Béla Bartók in 1927

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

Biography[link]

Childhood and early years (1881–98)[link]

Béla Bartók was born in the small Banatian town of Nagyszentmiklós in the Kingdom of Hungary, Austria-Hungary (since 1920 Sânnicolau Mare, Romania) on March 25, 1881. Bartók's family reflected some of the ethno-cultural diversities of the country. His father, Béla Sr., considered himself thoroughly Hungarian, because on his father's side the Bartók family was a Hungarian lower noble family, originating from Borsod county (Móser 2006a, 44; Bartók 1981, 13), though his mother was from a Roman Catholic Serbian family (Bayley 2001, 16). His mother, Paula (born Paula Voit), had German as a mother tongue, but was ethnically of "mixed Hungarian" origin: Her maiden name Voit is German, probably of Saxon origin from Upper Hungary (Since 1920 in Czechoslovakia, since 1993 in Slovakia), though she spoke Hungarian fluently.^{[citation needed]} Among her closest forefathers there were family names like Polereczky (Magyarized Polish or Slovak) and Fegyveres (Magyar). 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; 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. Béla's mother then took him and his sister, Erzsébet, to live in Nagyszőlős (today Vinogradiv, Ukraine) and then to Pozsony (German: Pressburg, today Bratislava, Slovakia). In Pozsony, Béla gave his first public recital at age eleven to a warm 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" (de Toth 1999). Shortly thereafter László Erkel accepted him as a pupil.

Early musical career (1899–1908)[link]

Bartók's signature on his high school graduation photograph, dated September 9, 1899

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 influenced him greatly and became his 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 life-long dedication to folk music.

From 1907 he also began to be influenced by the 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 (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 and Siberia.

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)[link]

Personal life[link]

In 1909, Bartók married Márta Ziegler. Their son, Béla III, was born on August 22, 1910. After nearly 15 years together, Bartók divorced Márta in 1923.

He then married Ditta Pásztory, a piano student. She had his second son, Péter, born in 1924.

Opera[link]

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, he was pressured by the new Soviet government 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[link]

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 (the then-Kingdom of Hungary), where he notated Hungarian, Slovakian, Romanian and Bulgarian folk music. He also collected in Moldavia, Wallachia and in 1913 in Algeria. The outbreak of World War I forced him to stop the expeditions, and he returned to composing, writing the ballet The Wooden Prince in 1914–16 and the String Quartet No. 2 in 1915–17, both influenced by Debussy.

Raised as a Roman Catholic, by his early adulthood Bartók had become an atheist. He believed that the existence of God could not be determined and was unnecessary. He later became attracted to Unitarianism and publicly converted to the Unitarian faith in 1916. As an adult, his son later became 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. He next wrote his two violin sonatas (written in 1921 and 1922 respectively), which are harmonically and structurally some of his most complex pieces. The Miraculous Mandarin, a modern story of prostitution, robbery, and murder, was started in 1918, but not performed until 1926 because of its sexual content.

In 1927–28, Bartók wrote his third and fourth string quartets, after which his compositions demonstrate his mature style. Notable examples of this period are Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936) and Divertimento for String Orchestra BB 118 (1939). The String Quartet No. 5 was composed in 1934, and the sixth and last string quartet 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)[link]

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 with 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 Ditta Pásztory in July that year. They settled in New York City. After joining them in 1942, his younger 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, Jr., remained in Hungary where he survived the war and later worked as a railroad official until his retirement in the early 1980s.

Bartók never became fully at home in the US. 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 concerts. 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. They also translated some old Hungarian textbooks into English which were also from Columbia's libraries.^{[citation needed]} 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 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 Koussevitsky's commission for the Concerto for Orchestra. Koussevitsky's Boston Symphony Orchestra premièred the work in December 1944 to highly positive reviews. 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 neo-classical work. He began work on his Viola Concerto, but had not completed the scoring at his death.

Béla Bartók's portrait on 1,000 Hungarian forint banknote (printed in 1983; no longer in circulation).

Béla Bartók died at age 64 in a hospital in New York City from complications of leukemia (specifically, of secondary polycythemia) on September 26, 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).

Bartok's body was initially interred in Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York. During the final year of communist Hungary in the late 1980s, the Hungarian government, along with his two sons, Béla III and Péter, requested that his remains be exhumed and transferred back to Budapest for burial, where Hungary arranged a state funeral for him on July 7, 1988. He was reinterred at Budapest's Farkasréti Cemetery (Chalmers 1995, 214).

