Bartok, Bela (1881-1945), Hungarian composer and pianist, born Nagyszentmiklos. He first learnt music from his mother, a schoolmistress who became a widow when he was 8. They moved from place to place until 1894, when they settled at Pozsony (Pressburg, now Bratislava), where he studied with L. Erkel.

In 1899, by which time he had already played the piano in public, he entered the Budapest Academy of Music as a pupil of Thoman for piano and Koessler for composition. In 1901 he won the Liszt scholarship. His student works were influenced in turn by Liszt, Brahms and Wagner, and in 1902 he came under the spell of Richard Strauss for a short time; but later he repudiated all his early works, the first he acknowledged, and labeled Op. 1, being the Rhapsody for piano and orchestra of 1904. About 1905 he began to realise that what had so far passed as Hungarian folk music and been used as such by composers like Liszt, was really Gypsy music, and that the true Magyar peasant music was quite different. He began to collect and publish folk-songs with Kodaly (q.v.). In 1907 he became piano professor at the Academy. His success as a composer was retarded by the often uncompromising harshness of his first mature works; but in 1917 his ballet The Wooden Prince and in 1918 his opera Bluebeard's Castle were produced.

Soon afterwards the political changes in Hungary brought him new difficulties; yet his importance was recognised by 1923, when he was commissioned to write an orchestral work for the 50th anniversary of the union of Buda and Pest, when he produced the Dance Suite. In 1927 he toured the U.S.A. and in 1929 Russia. Meanwhile his interest in folk music had extended to Rumanian and Arab music, and in 1934, when he resigned from the Academy, he was engaged by the Hungarian Academy of Arts and Sciences to prepare folk-song collections for official publication.

The events of the Second World War made life in Hungary politically intolerable to Bartok and in 1940 he decided to emigrate to America. But owing to ill-health he found it impossible to obtain profitable employment there, and his pride forbade him to accept money which he did not feel he had earned. He died in penury in New York on 26 Sept. 1945.

His music may be said to fall into 4 periods; a first including the immature early works he discarded; a second in which the influence of earlier composers gradually gives way to that of folk music; a third (including the middle string quartets, the 2nd piano concerto and the Cantata profana), where experimentation becomes often ruthless and disconcerting; and a fourth showing a beautiful clarification of style, without any sacrifice of individuality and enterprise, in such works as the 3rd Concerto, the Sonata for 2 pianos and percussion, the Concerto for Orchestra, the 6th Quartet and the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta.