Bela Bartok hauled a primitive phonograph through the villages and mountains of Hungary, Romania, and North Africa, recording folk music that was disappearing as modernization reached rural communities. He collected thousands of melodies, catalogued them with scientific precision, and then fused them into concert music of ferocious originality. He died in poverty in New York, and the folk music he saved now exists only because he bothered to record it.

This episode traces Bartok from his Hungarian childhood through the folk music expeditions, the compositions that shocked European audiences, and the wartime exile in New York where he died unrecognized and broke.

• The folk music expeditions — carrying recording equipment through remote villages across three continents
• The fusion of folk melody with modernist technique that created his distinctive musical language
• The flight from Nazi-aligned Hungary and the impoverished New York exile
• His death in poverty and the posthumous recognition of both his music and his ethnomusicological legacy