The Third Piano Concerto was nearly finished at his death. For his Viola Concerto, Bartok had completed only the viola part and sketches of the orchestral part. Both 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. The Viola Concerto was revised and polished in the 1990s by Bartók's son, Peter; this version may be closer to what Bartók intended (Chalmers 1995, 210).

Statues[link]

• A statue of Béla Bartók stands in Brussels, Belgium near the central train station in a public square, Spanjeplein-Place d'Espagne.
• A statue stands outside Malvern Court, south of South Kensington Underground Station, and just north of Sydney Place, where he stayed when performing in London.
• A statue of him was installed in front of one of the houses which Bartók owned in the hills above Budapest. It is now operated as a house museum.
• 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 in the front yard of Ankara State Conservatory, Ankara, Turkey right next to the bust of Ahmet Adnan Saygun.

Compositions[link]

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)[link]

The works of his youth are of a late-Romantic style. Between 1890 and 1894 (nine to 13 years of age) he wrote 31 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. 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. Compared to his later achievements, these works are of less importance.

New influences (1903–11)[link]

Under the influence of Richard Strauss (among other works 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^{[citation needed]} 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

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)[link]

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). Thrown largely onto himself, he experimented with extreme compositional practices, the peak being his Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 1 (Op. 21) and No. 2.^{[citation needed]} 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)[link]

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.

Analysis[link]

Analytic approaches[link]

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, it rarely uses the chords or scales of tonality, and so the descriptive resources of tonal theory are of limited use. George Perle and Elliott Antokoletz focus on alternative methods of signaling tonal centers, via axes of inversional symmetry. Others view Bartok's axes of symmetry in terms of atonal analytic protocols. Richard Cohn 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 seconda 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" (Gillies 1990, 185). More thoroughly, in the first eight measures of the last 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).

Béla Bartók memorial plaque in Baja, Hungary

Ernő Lendvaï (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.

Milton Babbitt, in his 1949 critique of Bartók's string quartets, criticized Bartók for using tonality and non tonal methods unique to each piece. Babbitt noted that "Bartók's solution was a specific one, it cannot be duplicated" (Babbitt 1949, 385). Bartók's use of "two organizational 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[link]

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.^{[citation needed]}.

Discography[link]

• 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.

Media[link]

See also[link]

Biography portal

• List of solo piano compositions by Béla Bartók

Bibliography[link]

• Anon. 2003. "Béla Bartók 1881–1945". Websophia.com. (Accessed March 25, 2009)
• Anon. 2006. "Gyorgy Sandor, Pianist and Bartok Authority, Dies at 93". The Juilliard Journal Online 21, no. 5 (February). (Accessed September 15, 2010)
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• 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, ^[citation needed]. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-691-08966-3
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• 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.
• Moreux, Serge. 1953. Béla Bartók, translated G. S. Fraser and Erik de Mauny. London: The Harvill Press.
• Móser, Zoltán. 2006a. "Szavak, feliratok, kivonatok". Tiszatáj 60, no. 3 (March): 41–45.
• Móser, Zoltán. 2006b. "Bartók-õsök Gömörben". Honismeret: A Honismereti Szövetség folyóirata 34, no. 2 (April): 9–11.
• Özgentürk, Nebil. 2008. Türkiye'nin Hatıra Defteri, episode 3. Istanbul: Bir Yudum İnsan Prodüksiyon LTD. ŞTİ. Turkish CNN television documentary series.
• Sipos, János (ed.). 2000. In the Wake of Bartók in Anatolia 1: Collection Near Adana. Budapest: Ethnofon Records.
• Somfai, Laszlo (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
• Schneider, David E. 2006. Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition: Case Studies in the Intersection of Modernity and Nationality. California Studies in 20th-Century Music 5. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-24503-7
• Stevens, Halsey. 1964. The Life and Music of Béla Bartók, second edition. New York: Oxford University Press. ASIN: B000NZ54ZS (Third edition 1993, ISBN 978-0-19-816349-7)
• Szabolcsi, Bence. 1974. Bartók Béla: Cantata profana in "Miért szép századunk zenéje?" (Why is the music of the Twentieth century so beautiful), ed. György Kroó. Budapest.
• Wells, John C. 1990. "Bartók", in Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, 63. Harlow, England: Longman. ISBN 0-582-05383-8
• Wilson, Paul. 1992. The Music of Béla Bartók. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-05111-5.

