Ditta Pásztory-Bartók

Ditta Pásztory-Bartók (31 October 1903 – 21 November 1982) was a Hungarian pianist and the second wife of the composer Béla Bartók. She was the dedicatee of a number of his works, including Out of Doors and the Third Piano Concerto.

Edith (Ditta) Pásztory was born in Rimaszombat, Austria-Hungary (now Rimavská Sobota, Slovakia) in 1903, the daughter of a piano teacher and high school teacher. She studied piano at the Budapest Conservatory, gaining her diploma in 1921, and in 1922 went to the Royal Academy of Music for more studies, where she became a private pupil of Béla Bartók.

Bartók divorced his then wife Márta Ziegler (1893-1967) in June 1923. He had a distinct attraction to girls and women considerably younger than himself. Márta was aged only 16 when he married her in 1909, when he was 28. In Ditta's case, she was 19 and he 42. He walked her home after a lesson one day, then out of the blue he proposed to her, giving her three days to make her decision. Up till then, their relationship had been strictly teacher and pupil. She accepted, they obtained a special licence and were married within a week, on 28 August 1923.

In 1924 she gave birth to Peter Bartók, her only child but her husband's second son. Márta Ziegler had given birth to Béla Bartók III on 22 August 1910, the year after their marriage.

Ditta Pásztory-Bartók later experienced illness and had treatments in sanatoria in Davos, Switzerland and Bucharest, Romania.

In 1926, he dedicated his suite Out of Doors to Ditta.

She abandoned her own solo career, but he later encouraged her to perform piano duo works with him. Along with the percussionists Saul Goodman and Henry Deneke, Béla and Ditta Pásztory-Bartók jointly premiered his Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion on 16 January 1938 at the ISCM anniversary concert in Basel, Switzerland.

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