Bela Bartok

Bela Vikto Janos Bartok was born March 25, 1881 in Nagyszentimiklos, Hungary. Bartok's childhood was ridden with illness; he suffered from eczema (a skin rash from a smallpox vaccination), pneumonia, and was diagnosed with a spinal curvature. His illnesses caused him to withdraw from others, making him shy and often alone as a child. However, Bartok's musical interests were expressed at an early age and he began piano lessons at the age of five. When he was …

…Liszt, who was also a Hungarian composer and Claude Debussy, a French composer. Among the more renown pieces Bartok composed are: the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, the Violin Concerto, and the Concerto for Orchestra. Bela Bartok is noted to be of the great innovators of music, bringing "the practices of [his] own time into a homogeneous and consistent flowering-the highest musical synthesis of the era" (Stevens, 307).