'In the name of Nature, Art and Science . . ,nBela Bartok invoked his personal trinity in 1907, at the age of twenty-six, ina letter to his friend the violinist Stefi Geyer, and for the rest of his life devotedhimself to its veneration with a commitment and conviction that matched theintensity of his early rejection of conventional religious belief2 For Bartok,the music of the uneducated rural peasantry which he began studying seriouslyin 1905 was as much a manifestation of nature as the butterflies, insects andalpine flowers he collected: