Béla Bartók

Carrying a phonograph into villages across Hungary, Transylvania, Slovakia and later North Africa, Béla Bartók collected thousands of peasant melodies and transcribed them; this research influenced his compositions. He studied at the Budapest Academy and collaborated with Zoltán Kodály in folk-music research. His works include six string quartets, the three piano concertos, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, the Concerto for Orchestra, the one-act opera Bluebeard's Castle, the pantomime The Miraculous Mandarin, and Mikrokosmos, a collection of 153 graded piano pieces. Born at Nagyszentmiklós, now Sânnicolau Mare in Romania, he left Hungary for the United States in 1940 and died in New York in 1945. He had given his first public performance at eleven, including pieces of his own, and at the Royal Academy studied piano with István Thomán, a pupil of Liszt, and composition with János Koessler, leaving in 1903 with the symphonic poem Kossuth behind him; from 1907 until 1934 he himself taught piano there. The ballet The Wooden Prince, Cantata profana and the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion belong to the same body of work, and in 1919 he sat with Kodály on the music directorate of the short-lived Hungarian Communist Republic of Councils. A posthumous International Peace Prize for 1954 was announced in 1955, and his remains returned to Hungary in 1988.