Béla Bartók was a Hungarian composer, pianist, and ethnomusicologist of the 20th century, born in Nagyszentmiklós (now Sânnicolau Mare, Romania) and based for most of his career in Budapest, where he taught at the Liszt Academy of Music, before emigrating to New York City in 1940 to escape the Second World War. His output includes the opera Bluebeard’s Castle, the ballet The Miraculous Mandarin, six string quartets, and orchestral works such as Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta and the Concerto for Orchestra, drawing extensively on the folk music he collected across Eastern Europe and beyond. He died in New York in September 1945 at age 64 from complications of leukemia.

Bartók is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century and, alongside Kodály, a founder of modern ethnomusicology, having pioneered the systematic collection and analysis of folk traditions. His fusion of folk material with rigorous modernist technique reshaped the possibilities of concert music, and his string quartets and orchestral works, especially the Concerto for Orchestra, remain cornerstones of the 20th-century repertoire and touchstones for later composers.

Compare recordings piece by piece — 4 works of Béla Bartók with more than one performance on the site →

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A9la_Bart%C3%B3k