This long-awaited, authoritative account of Bartk’s compositional processes stresses the composer’s position as one of the masters of Western music history and avoids a purely theoretical approach or one that emphasizes him as an enthusiast for Hungarian folk music.

For Bla Bartk, composition often began with improvisation at the piano. Lszl Somfai maintains that Bartk composed without preconceived musical theories and refused to teach composition precisely for this reason. He was not an analytical composer but a musical creator for whom intuition played a central role.

These conclusions are the result of Somfai’s three decades of work with Bartk’s oeuvre; of careful analysis of some 3,600 pages of sketches, drafts, and autograph manuscripts; and of the study of documents reflecting the development of Bartk’s compositions. Included as well are corrections preserved only on recordings of Bartk’s performances of his own works. Somfai also provides the first comprehensive catalog of every known work of Bartk, published and unpublished, and of all extant draft, sketch, and preparatory material. His book will be basic to all future scholarly work on Bartk and will assist performers in clarifying the problems of Bartk notation. Moreover, it will be a model for future work on other major composers.