Béla Viktor János Bartók began his musical studies on the piano at age five. His mother was his first teacher; after his father died in 1888, the Bartok family moved to Nagyszolos, where Bela continued his piano studies and took up composition.

 

At age eleven, he made his first public appearance, playing his own piano music. Bartok enrolled in the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest. he made several tours of Europe after his graduation in 1902.

 

In 1940 Bartok moved to the United States to get away from the Nazi expansion and was given a teaching position at Columbia University in New York City. Through his collection and analytical study of folk music, he was one of the founders of ethnomusicology.

 

With the exception of some noted musicians - conductor Serge Koussevitzky and violinist Yehudi Menuhin in particular - he was generally misunderstood and ignored by the musical establishment. He contracted leukemia in the early 1940s, and died in the fall of 1945, unaware of the monumental status he would achieve after death.