Hungarian composer, pianist, and ethnomusicologist whose career divided itself between two projects: composing some of the major modernist concert music of the twentieth century, and recording, transcribing, and analyzing the peasant folk music of Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Turkey, and North Africa. Bartók and his colleague Zoltán Kodály began their fieldwork in 1905, traveling to villages with an Edison wax-cylinder phonograph and bringing back recordings that overturned the standard nineteenth-century assumption — Liszt's, Brahms's — that what Hungarians called Hungarian folk music was the urban Romani café music. The actual peasant repertoires, Bartók discovered, were older, modally distinct, and shared across ethnic and linguistic borders that the politics of the period was hardening into nationalism.
The compositional work — six string quartets, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936), Concerto for Orchestra (1943), the opera Bluebeard's Castle (1911), the Mikrokosmos (1926–1939) — drew on folk material not as quotation but as deep structural source: the modes, rhythms, and asymmetries of peasant music remade as the basis of a new musical language. The political implications were direct. Bartók's insistence that authentic Hungarian music was Romanian and Slovakian as well as Magyar — that the actual cultural map did not match the nationalist map — set him in increasing opposition to the Horthy regime and, after 1933, to the rising power of Nazi Germany. He refused to allow his music to be performed in Germany after the Nazis came to power, demanded that Austrian publishers cease licensing his work to German firms, and emigrated to the United States in October 1940.
The American years were difficult — financial precarity, declining health, leukemia diagnosed in 1944 — but produced the Concerto for Orchestra, commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky, and the unfinished Third Piano Concerto and Viola Concerto. Bartók died in New York in September 1945, having lived just long enough to know that the regimes he had refused to perform under had been defeated.