Béla Bartók (1881 - 1945)

The Hungarian composer Béla Bartók was born in 1881 in an area that now forms part of Romania. His father, director of an agricultural college, was a keen amateur musician, while it was from his mother that he received his early piano lessons. The death of his father in 1889 led to a less settled existence, as his mother resumed work as a teacher, eventually settling in the Slovak capital of Sratislava (the Hungarian Pozsony), where Bartók passed his early adolescence, counting among his school-fellows the composer Ernö Dohnanyi. Offered the chance of musical training in Vienna, like Dohnanyi he chose instead Budapest, where he won a considerable reputation as a pianist, being appointed to the teaching staff of the Academy of Music in 1907. At the same time he developed a deep interest, shared with his compatriot Zoltan Kodaly, in the folk-music of his own a