This month’s educational corner will begin a series of articles discussing the up-coming performance of Bela Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra in March. The piece is one of Bartok’s most known works, but is considerably different in style than that of his other music. We hope to bring some insight into who the real Bela Bartok is, and what a great and exciting piece of music this is. For this month, we are focusing on telling a little bit about who Bela Bartok was and the exciting contributions that he made to the field of music.

Bela Bartok was born in 1881 in Transilvania, then part of Austria-Hungary (now part of Romania). He is one of the most important composers of the twentieth century and was a founder of the field of ethnomusicology – the study of folk music.

Bela Bartok, the founder of the ethnomusicology field, was an important figure in music of the first half of the 20th Century.

The young Bartok took piano lessons from his mother and began composing at age ten. He went on to study piano and composition at the Budapest Academy and later accepted a position there as a piano instructor. This allowed him the opportunity to pursue his study of Eastern European and Middle Eastern Folk Music with his friend and fellow composer, Zoltan Kodaly. Kodaly is best known for his opera, Hary Janos and for his work in the field of music education.

Beginning in 1905, Bartok and Kodaly traveled throughout the Hungarian countryside, to remote villages, to collect samples of folk music on a recording device known as the wax or phonograph cylinder. (For information and examples of wax cylinder recordings click here.) These samples were then transcribed, edited and classified.

While Bartok rarely quoted actual folksongs in his works, he made effective use of the driving rhythms and tonal characteristics of the folk melodies he collected. Bartok’s early compositions showed the influence of Brahms and Richard Strauss while his later works were influenced by Debussy, Stravinsky and Schoenberg. Unlike many composers, Bartok’s style actually became more accessible to the general listener later in his life.

Bartok was strongly opposed to Hungary aligning politically with the Nazi regime and left Europe to live in New York in 1940. He was never really comfortable in the US, was not well-known in this country and experienced serious health and financial problems. He managed to secure a position as a musical research assistant at Columbia University.

In 1943, Serge Koussevitsky, the Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, commissioned Bartok to write a new piece for the orchestra. The commission fee of $1,000 (perhaps the best bargain since the sale of Manhattan to the Dutch!) was really intended to ease the composer’s financial situation, as Koussivitsky is said to have had no real expectation that the work would actually be completed. Bartok’s best known work, the Concerto for Orchestra was premiered by the Boston Symphony in 1944. It was obvious from the opening notes that this was a great masterpiece and the work was enthusiastically received by audiences at and since its premier. The composer died from leukemia in 1945, his true genius not fully recognized until some decades later.

If you would like to come and hear Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra, be sure to get your tickets now by calling the symphony office at 203-574-4283 or by visiting our E-Box Office.