of Modern Music. London: Thames and Hudson. ISBN 0-500-20164-1.
Griffiths, Paul. 1988. Bartók. London: JM Dent & Sons Ltd.
Hooker, Lynn. 2001. “The Political and Cultural Climate in Hungary at the Turn of the Twentieth Century”. In The
Cambridge Companion to Bartók (https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Cambridge_Companion_to_Bartók.
html?id=4uInwtVVfxMC), edited by Amanda Bayley, 7–23. Cambridge Companions to Music. Cambridge and New
York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-66010-6 (cloth); ISBN 0-521-66958-8 (pbk).
Hughes, Peter. 1999–2007. "Béla Bartók (https://web.archive.org/web/20131207194032/https://www25.uua.org/uu
hs/duub/articles/belabartok.html)" in Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography. [n.p.]: Unitarian
Universalist Historical Society. Archive from 7 December 2013 (accessed 24 October 2017).
Jones, Tom. 2012. "See Béla Bartók (http://www.tiredoflondontiredoflife.com/2012/10/see-bela-bartok.html)". Tired
of London, Tired of Life blog site (8 October) (accessed 4 July 2014).
Lendvai, Ernő. 1971. Béla Bartók: An Analysis of His Music, introduced by Alan Bush. London: Kahn & Averill.
ISBN 0-900707-04-6 OCLC 240301 (https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/240301).
Lendvai, Ernő. 1972. "Einführung in die Formen- und Harmoniewelt Bartóks" (1953). In his Béla Bartók: Weg und
Werk, edited by Bence Szabolcsi, 105–49. Kassel: Bärenreiter.
Maconie, Robin. 2005. Other Planets: The Music of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Lanham, MD, Toronto, Oxford: The
Scarecrow Press, Inc. ISBN 978-0-8108-5356-0.
Martins. 2004..
Maurice, Donald. 2004. Bartok's Viola Concerto: The Remarkable Story of His Swansong (https://books.google.co.
uk/books?id=sI4sRzCR-s8C&pg=PA205&lpg=PA205). Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-
0-19-534811-8 (accessed 19 October 2017)
Moreux, Serge. 1953. Béla Bartók, translated G. S. Fraser and Erik de Mauny. London: The Harvill Press.
Móser, Zoltán. 2006a. "Szavak, feliratok, kivonatok (http://epa.oszk.hu/00700/00713/00175/pdf/2006_03.pdf)".
Tiszatáj 60, no. 3 (March): 41–45.
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Turkish CNN television documentary series.
Perle, George. 1955. "Symmetrical Formations in the String Quartets of Béla Bartók". Music Review 16, no. 4
(November 1955). Reprinted in The Right Notes: Twenty-Three Selected Essays by George Perle on Twentieth-
Century Music, foreword by Oliver Knussen, introduction by David Headlam, 189–205. Monographs in Musicology.
Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press. ISBN 0-945193-37-8.
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Modernity and Nationality. California Studies in 20th-Century Music 5. Berkeley: University of California Press.
ISBN 978-0-520-24503-7.
Sipos, János (ed.). 2000. In the Wake of Bartók in Anatolia 1: Collection Near Adana. Budapest: Ethnofon
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Smith, Erik. 1965. A discussion between István Kertész and the producer. DECCA Records (liner notes for
Bluebeard's Castle).
Somfai, László. 1996. Béla Bartók: Composition, Concepts, and Autograph Sources. Ernest Bloch Lectures in
Music 9. Berkeley : University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-08485-8.
"Statue: Bela Bartok (http://www.brusselsremembers.com/memorials/bela-bartok)", BrusselsRemembers.com.
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Wilson, Paul. 1992. The Music of Béla Bartók. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-05111-5.

