A Transylvanian nanny's songs remade modern music
Béla Bartók ranks with Liszt among Hungary's greatest composers, yet his lasting method began on holiday in 1904 when he overheard a nanny singing folk tunes to children. With Zoltán Kodály he collected peasant melodies once dismissed as Gypsy pastiche—and folded them into Bluebeard's Castle, string quartets, and the Concerto for Orchestra.
Born 25 March 1881 in Nagyszentmiklós in the Kingdom of Hungary—now Sânnicolau Mare, Romania—Bartók came from a lower noble Hungarian line on his father's side. His mother Paula recalled that he could tell dance rhythms apart before speaking in full sentences; by four he played some forty piano pieces. After his father, an agricultural-school director, died suddenly in 1888, mother and children moved through Nagyszőlős and Pressburg. An eleven-year-old recital there featured his early piece The Course of the Danube.
At Budapest's Royal Academy (1899–1903) he studied piano with Liszt pupil István Thomán and composition with János Koessler, befriending Kodály. Early orchestral writing still echoed Brahms and Richard Strauss, whom he met at a 1902 Budapest Zarathustra premiere. The 1904 folk encounter redirected him. From 1908 he and Kodály traveled the countryside documenting Hungarian peasant song, rejecting the salon "Gypsy music" stereotype crystallized in Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies. They quoted authentic tunes and built works from them—Bartók's For Children sets eighty folk melodies with new accompaniments.
Debussy's example, brought from Paris by Kodály around 1907, sharpened his ear further. Stage landmarks range from the one-act Bluebeard drama to Mandarin's brutal ballet; later orchestra showpieces such as the Strings-Percussion-Celesta score, a cycle of six quartets, and the wartime Concerto for Orchestra sealed the catalogue. Through collecting and analysis he helped found comparative musicology, later called ethnomusicology. He died on 26 September 1945. Anthony Tommasini later credited him with empowering composers to braid folk material from any culture into classical craft—the nanny's lullaby as research program.
Source: Béla Bartók
