Béla Bartók
Q: Was Béla Bartók Slovak?
Béla Bartók, a renowned composer, was born on 25 March 1881 in Sânnicolau Mare, now in Romania, and baptized Roman Catholic (he converted to Unitarianism typical of his native Transylvania after his first marriage). He immigrated in 1940 and died in New York on 26 September 1945.
His mother Paula née Voit was born in Martin, now in Slovakia, in 1857, and married Béla's future father (also Béla) in 1880. In 1893-1899 Béla Jr. attended high school in Bratislava (called Prešporok by the Slovaks then) where his mother moved a few years after his father's death in 1888. He then moved to Budapest. Bartók collected folk songs from all over the Kingdom of Hungary, some 3,400 in his collection were Slovak.
Bartók never lived in the Slovak-majority areas of the Kingdom (Bratislava was about 65% German, 20% Hungarian, and 15% Slovak when he arrived there), nor did he show greater interest in Slovak songs than in the songs of the Kingdom's other ethnic groups. He identified strongly as Hungarian, one of his (failed) youthful goals was to convert his mother's German-speaking family to using Hungarian.