Hungarian Rhapsodies virtuoso pianist as well as a composer). Liszt incorporated many themes he had heard in his native western Hungary and which he believed to be folk music, though many were in fact tunes written by members of the Hungarian upper middle class, or by composers such as József Kossovits, often played by Roma (Gypsy) bands. The large scale structure of each was influenced by the verbunkos, a Hungarian dance in several parts, each with a different tempo. Within this structure, Liszt preserved the two main structural elements of typical Gypsy improvisation—the "lassan" ("slow") and the "friska" ("fast"). At the same
Three Hungarian Folktunes by Bartók himself. Three Hungarian Folktunes Three Hungarian Folksongs, Sz. 66, BB 80b () is a collection of folksongs for piano by Hungarian composer Béla Bartók. It was composed between 1914 and 1918. There is much speculation about when the set was composed, but some of the most reliable sources point to it being composed somewhere between 1914 and 1918, in a period where Bartók felt very fascinated with folk music from Romania and his native Hungary. Many of the small compositions he wrote when collecting folk music all around these countries was either lost or revamped into later works,