Bartók Letters: The Musical Mind

by Béla Bartók, Malcolm Gillies (Editor), Adrienne Gombocz (Editor)

Bela Bartok (1881-1945) is now recognized as the twentieth century's most renowned Hungarian musician and one of the most important composers of the modern age. This book presents nearly three hundred letters which focus on his thoughts about music. Nearly all of the selections are either previously unpublished or unavailable in English translation."

656 pages, Hardcover

First published November 30, 2000

About the author

Works, including the music for the opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle (1911) and Concerto for Orchestra (1943), of Hungarian pianist and composer Béla Bartók combine east European folk with dissonant harmonies.

Since 1920, small childhood hometown of Béla Viktor János Bartók in the kingdom within Austria constituted Sânnicolau Mare or great Saint Nicholas, Romania.

From his mother, he got his first lessons, but from the age of 18 years in 1899, he studied under a protege of the great late Franz Liszt. At the royal academy in Budapest, he met Zoltán Kodály, lifelong friend. Kodály, Claude Debussy of France, Johannes Brahms, and old Magyar melodies influenced Bartók, who met Richard Strauss in 1902. Indeed, Bartók of founded study of ethnomusicology, a passion in which his friend Kodály joined him, studying and incorporating much country into his own.