Béla Bartók

Béla Bartók (1881-1945) was a Hungarian composer, pianist and ethnomusicologist, born in Nagyszentmiklós (now Sânnicolau Mare, Romania). Bartók built a modern musical language on the folk music of Hungary and the neighbouring regions, which he recorded and studied in the field. His output includes six string quartets, the opera Bluebeard's Castle, the ballet The Miraculous Mandarin and the Concerto for Orchestra. Bartók collected folk songs with Zoltán Kodály on phonograph cylinders, and his fieldwork also covered Slovak and Romanian material, Algeria (1913) and Turkey (1936).