Among other things, what sets Béla Bartók apart from most of his European contemporaries is the constancy of his contact with folk music. His research of Hungarian peasant music began out of purely musical motives. It extended gradually to the folk music of the neighboring countries in order to study relationships and dissimilarities, sources and influences, and led finally to his essential concept of the fraternization of the nations.

Bartók began collecting Romanian folk melodies in 1908 an...