Béla Bartók showed unusual talent as a pianist and composer at an early age. Music was the avocation of his father, who was principal of an agricultural school in Hungary; after his death Bartók’s mother worked as a piano teacher, tirelessly promoting her son’s career.

Few musicians have ever had as varied a career as Bartók. He was a prolific composer and a fine pianist, as was his second wife; they appeared as a two-piano team. (Both of his wives had been his students.) In conjunction with another important Hungarian composer, Zoltán Kodály, he directed the Budapest Academy of Music, where the two men tried out new ideas in music teaching. An outcome of this side of Bartók’s career is his Mikrokosmos, a series of 153 graded piano pieces starting with the very easiest. Well known to most piano students today, the Mikrokosmos has probably done more than any other work to introduce modernism to large numbers of musicians in their impressionable years.

Also with Kodály, Bartók undertook a large-scale investigation of Hungarian (and other) folk music, writing several standard books on the topic. He published many folk-song and folk-dance arrangements, and his other compositions are saturated with folk rhythms, modes, and melodic turns. The outstanding nationalist composer of the twentieth century, Bartók left a body of work that equals or surpasses that of any of the nineteenth-century nationalists.

Bartók was strongly opposed to the Nazis. After they came to power in Germany, he refused to concertize there and broke ties with his German publisher. And his liberal views caused him a good deal of trouble from right-wingers in Hungary. In 1940, after the outbreak of World War II, Bartók came to America, but he was not well known here and there was little interest in his music. His last years were a struggle to complete his Third Piano Concerto and the Viola Concerto. His important works earned a wide, enthusiastic audience only after his death.

Chief Works: Concerto for Orchestra, three piano concertos, Violin Concerto, Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (for small orchestra) ◼ Six string quartets; a fascinating Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion ◼ An opera, Bluebeard’s Castle, and a ballet, The Miraculous Mandarin ◼ Mikrokosmos and other works for piano ◼ Many folk-song arrangements for various ensembles, including Six Rumanian Dances

Encore: After Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, listen to the Violin Concerto and Quartet No. 6.

Image credit: Bettmann/CORBIS.