[15] When visiting a holiday resort in the summer of 1904, Bartók overheard a young nanny, Lidi Dósa from Kibéd in Transylvania, sing folk songs to the children in her care.

Bartók's large-scale orchestral works were still in the style of Johannes Brahms and Richard Strauss, but he wrote a number of small piano pieces which showed his growing interest in folk music.

Among his notable students were Fritz Reiner, Sir Georg Solti, György Sándor, Ernő Balogh, Gisela Selden-Goth, and Lili Kraus.

The classic example is Franz Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies for piano, which he based on popular art songs performed by Romani bands of the time.

[citation needed] After his disappointment over the Fine Arts Commission competition, Bartók wrote little for two or three years, preferring to concentrate on collecting and arranging folk music.

Bartok's compositional command of folk elements is expressed in such an authentic and undiluted a manner because of the scales, sounds, and rhythms that were so much a part of his native Hungary that he automatically saw music in these terms.

The outbreak of World War I forced him to stop the expeditions, but he returned to composing with a ballet called The Wooden Prince (1914–1916) and the String Quartet No.

Bartók's libretto for The Miraculous Mandarin, another ballet, was influenced by Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg and Richard Strauss.

[27] According to the critic Joan Llongueras i Badia [ca], "he was very interested in the sardanas, above all, the freshness, spontaneity and life of our music [...] he wanted to know the mechanism of the tenoras and the tibles, and requested data on the composition of the cobla and extension and characteristics of each instrument".

[28][29] In 1940, as the European political situation worsened after the outbreak of World War II, Bartók was increasingly tempted to flee Hungary.

After joining them in 1942, their younger son Péter Bartók enlisted in the United States Navy, where he served in the Pacific during the remainder of the war and later settled in Florida, where he became a recording and sound engineer.

His elder son by his first marriage, Béla Bartók III, remained in Hungary and later worked as a railroad official until his retirement in the early 1980s.

Bartók's illness was at first thought to be a recurrence of the tuberculosis he had experienced as a young man, and one of his doctors in New York was Edgar Mayer, director of Will Rogers Memorial Hospital in Saranac Lake, but medical examinations found no underlying disease.

Béla Bartók died at age 64 in a hospital in New York City from complications of leukemia (specifically, of secondary polycythemia) on 26 September 1945.

[46] Concurrently, Peter Bartók, in association with Argentine musician Nelson Dellamaggiore, worked to reprint and revise past editions of the Third Piano Concerto.

The works of Bartók's youth were written in a classical and early romantic style touched with influences of popular and romani music.

[1][53] Although most of these were simple dance pieces, in these early works Bartók began to tackle some more advanced forms, as in his ten-part programmatic A Duna folyása ("The Course of the Danube", 1890–1894), which he played in his first public recital in 1892.

[54] In Catholic grammar school Bartók took to studying the scores of composers "from Bach to Wagner",[55] his compositions then advancing in style and taking on similarities to Schumann and Brahms.

[57] In 1902 his creative energies were revitalized by the discovery of the music of Richard Strauss, whose tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra, according to Bartók, "stimulated the greatest enthusiasm in me; at last I saw the way that lay before me".

[60] Bartók began to collect Magyar peasant melodies, later extending to the folk music of other peoples of the Carpathian Basin, Slovaks, Romanians, Rusyns, Serbs and Croatians.

We may, for instance, take over a peasant melody unchanged or only slightly varied, write an accompaniment to it and possibly some opening and concluding phrases.

"[64] Until 1911, Bartók composed widely differing works which ranged from adherence to romantic style, to folk song arrangements and to his modernist opera Bluebeard's Castle.

He was particularly inspired by American composer Henry Cowell's controversial use of intense tone clusters on the piano while touring western Europe.

The style of his last period – named "Synthesis of East and West"[74] – is hard to define let alone to put under one term.

[76][page needed] He made a lasting contribution to the literature for younger students: for his son Péter's music lessons, he composed Mikrokosmos, a six-volume collection of graded piano pieces.

George Perle (1955) and Elliott Antokoletz (1984) focus on his alternative methods of signaling tonal centers, via axes of inversional symmetry.

Richard Cohn (1988) argues that inversional symmetry is often a byproduct of another atonal procedure, the formation of chords from transpositionally related dyads.

[78] He rarely used the simple aggregate actively to shape musical structure, though there are notable examples such as the second theme from the first movement of his Second Violin Concerto, of which he commented that he "wanted to show Schoenberg that one can use all twelve tones and still remain tonal".

Bartók assigned opus numbers to his works three times, the last of these series ending with the Sonata for Violin and Piano No.

[86] Together with his like-minded contemporary Zoltán Kodály, Bartók embarked on an extensive programme of field research to capture the folk and peasant melodies of Magyar, Slovak and Romanian language territories.