DURING his recent two-day visit to Hungary, Culture Minister Rudolf Chmel met with his Hungarian counterpart, Culture Heritage Minister István Hiller, and handed him copies of the handwritten third volume of Béla Bartók's Slovak Folk Songs collection, the SITA news agency reported.
The Slovak Folk Songs collection consists of over 3,400 melodies, which makes it the largest anthology of folk songs collected by the Hungarian composer, compared to his Hungarian and Romanian collections. This volume is ready for print and should be published by the end of May. The collection of Slovak Folk Songs is considered to be the best of Bartók's work in ethno-musicology, and among the top European work in the field.