Béla Bartók

Béla Viktor János Bartók (March 25 1881 – September 26 1945) was a Hungarian composer and pianist, considered one of the greatest composers of the 20th century. Through his collection and analytical study of folk music he was one of the founders of ethnomusicology. Béla Bartók was born in the small Banat town of Nagyszentmiklós in Austria-Hungary (now Sânnicolau Mare, Romania). He displayed notable musical talent very early in life: according to his mother, he could distinguish between different dance rhythms that she played on the piano even before he learned to speak in complete sentences (Gillies 1990, 6). By the age of four, he was able to play 40 pieces on the piano, and his mother began formally teaching him the next year. Béla was a small and sickly child, and suffered from a painful chronic rash until the age of five (Gillies 1990, 5). In 1888, when he was seven, his father (the director of an agricultural school) died suddenly, and Béla's mother then took him and his sister... full article at wikipedia