Further reading[link]

• 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.
• 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).
• Kárpáti, János. 1975. Bartók's String Quartets, translated by Fred MacNicol. Budapest: Corvina Press.
• Somfai, László. 1981. Tizennyolc Bartók-tanulmány [Eighteen Bartók Studies]. Budapest: Zeneműkiadó. ISBN 963-330-370-2.
• Somfai, Lászlo. 1996. Béla Bartók: Composition, Concepts, and Autograph Sources. Ernest Bloch Lectures. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-08485-3.

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Béla Bartók

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Béla Bartók

• Béla Bartók biography and works on the UE website (publisher)
• The Lied and Art Song Texts Page Original texts of the songs of Bartok with translations in various languages.
• Bartók Béla Memorial House, Budapest
• Bartók and his relationship with Unitarianism
• Gallery of Bartók portraits
• Béla Bartók at the Notable Names Database
• Don Gabor and Laszlo Halasz recorded Béla Bartók at his home in New York
• Béla Bartók at Find a Grave
• Plaque #94 on Open Plaques. in Sydney Place, London

Recordings

• Kunst der Fuge: Béla Bartók—MIDI files
• Excerpts from sound archives of Bartok's works.
• In the BBC Discovering Music: Listening Library

Sheet music

• Free scores by Béla Bartók at the International Music Score Library Project

Zoltán Kocsis (Hungarian pronunciation: [ˈzoltaːn ˈkotʃiʃ]) (born May 30, 1952) is a Hungarian pianist, conductor, and composer.

Born in Budapest, he started his musical studies at the age of five and continued them at the Béla Bartók Conservatory in 1963, studying piano and composition. In 1968 he was admitted to the Franz Liszt Academy of Music, where he was a pupil of Pál Kadosa and Ferenc Rados.^[1]

In 1970, he gave his first important debuts both at home and abroad. During the following 25 years he toured all over the world, performing with the Berliner Philharmoniker, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Dresden Staatskapelle, the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the Philharmonia of London, and the Wiener Philharmoniker. American critic Harold Schonberg praised Kocsis' extraordinary technique and fine piano tone.^[2] Kocsis has recorded the complete solo and with orchestra piano work of Béla Bartók.^[3] In 1990, his recording of Debussy's "Images"^[4] won "The Gramophone" Instrumental Award for that year.

In recent years, Kocsis has taken the role of conductor, especially with the Budapest Festival Orchestra (of which he was a founder)^[5] and the Hungarian National Philharmonic, where he is the current musical director.^[6]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Zoltán Kocsis biography
• Listing and reviews of Kocsis recordings
• TV and Video Productions with Zoltán Kocsis
• Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra website
• Budapest Festival Orchestra website
• Opus 3 Artists, Profile

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Ivry Gitlis in his home

Ivry Gitlis (Hebrew: עברי גיטליס‎; born Haifa, August 25, 1922^[1]) is an Israeli violinist and UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador. He has performed with the world's top orchestras (New York Philharmonic, Berlin Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, and Israel Philharmonic), and many of his recordings are considered classics.

Life[link]

Born in Haifa, Palestine Mandate, to Jewish immigrants from Russia, Gitlis studied violin at an early age. When violinist Bronisław Huberman first heard him play, he sent him to study at the Conservatoire de Paris, where Gitlis won a first prize, aged 13. His teachers include Carl Flesch, George Enescu, and Jacques Thibaud. In 1951, Gitlis made his debut in Paris.^[1]

His first recording, Concerto à la mémoire d'un ange by Alban Berg, won the Grand Prix du Disque in France.^[1]

In 1968 he participated in John Lennon's Dirty Mac project on The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus program.

In 1971 Bruno Maderna wrote Piece for Ivry for him.

In 1990 Gitlis was designated UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador.^[2] His stated aim is the "support of education and culture of peace and tolerance".

Ivry Gitlis is a commentator (along with Itzhak Perlman) all the way through the DVD "The Art of Violin" (2000) which showcases performances and gives biographical details of many of the great violinists of the 20th Century.

Since the end of the sixties, Gitlis has resided in Paris, France.

At various stages in his career he played on the 1737 "Chant du Cygne" Stradivarius and the "Ysaye" Guarnerius del Gesu. Ivry currently owns the "Sancy" Stradivarius of 1713.

