Béla Bartók - Biography
Béla Bartók, one of the supreme modernists of the 20th Century, was born on March 25th, 1881, in Nagyszentmiklós, Austria-Hungary (now Sânnicolau Mare, Romania). He died in New York on September 26th, 1945. His mother was a well trained, amateur pianist who gave Bartók his initial training as a child. Bartók’s father was a headmaster in an agricultural school who died when Bartók was seven, at which point he and his mother moved to the Slovak capital, Pressburg (now Bratislava). By the age of eleven, Bartók was a proficient pianist. He was talented enough to be sent to the Budapest Royal Academy where he studied at the turn of the century. There he met the other great Hungarian composer of the time, Zoltán Kodály, who was to become a lifelong friend and collaborator.
During this early period, Bartók wrote his first major orchestral work, Kossuth, a symphonic poem based on the life of the famed Hungarian patriot and revolutionary leader. When he was in his early twenties, Bartók’s music was heavily influenced by Richard Strauss, whom he met in 1902. When he went to Paris, he discovered Claude Debussy, whose music was to have a far greater influence on his music in the years to come. In 1907, Bartók began his scholarly research on the music of Transylvania. This research, along with later research on Magyar music with Kodaly, would have a profound effect on his music. Bartók would go out to the countryside with a primitive recording machine and record the folk music of local ethnic groups before modern times were to decimate their way of life. Even if Bartók hadn’t been a great composer, he would have assured a position in music history as a pioneering ethnomusicologist.
Bartók became a piano teacher at the Budapest Academy where he taught Fritz Reiner, Lili Kraus, Sir Georg Solti and György Sándor. Bartók was also an admirer of Schoenberg, but while he used elements of atonality, he never embraced the twelve tone teachings of the Second Viennese School. As his recordings reveal, Bartók was an amazingly fine pianist, but his reserved and austere personality prevented him from become a touring virtuoso like his contemporary compatriot and fellow Hungarian composer, pianist Ern? Dohnányi. Bartók’s compositions from this early period were excellent, though not fully characteristic of his mature style. Examples include String Quartet No. 1 in A minor, two orchestral suites and a good deal of other piano music written for beginning and intermediate students. The culmination of this period came with Bartók’s first masterwork, the one act opera, Duke Bluebeard's Castle (A kékszakkallú Herceg Vára).
Bartók married Marta Zeigler in 1909. Their first son, Bela II, was born the following year. During the period just prior to the First World War, Bartók spent much of his time on ethnomusicalogical research, making extensive trips to Bulgaria, Carpathia and Algeria. During this time, he also composed String Quartet No. 2 in A minor and the ballet, The Wooden Prince. The period during the First World War wasn’t particularly fruitful for Bartók as a composer, though a well known piano piece come from the period, entitled Suite for piano.
The war was particularly difficult in Hungary, which was torn asunder by conservatives loyal to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and those on the Left (like Bartók) who wanted to see an independent Hungary. The first work to emerge from the post war years was the extraordinary, scandalous ballet, The Miraculous Mandarin, pantomime in 1, based on a lurid plot that combined murder, prostitution and necrophilia. In the 1920s, Bartók wrote his String Quartet No. 3 in C sharp major, String Quartet No. 4 in C major, two piano concertos, Dance Suite (Táncszvit) for orchestra, Out of Doors (Szabadban) and several violin sonatas.
A major change occurred in Bartók’s personal life when he divorced his wife and married his young piano student Ditta Pásztory in 1923. Their son, Peter, (born in 1924) went on to found a record company named after his father and became a well known producer. Bartók became increasingly well known in the 1930s, particularly in progressive European circles. He was hindered somewhat by the rise of the Third Reich, where his modernist tendencies were tolerated but frowned upon. In the thirties, he wrote a string of masterpieces, including Divertimento for string orchestra, the fifth and sixth string quartets, Mikrokosmos, Sonata for 2 pianos & 2 percussion, and Violin Concerto (No. 2) in B minor.
When the Second World War started, Hungary was under a Nazi-allied government led since by the 1920s by Admiral Horthy. When it became part of the Axis, Bartók’s position became untenable and he immigrated with his second wife and teenage son to New York in 1941. A man of great dignity and character, he refused a well paying position as a professor of composition because he felt composition could not be taught. He survived by performing as a concert pianist and made some recordings. There was a tragic, comic story relayed by his son wherein they got lost in the New York subway for hours, refusing to ask for help because of his poor English.
Bartók was always a frail man (though medium height, he barely weighed 120 pounds) and he had developed considerable arthritic pain and fatigue. Eventually he was diagnosed with a severe form of Leukemia Polycythemia, for which treatment for it was very limited in the 1940s. His old friend Fritz Reiner helped with a commission to write an orchestral transcription of Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, now renamed Concerto for Two Pianos and Percussion. A new friend, famed violinist Yehudi Menuhin, commissioned a violin sonata and (most importantly) the great conductor Serge Koussevitzky commissioned the Concerto for Orchestra for his Boston Symphony. This was to be Bartók’s greatest public triumph and to become his most popular work. Bartók’s radiation treatment was paid for by ASCAP (Bartók was by no means affluent but stories of his dire poverty in New York were exaggerated and the American musical community did help). Bartók was a very European man and the hustle and bustle of war time New York did not agree with him or his wife. By 1945, Bartók’s condition reached the terminal stage. He did complete all but the last few bars of his beautiful Piano Concerto # 3, written for his old Student Gyorgy Sandor, and sketched a viola concerto (realized and completed by Tibor Szerly). Time ran out for Béla Bartók and he died in a New York Hospital on September 26th 1945.
Of course after Bartók’s death he became very popular, and not just among classical modernists. Jazz musicians and aficionados became fans his string quartets. Difficult pieces were recorded by the Julliard Quartet on Columbia in the early 1950s and became big sellers. Multiple recordings by of the Concerto for Orchestra became commercial successes, particularly the one recorded by Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony. As mentioned before, his son Peter set up a label to record his works. Even the great comedian (and fellow Hungarian) Ernie Kovacs had a dance sequence set to the first movement of the Concerto for Orchestra on one his television shows. Bartók has continued to be popular among more adventurous listeners into the new millennium. There are many splendid recordings quite a few by musicians who knew Bartók like Reiner, Fricsay, Solti, Dorati, Ormandy, Foldes and Anda along with newer performers like Koscis, Pollini and the Emerson Quartet. We are dealing with a sterling musician with an equally sterling character.
