With the publication of the third volume of Slovakian folksongs, the public has at last gained access to the entirety of Béla Bartók's enormous collection of 1640 basic melodies and their variants, which is based on the composer's own collecting activity in Gömör, Hont, Nyitra and Zólyom counties.
As early as in the 1920s Bartók handed over the collection, in several instalments, to the Matica Slovenska (the Slovaks'main scientific and cultural institution prior to the establishment of the Slovakian Academy of Sciences), but he did not live to see this extremely important material appear in a printed edition. The first volume was published in 1959, the second in 1970, while the third was only recently issued for the first time, in 2007. All three volumes were issued by the Slovakian Academy of Sciences, the publishers being Alica Elscheková and Oskár Elschek.