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Shumsky, Eric, "Ageless Virtuosos Still Going Strong: Violinist Ivry Gitlis and violist Emanuel Vardi still active", The Epoch Times, July 9, 2010
• Coppey, Nicole, "Interview of Ivry Gitlis: se créer au moment de créer", Revue musicale suisse, July/August 2008

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Kyung-wha Chung (born 26 March 1948, Seoul, South Korea) is a Korean violinist.^[1] She has won wide recognition as a very fine player both from critics and audiences.

Biography[link]

Kyung-wha Chung's musical career began at the age of three. Her fame in the seventies and eighties was at the highest level, and she was ranked alongside the great violinists Pinchas Zukerman and Itzhak Perlman.^{[citation needed]} Chung later extended her repertoire in her interpretations of Romantic, Modern music, Baroque and Mozart.^[2]

Early years[link]

Kyung-wha Chung was born to a musical family. Her mother recognised her musical talent from a young age (she began to sing at the age of two). With her perfect pitch, Chung was a good singer, winning several minor competitions in Korea. Following this success she was introduced to the piano, but the instrument bored her so much that she often fell asleep while practicing. However, the moment she first heard the sound of a violin, she was instantly mesmerized by its tone. With an amazing amount of focus, and surprising speed of learning for one so young, Kyung-wha Chung began to play the violin from the age of seven. She became recognized as a child prodigy, and by the age of nine she was already playing the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto with the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra. As time progressed she steadily won most of the famous music competitions in Korea. With her siblings, Chung toured around the country, performing music both as soloist and as a part of an ensemble. As the children became famous in Korea, Chung's mother felt that it was too small a country for her children to further their musical careers, and she decided to move to America. All of Chung's siblings played classical instruments and three of them would become professional musicians. Her younger brother, Myung-whun Chung is a conductor and a pianist who won the second prize in the Tchaikovsky Competition against Andrei Gavrilov. Her older sister, Myung-wha Chung, who plays cello and studied under the great Gregor Piatigorsky, has won many competitions (among them, the Geneva Competition) and currently teaches at the Korean National University of Arts in Seoul.

To America[link]

At age thirteen she arrived in the United States. However, Chung's family found that moving to America was not an easy undertaking. With the help of Myung-Soh, her older flautist sister who was studying at Juilliard School in New York, Chung received an invitation to audition for Pre-College division of Juilliard. The audition was successful, and Chung was awarded a full scholarship, with the possibility of studying under the renowned pedagogue Ivan Galamian.

At Juilliard[link]

Studying in Juilliard was not easy. The language barrier was challenging, and being a part of a racial minority group meant that Chung often felt like an outsider. She was one of the best child violinists in Korea, but at Juilliard, competing against some of the best young prodigies in the world, Chung found that her talent was less developed than others.

Faced with these challenges she was determined to distinguish herself, working so hard that her family began to fear for her health. Galamian's training was strict, renowned for causing students to leave the school. However, for Chung's work ethic, it seemed that his technique was exactly what she needed. Her playing matured considerably during this time with the help of her teacher. Galamian, however, was known to be prejudiced against female violinists. Although he knew of her talent, he thought she could go only so far as a professional violinist. He always told her not to get married, as he had seen promising female violinists before her choose marriage over violin performance. Subsequently, she proved the possibility of having children and a successful concert career.

1967 Edgar Leventritt Competition[link]

Chung had always wished to compete in the Tchaikovsky Violin Competition, but because of the Cold War and the tense relationship between the Soviet Union and South Korea, she could not participate. So instead in 1967, she decided to participate in the Edgar Leventritt Competition, a prestigious 27-year old contest in which Itzhak Perlman had won first prize. However, many around her tried to dissuade her from participating. Her manager thought that if she did not win, it would be detrimental to her career.

Her teacher Ivan Galamian was also not in favor because Pinchas Zukerman, another of his students, was participating in the same competition. Supported by the famous and powerful Isaac Stern, Zukerman seemed to have better chance of winning the competition. But to boost her confidence, Chung's determined mother sold the family home in Korea to buy her the Harrison Stradivarius violin which had been part of the Henry Hottinger Collection.

