Worldwide festivals celebrate a century after his birth
Béla BartÓk was an orphan of the 20th century. NagyszentmiklÓs, the Hungarian town in which he was born a century ago, was ceded to Rumania in 1920. Nagyszöllös, where he wrote his first compositions at the age of nine, is now part of the Soviet Union. Pozsony, where he spent his teen-age years, has become Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. He died of leukemia in New York City in 1945, a refugee from the war, living at the end in a cramped apartment on West 57th Street.
Today, the music...
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