Bela Bartok senior, the composer's father, was the successful headmaster of an agricultural school at Nagyszentmiklos and known for his high energy and devotion to the fine arts. The family atmosphere provided their children, Bela and Elza, with intellectual stimulus and even after Bela senior's untimely death in 1888, his wife, Paula Voit, saw to it that her offspring had an excellent education.

Bela Bartok strongly opposed totalitarian governments.

The Ascent of a Youth:

Left a widow, Bartok's mother now had to accept teaching positions around Hungary, finally settling in the town of Pozsony (now Bratislava in Slavakia). Fortunately, the town had high culture and a well developed musical tradition. From the age of three, Bartok had exhibited an amazing ear for music, pounding out rhythms on his little drum to perfect time, as his mother played the piano. At four he could play at least 40 folk tunes by memory and his mother realized her son had an enormous musical talent.

At five he begged his mother to teach him piano and at nine he wrote his first composition, a waltz entitled "The Course of the Danube." His first successful public appearance occured at the age of eleven when he performed his own "Course of the Danube." At this point news of his unusual talent reached the ears of some eminent professors and he was accepted as a student of Laszlo Erkel in Pozsony.

At this time in Hungary there were two kinds of music: the "high art" music played in Budapest (which was mainly German, including Wagner and Brahms) and the gypsy music which was wildly popular in the provinces. Young Bartok was influenced greatly by the German music taught him by his teachers and later was equally influenced by the music of Franz Liszt.

A Promising Pianist:

After graduating from grammar school in 1899, Bartok set his sights on the illustrious Academy of Music in nearby Vienna and was accepted. However, his close friend and fellow pianist Ernst von Dohnanyi chose the Academy of Music in Budapest founded by Liszt, and Bartok followed his example. Early in 1899 he began piano studies with the renowned Istavan Thoman (a pupil of Liszt) and composition with Hans Koessler (a devotee of Brhams). Unfortunately, his studies were constantly interrupted during his first year by bronchial illnesses, including a bout with pneumonia that laid him up for six months. During this time, even the doctors gave up on him. It was only his mother who brought him back to health with careful nursing and a stay in the mountains. In 1901 he was ready to make an appearance at the Academy in a sensational performance of Liszt's Sonata in B minor.

Hailed mainly during this period as a promising concert pianist, Bartok also wrote many works, including chamber music, piano pieces and orchestral compositions. Among these were a Scherzo for piano and orchestra, Op. 2, and the sketch of a symphony in four movements. The heavy (?) influences of Schumann and Brahms are evident in these works. Bartok's famous sardonic, grotesque and playful scherzo style was yet to emerge.

Composer and Patriot:

In 1903, anti-Austrian feelings flared up again in Hungary and Bartok found himself caught up in the new nationalist spirit. He wrote in a letter: "All my life, in every field at all times, and in every way, I shall serve but one aim; the benefit of the Hungarian nation." Twenty-eight years later, he expanded upon this idea, writing: "My guiding idea, which I have been conscious of ever since I found myself a composer, is the idea of the brotherhood of nations, a brotherhood in spite of war and strife. This is the idea I am trying to serve, with the best of my ability, in my music."

With the performance in Budapest in 1904 of his massive symphonic poem "Kossuth," Bartok became the object of wild admiration in the Hungarian capital. The subject was the glorification of Hungarian war of independence in 1848. Again, this work was filled with foreign influences and technical flaws. The real voice of Bartok's genius was yet to be heard and was propelled forth by a set of unusual circumstances, including a surprising change in his entire social, psychological and philosophical beliefs.

Sorrow and Transformation:

In 1905, a stunning blow struck down Bartok's ambition to win recognition as an international concert pianist. He entered the Rubenstein Music Competition in Paris, hoping to win First Prize in both piano and composition. However, Wilhelm Backhaus won the piano award, and no prize was given in composition!

