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
Biography Béla Bartók in 1927
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 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).

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 toPozsony (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 composerClaude 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
Bartók's signature on his high- music. The first piece to show clear signs of this new interest is the String Quartet
school-graduation photograph, dated No. 1 in A minor (1908), which contains folk-like elements.
9 September 1899
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 taughtJack 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.

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 byDebussy.

Raised as a Catholic, by his early adulthood Bartók had become an atheist. He later Béla Bartók using a phonograph to
record folk songs sung by peasants
became attracted to Unitarianism and publicly converted to the Unitarian faith in
in what is now Slovakia
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.

In 1927–28, Bartók wrote his Third and Fourth String Quartets, after which his compositions demonstrated his mature style. Notable
examples of this period areMusic for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936) and Divertimento for String Orchestra(1939). The Fifth
String Quartet was composed in 1934, and theSixth 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 thisChalmers
( 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 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 inFerncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York. During the final year ofcommunist 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 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 centenaryChalmers
( 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 Béla Bartók's portrait on 1,000
Dellamaggiore, worked to reprint and revise past editions of the Third Piano Hungarian forint banknote (printed
between 1983 and 1992; no longer in
Concerto (Somfai 1996).
circulation)

Statues
A statue of Bartók stands inBrussels, 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 ofSouth Kensington
Underground Station, and just north of 7 Sydney Place, where he stayed
when performing in London. AnEnglish Heritage blue plaque, unveiled
in 1997, now commemorates Bartók at 7 Sydney PlaceAnon. ( & 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 o Yrk 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 ofAnkara State Conservatory,
Ankara, Turkey right next to the bust ofAhmet Adnan Saygun.
A bronze statue of Bartók, sculpted by Imre V arga in 2005, stands in the
front lobby of the Royal Conservatory of Music, 273 Bloor Street W est, Statue of Bartók in Makó, Hungary
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, inParis, 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 sculptorAndrás Beck in Square Henri-Collet, Paris16th.
A statue of him also stands inTargu Mures city centre.

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 B
( otstein & [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 hisMusic for Strings, Percussion and Celesta.

His music can be grouped roughly in accordance with the dif

ferent 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

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 completedThe 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 W
( ilson 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 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
Béla Bartók memorial plaque inBaja,
polymodal chromaticism, projected sets, privileged patterns, and large set types used Hungary
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 collectionWilson
( 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.
Walk of Fame Vienna
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 Bartók for semitones) in Bartók'sSonata for
using tonality and non tonal methods unique to each piece. Babbitt noted that Two Pianos and Percussion, 3rd
"Bartók's solution was a specific one, it cannot be duplicated" (Babbitt 1949, 385). mov. (1937) (Maconie 2005, 26, 28,
Bartók's use of "two organizational principles"—tonality for large scale relationships citing Lendvai 1972) Play

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 closureBabbitt
( 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 thepublic domain in the European Union.

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
Anon. n.d.(a) "Bartók, Béla (1881–1945) Plaque erected in 1997 by English Heritage at 7 Sydney Place, South
Kensington, London SW7 3NL, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea ". English Heritage website (Accessed 19
October 2012).
Anon. n.d.(b). "Square Béla Bartók in Paris" Eutouring.com website (2 August) (accessed 4 July 2014).
Anon. 2006. "Gyorgy Sandor, Pianist and Bartok Authority, Dies at 93". The Juilliard Journal Online21, no. 5
(February) (accessed September 15, 2010).
Anon. 2014. Location Map. Brussels Remembers: Memorials of Brussels (accessed 17 June 2014).
Antokoletz, Elliott. 1984.The Music of Béla Bartók: A Study of T
onality and Progression in Twentieth-Century Music.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.ISBN 0-520-04604-8.
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Dicaire, David. 2010. The Early Years of Folk Music: Fifty Founders of the Tradition. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland.
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Dille, Denijs. 1990. Béla Bartók: Regard sur le Passé. (French, no English version available). Namur: Presses
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.
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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 inGrove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (Accessed
May 23, 2006), (subscription access).
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Cambridge Companion to Bartók, 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).
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Universalist Historical Society. Archive from 7 December 2013 (accessed 24 October 2017).
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Further reading
Anon. 2003. "Béla Bartók 1881–1945". 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 anács.
T English edition, as
Béla Bartók: Letters, translated by Péter Balabán and István Farkas; translation revised by Elisabeth W
est and Colin
Mason (London: Faber and Faber Ltd.; New Y ork: 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
Bartók, Peter. 2002. "My Father". Homosassa, Florida, Bartók Records (ISBN 0-9641961-2-3).
Bónis, Ferenc. 2006. Élet-képek: Bartók Béla. 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, V ariation 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.
Kasparov, Andrey. 2000. "Third Piano Concerto in the Revised 1994 Edition: Newly Disco
vered Corrections by the
Composer". Hungarian Music Quarterly11, 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 London33, 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 folyóirata34, no. 2 (April): 9–
11.
Nelson, David Taylor (2012). "Béla Bartók: The Father of Ethnomusicology", Musical Offerings: Vol. 3: No. 2, Article
2.
Sluder, Claude K. 1994. "Revised Bartok Composition Highlights Pro Musica Concert".The Republic (16 February).
Somfai, László. 1981. Tizennyolc Bartók-tanulmány[Eighteen Bartók Studies]. Budapest: Zeneműkiadó.ISBN 963-
330-370-2.
Wells, John C. 1990. "Bartók", inLongman Pronunciation Dictionary, 63. Harlow, England: Longman. ISBN 0-582-
05383-8.

External links
Béla Bartók at Encyclopædia Britannica
Works by or about Béla Bartókat Internet Archive
The Lied and Art Song Texts Page Original texts of the songs of Bartók with translations in various languages.
Bartók Béla Memorial House, Budapest
The Belgian Bartók Archives, housed in the Brussels Royal Library and founded by Denijs Dille
"Discovering Bartók". BBC Radio 3.
Gallery of Bartók portraits
Virtual Exhibition on Bartók
Excerpts from sound archivesof Bartok's works.
Free scores by Béla Bartókat the International Music Score Library Project(IMSLP)
Bartók plays Bartók for Don Gabor's Continental record label later reissued on Remington Records
Excerpts from sound archivesof Bartok's works.

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