Béla Bartók was a great Hungarian composer and one of the founders of modern ethnomusicology, a figure who transformed twentieth-century music by fusing the raw vitality of folk music with the techniques of the modern concert tradition. Born in a small town then in Hungary, he showed early musical gifts and studied at the Budapest Academy, where he later taught for many years.
Bartók's life was shaped by a passionate scientific interest in folk music. Together with his friend and compatriot Zoltán Kodály, he traveled the villages of Hungary, Romania, and beyond with an early recording machine, collecting and transcribing thousands of peasant songs that had never been written down. This authentic folk material — modal, rhythmically irregular, far from the sentimental "gypsy" music of the cities — became the wellspring of his own distinctive style.
His compositions, rigorous and intensely original, ranged from string quartets regarded as among the finest since Beethoven's to the Concerto for Orchestra, the opera Bluebeard's Castle, and an influential set of piano teaching pieces. His music combined folk-derived energy with a powerful, sometimes austere modern idiom.
A man of fierce integrity, Bartók despised fascism, and as Nazi influence spread across Europe he emigrated to the United States in 1940. His final years there were marked by poverty, illness, and obscurity, though he continued to compose. He died in New York in 1945, his stature recognized only fully after his death.