Béla Bartók (1881-1945). Hungarian composer

Hungarian-born composer Béla Bartók is particularly noted for his work with folk music, founding the beginnings of ethnomusicology. He studied at the Budapest Royal Academy of Music, and it was during his visits to the Hungarian countryside that he began collecting samples of Magyar (native Hungarian) folk music that would go on to influence his interest in the folk music of Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Turkey. Bartok’s most famous works in this area are his Romanian Folk Dances, originally written for piano in 1915, and arranged for orchestra in 1917. Between these dates, in 1916, he began work on his first ballet, The Wooden Prince, wherein similarly folkloric and earthy melodies carry the mystical fairy tale story. It was first performed at the Opera House in Budapest. In 1918, Bartók began work on The Miraculous Mandarin a balletic pantomime that he described as ‘hellish music […] pandemonium’; the seductive and violent story was considered scandalous to the first-night audience in 1926, almost to the point of riot. Other works by Bartók include his one-act opera, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle (1918).