A bitterly disappointed Bartok changed career directions almost at once. He made the wrenching decision to give up the life of a piano virtuoso forever, electing instead to dedicate himself, with an all absorbing intensity, to original composition and a lifetime of collecting Hungarian folk music.

Unfortunately, during the early stages of his career shift, there was a great deal of criticism of Bartok's "new" music. When the opposition became unbearable, the young composer turned for solace to his beloved folk music collection, finding comfort and a measure of security in its simple purity. Indeed, in his later writings, Bartok emphasized his belief that a simple original folk tune was as much a work of art (on a smaller scale) as a piece by Mozart or Beethoven.

The Source of Inspiration:

This new obsession was born almost by accident, when Bartok heard, early in 1904, a beautiful folk melody being sung by a Transylvanian servant girl. He was so fascinated by its freshness and originality that he wrote down the melody on the spot.

Bartok was fascinated by the striking tonal difference between the folk song and the Hungarian gypsy music he had listened to all his life. He was astonished to find that the folk song was based on an entirely different scale!

His increasing interest in folk music led Bartok to one of the most important friendships in his life when he discovered that his fellow Hungarian composer and colleague, Zoltan Kodaly, was also collecting folk songs in small Hungarian villages nearby. The two men were soon united by their passion for the hidden gems that were sung for them by local peasants. They developed a lifelong friendship, based on mutual respect and a burning desire to preserve authentic Hungarian music forever.

Bartok went about his new obsession in a most unusual way. He acquired a very large horn, which was equipped with a wax cylinder. He carried this cumbersome equipment tirelessly over Hungarian hill and dale, persuading the peasants to sing into the horn so that he could record their voices on the wax cylinder.

Bartok literally lived with the peasants during these odysseys, feasting on stuffed cabbage and chicken paprikash and sleeping in their thatched roof houses. In later years, he often remarked that these were the happiest memories of his life.

Following each trip, Bartok would rush home, listen to each recording over and over, and painstakingly write down every note of every song!

During ensuing years, Bartok's collecting expeditions led him on extensive journies over ever increasing distances into Slovakia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and eventually, all the way into Turkey and Morocco. Strangely enough, the influences of the music of all of these countries can be found in his compositions. By the end of his life in 1945, his precious collection had grown to nearly 6,000 tunes.

In addition to folk songs, Bartok collected hand carved Transylvanian furniture, pottery, and embroidery for his apartment in Budapest. Some of these treasures can still be seen at the Bartok Memorial House in the wooded Buda hills overlooking the Danube.

The idyllic trips always took place during the summer months, when he was free from his teaching duties at the Academy of Music, and continued until 1914 when they were abruptly cut short by the outbreak of World War I.

Resonance and Innovation:

Shaped by these truly monumental musical discoveries, Bartok's life philosophy changed abruptly, as he initiated stark modifications in the harmonic basis of his new compositions. Gone were the influences of Johannes Brahms and Richard Strauss. And gone also was the approval of the Hungarian musical public.

His adoption of a pantheistic view of the universe also alienated Bartok permanently from his great love at the time, the gifted and beautiful violinist Stefi Geyer. As a result, he suffered a serious emotional crisis, which was observed with alarm and concern by his intimate circle of family and friends.

Despite these numerous setbacks, his first compositions appeared at last, uttering the new and distinct Bartokian sound, not fully matured as yet, but separated unequivocally and forever from the well known harmonies and rhthymic patterns of the previous century.

Modal and pentatonic scales, free flowing exotic rhythms, and the use of polytonality were everywhere evident, in his String Quartet No. I; and in his Bagatelles, Sketches, Dirges and Elegies for piano; all boldly and excitingly new, all daringly different, and all influenced by his growing collection of Hungarian folk music and his introduction to the new impressionistic music of Claude Debussy.

The boy wonder had been supplanted by an extremely serious, taciturn and unyielding individual, whose path of genius would remain totally uncompromising, and throughout the coming years, thorny at best.

from Bela Bartok Circle, on-line