The folk song arrangements for voice and piano are not among Bartók's best-known works, although they accompanied him throughout his entire career, from the Székely Folk Song of 1904 to the Three Ukrainian Folk Songs of 1945. This volume contains all of Bartók's works in this genre, with 96 arrangements of 84 folk melodies from Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and Ukraine. Most of these works were not published during the composer's lifetime, and some have never appeared before. This volume features the first printed editions of the fragmentary Hungarian Folk Songs (1904-5), the Four Slovak Folk Songs (1907?), as well as two works, Nine Romanian Folk Songs (1912?) and Three Ukrainian Folk Songs (1945), that Bartók left behind as unedited drafts. In addition to the original words, this edition includes all translations approved by the composer as underlay. The original words and their literal English translations are presented side by side in the appendix.

The introductory essays in English, Hungarian, and German not only explore the genesis and reception of the works more thoroughly than ever before, but also orient the reader in issues of notation and performance. The critical commentary presents all manuscript and print sources of the works in detail (including folk music sources), it documents the compositional processes, and it surveys the range of textual variants and problems.