In a note for the planned first edition of his Hungarian Peasant Songs in 1914, Bartók wrote that “the melodies published here are folksongs in the truest sense of the word; more precisely, peasant songs”. Bartók initially withdrew this work from publication, however, and added new pieces to it using folk music he had collected in the meantime. The first edition was only finally published in 1920.

The Bartók scholar László Somfai explains the work’s complicated genesis in his preface. The co...