d.26 September 1945, New York Béla Bartók was born in the
Hungarian town of Nagyszentmiklós (now Sînnicolau Mare in
Romania) on 25 March 1881, and received his first instruction in
music from his mother, a very capable pianist; his father, the
headmaster of a local school, was also musical. After his family
moved to Pressburg (now Bratislava in Slovakia) in 1894, he took
lessons from László Erkel, son of Ferenc Erkel, Hungary’s first
important operatic composer, and in 1899 he became a student at
the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest, graduating in 1903. His
teachers there were János Koessler, a friend of Brahms, for
composition and István Thoman for piano. Bartók, who had given
his first public concert at the age of eleven, now began to
establish a reputation as a fine pianist that spread well beyond
Hungary’s borders, and he was soon drawn into teaching: in 1907
he replaced Thoman as professor of piano in the Academy. Béla
Bartók’s earliest compositions offer a blend of late Romanticism
and nationalist ele