Béla Bartók

There was always a sense that Bartók was not quite of this world. At a time when most musical modernists were thoroughly urban in attitude, Bartok felt ill at ease in cities, looking instead to nature for inspiration. The sounds of night—bird calls, insect noises—found echo in the magnificent concertos and string quartets that form the backbone of his output. He was a pioneering collector of folk music, and the colourful modes and complex rhythms he found in the music of the Balkans and his native Hungary stimulated many of his own stunning musical inventions, right through to his final life-affirming work, the Concerto for Orchestra (1943). Born in what is now Romania in 1881, this intensely private man also looked deep into the darker regions of the human soul, forming what he found into such beautiful, finely structured, but also disturbing masterpieces as the opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle (1911) and the revolutionary Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936). Hungary’s capitulation with the Nazis in World War Two horrified him and he fled, ending up in New York where he died of leukemia in 1945, just as his music was beginning to enjoy belated popularity.