Further reading
Anon. 2003. "Béla Bartók 1881–1945 (http://www.websophia.com/faces/bartok.html)". Websophia.com (http://ww
w.websophia.com/). (Accessed March 25, 2009)
Bartók, Béla. 1948. Levelek, fényképek, kéziratok, kották. ("Letters, photographs, manuscripts, scores"), ed. János
Demény, 2 vols. A Muvészeti Tanács könyvei, 1.–2. sz. Budapest: Magyar Muvészeti Tanács. English edition, as
Béla Bartók: Letters, translated by Péter Balabán and István Farkas; translation revised by Elisabeth West and
Colin Mason (London: Faber and Faber Ltd.; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1971). ISBN 978-0-571-09638-1
Bartók, Béla. 1976. "The Influence of Peasant Music on Modern Music (1931)". In Béla Bartók Essays, edited by
Benjamin Suchoff, 340–44. London: Faber & Faber. ISBN 0-571-10120-8 OCLC 60900461 (https://www.worldcat.
org/oclc/60900461)
Bartók, Peter. 2002. "My Father". Homosassa, Florida, Bartók Records (ISBN 0-9641961-2-3).
Bónis, Ferenc. 2006. Élet-képek: Bartók Béla (https://books.google.com/books?id=W7-iAQAACAAJ&dq=%C3%89
LET-K%C3%89PEK:+BART%C3%93K+B%C3%89LA). Budapest: Balassi Kiadó: Vávi Kft., Alföldi Nyomda Zrt.
ISBN 963-506-649-X.
Boys, Henry. 1945. "Béla Bartók 1881–1945". Musical Times 86, no. 1233 (November): 329–31.
Cohn, Richard, 1992. "Bartok's Octatonic Strategies: A Motivic Approach." Journal of the American Musicological
Society 44
Czeizel, Endre. 1992. Családfa: honnan jövünk, mik vagyunk, hová megyünk? [Budapest]: Kossuth Könyvkiadó.
ISBN 963-09-3569-4
Jyrkiäinen, Reijo. 2012. "Form, Monothematicism, Variation and Symmetry in Béla Bartók's String Quartets". Ph.D.
diss. Helsinki: University of Helsinki. ISBN 978-952-10-8040-1 (Abstract (https://helda.helsinki.fi/handle/10138/336
83)).
Kárpáti, János. 1975. Bartók's String Quartets, translated by Fred MacNicol. Budapest: Corvina Press.
Kasparov, Andrey. 2000. "Third Piano Concerto in the Revised 1994 Edition: Newly Discovered Corrections by the
Composer". Hungarian Music Quarterly 11, nos. 3–4:2–11.
Leafstedt, Carl S. 1999. Inside Bluebeard's Castle. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-510999-6
Loxdale, Hugh D., and Adalbert Balog. 2009. "Bela Bartok: Musician, Musicologist, Composer, and Entomologist!."
Antenna – Bulletin of the Royal Entomological Society of London 33, no. 4:175–82.
Martins, José Oliveira. 2015. "Bartók’s Polymodality: the Dasian and other Affinity Spaces". Journal of Music
Theory 59, no. 2 (October): 273–320.
Móser, Zoltán. 2006b. "Bartók-õsök Gömörben". Honismeret: A Honismereti Szövetség folyóirata (http://www.hnm.
hu/honismeret/folyoirat/2006-2-honismeret1.pdf) 34, no. 2 (April): 9–11.
Nelson, David Taylor (2012). "Béla Bartók: The Father of Ethnomusicology", Musical Offerings: Vol. 3: No. 2,
Article 2. (http://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/musicalofferings/vol3/iss2/2)
Sluder, Claude K. 1994. "Revised Bartok Composition Highlights Pro Musica Concert". The Republic (16
February).
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5/15/2018 Béla Bartók - Wikipedia

Somfai, László. 1981. Tizennyolc Bartók-tanulmány [Eighteen Bartók Studies]. Budapest: Zeneműkiadó.
ISBN 963-330-370-2.
Wells, John C. 1990. "Bartók", in Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, 63. Harlow, England: Longman. ISBN 0-582-
05383-8.

External links
Béla Bartók (https://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/54394) at Encyclopædia Britannica
Works by or about Béla Bartók (https://archive.org/search.php?query=%28%28subject%3A%22Bartók%2C%20Bé
la%22%20OR%20subject%3A%22Béla%20Bartók%22%20OR%20creator%3A%22Bartók%2C%20Béla%22%20
OR%20creator%3A%22Béla%20Bartók%22%20OR%20creator%3A%22Bartók%2C%20B%2E%22%20OR%20tit
le%3A%22Béla%20Bartók%22%20OR%20description%3A%22Bartók%2C%20Béla%22%20OR%20description%
3A%22Béla%20Bartók%22%29%20OR%20%28%221881-1945%22%20AND%20%28%22Bartók%22%20OR%2
0Bartok%29%29%29%20AND%20%28-mediatype:software%29) at Internet Archive
The Lied and Art Song Texts Page (http://www.lieder.net/lieder/b/bartok.html) Original texts of the songs of Bartók
with translations in various languages.
Bartók Béla Memorial House, Budapest (http://www.bartokmuseum.hu)
The Belgian Bartók Archives, housed in the Brussels Royal Library and founded by Denijs Dille (http://bartok.kbr.b
e)
"Discovering Bartók" (http://bbc.co.uk/bartok). BBC Radio 3.
Gallery of Bartók portraits (https://web.archive.org/web/20070927070327/http://www.gallery-diabolus.com/gallery/a
rtist.php?language=english&id=utisz&page=205%2F)
Virtual Exhibition on Bartók (http://www.zti.hu/bartok/exhibition/main.htm)
Excerpts from sound archives (http://www.musiquecontemporaine.fr/en/search?disp=all&query=Bartok&exp_inl=o
n&exp_aud=on&so=ta) of Bartok's works.
Free scores by Béla Bartók at the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP)

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