In the final stage of the competition, the judges found it impossible to decide a winner between Chung and Zukerman, and Stern demanded that they play again. Yet even after the second round, the judges still could not decide and for the first time in the history of the Leventritt competition, it declared two winners: both Chung and Zukerman for first place. That outcome was remarkable: because of the exceptionally high standards of the Leventritt competition, in some years the judges picked no winner when they felt that the candidates were not ripe for major concert appearances and yet, that year, for the first time in the competition's history, two winners were named.^[3] Kyung-wha was immediately granted concerts with major American orchestras such as Chicago Symphony Orchestra and New York Philharmonic, and substituted for Nathan Milstein for his White House Gala when he became indisposed. However, her career was still not blossoming. Her next big opportunity came in 1970, when Itzhak Perlman could not come to London for his concert with London Symphony Orchestra (his wife was giving birth to their child), and Chung was asked to step in at the last minute. The orchestra was initially hostile to Chung, whom they considered an "amateur". The orchestra started playing the Mendelssohn Violin concerto during the rehearsal, although Chung had been told that she would be playing Tchaikovsky for the concert. She nonetheless played the Mendelssohn concerto perfectly, winning the respect of the orchestra. The rehearsal went smoothly afterwards, and the concert was a success.

Professional career[link]

Her success in London would mean much to her career; she had many engagements in the United Kingdom and she subsequently obtained an exclusive recording deal with Decca/London. Her debut album with André Previn and London Symphony Orchestra, which coupled Tchaikovsky and Sibelius concertos, brought her international attention.

It was in Europe that Chung then met her second great teacher, the well-known violinist Joseph Szigeti. Szigeti not only refined her violin skill, but also concentrated on expanding her understanding of music and art. He encouraged her to read books and go to galleries, and Chung later said at an interview that this experience had taught her how a visual medium of artistic expression, such as a painting, might be transformed into musical language.^{[citation needed]}

Since then she has performed around the world, most of the time to critical acclaim. She has worked with most of the major orchestras including Berlin Philharmonic,^[1] Vienna Philharmonic, London Symphony Orchestra,^[1] Philadelphia Orchestra,^[1] and Boston Symphony Orchestra.^[1] She has worked with many famous conductors including Georg Solti, André Previn,^[1] Simon Rattle,^[1] Claudio Abbado, Charles Dutoit and Riccardo Muti. She has also worked with such celebrated pianists as Radu Lupu, Krystian Zimerman, Peter Frankl, Stephen Kovacevich and her younger brother Myung-whun Chung. She plays also in the Chung Trio, with her brother and her older sister, Myung-wha Chung. Her repertoire includes most of the famous concertos ranging from Beethoven to Tchaikovsky to Berg, and she has recorded several important sonatas such as the Brahms violin sonatas, Franck & Debussy sonatas, and Respighi & Strauss sonatas (with Krystian Zimerman, a recording which earned her a Gramophone Award for Best Chamber Recording). Her interpretations are known to be very passionate but at the same time well structured and with a wide range of tonal variation. Her early recordings show the astonishing degree of perfectionism which Chung pursued.

In 1997, she celebrated the 30th anniversary of her international debut at Barbican Centre in London and in her hometown of Seoul, Korea. Her most recent recordings include Vivaldi's Four Seasons^[1] (which was selected as Gramophone's editorial choice) and Brahms violin concerto with Vienna Philharmonic under Simon Rattle.

Educator[link]

In 2007, she joined Juilliard as a member of the faculty of the school's Music and Pre-College Divisions.^[4]

In 2011, she received the Ho-Am Prize in the Arts division in recognition of her 40-year long career as a violinist and educator. In November that year, after a five year break with a finger injury and family bereavements, she resumed her playing career.^[5]

Discography[link]

• Beethoven Violin Concerto in D Major Op. 61, The Vienna Philharmonic, Kiril Kondrashin, conductor. London Records 1980 (digital recording LDR 10010)

References[link]

1. ^ ^{a b c d e f g h} "EMI Classics Biography". http://www.emiclassics.com/artistbiography.php?aid=40. Retrieved 2007-03-30. 
2. ^ Biography of Kyung Wha Chung from the Pittsburg Symphony
3. ^ "Contests: Cookie & Pinky Come Through", Time Magazine, May 26, 1967.
4. ^ "Juilliard School Faculty Bio Page, Kyung-wha Chung". http://www.juilliard.edu/asp/fsnew/faculty_details.php?FacultyId=9585&School=College&Division=Music. Retrieved 2009-01-24. 
5. ^ http://www.artsjournal.com/slippeddisc/2011/11/violin-veteran-returns-to-a-waiting-record-contract.html

External links[link]

• Kyung-Wha Chung at Opus 3 Artists
• Kyung-Wha Chung at allmusic