Bartók's Twenty Hungarian Folksongs for voice and piano was the last major work in the song genre. It is thought that Bartók may have been inspired to compose this large group of songs after his friend and fellow Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály began publishing his own copious folk song arrangements, beginning in 1924. Furthermore, as scholars have noted, a large number of Kodály's pieces had been recorded in 1928 as part of a collection of folk song arrangements: Bartók also contributed a few of his own pieces, but they were older, composed some twenty years earlier. This may have been the impetus Bartók required to compose a new, substantial set of folk song arrangements.

The melodies Bartók chose to set were taken from his own collection of transcribed folk melodies, which he published in 1924. Bartók divided his twenty chosen songs into four separate books, each book representing a different type of song. The first book is "Sad songs," and includes four slow laments. The second book, "Dancing Songs," also contains four songs, and as the title suggests, these pieces are more rhythmic and reflect the idioms of traditional Hungarian folk dances. "Diverse Songs" is the title of the third book, which contains seven songs, none directly traceable to a particular folk tradition. The last book is "New Style Songs," and unlike the other three books, its five tunes are numbered rather than titled.

The melodies of the original tunes are preserved in Bartók's settings; that is, they are not really developed or manipulated. Instead, they are set against, or sometimes intertwined with, highly virtuosic, relentlessly contrapuntal piano parts. The linearity of these songs is important: it results in not only in pianistic challenges, but also auditory ones, as Bartók's chromatic counterpoint creates a number of harsh dissonances. The piano parts of these songs clearly owe much to the piano music Bartók composed in 1926. During that year, Bartók wrote some of his most important piano works, including the Piano Sonata, the First Piano Concerto, and the Out of Doors suite. These pieces are works of considerable virtuosity, frequently dense polyphony, and percussive timbres. The piano parts in the Twenty Hungarian Folksongs are very similar in character, texture, and timbre to these large-scale piano works, and, uncharacteristic of folk song accompaniment, are almost virtuoso pieces by themselves.

Bartók's arrangements of these tunes, while harmonically and texturally complex, do not disregard the demands of the folk texts. As scholars have noted, Bartók employs not only dissonant music in this set, but also uses tonal effects for the purpose of word painting, including tonal sighing motives, and the musical depiction of bells. Furthermore, Bartók is able to follow the nuances of each text by employing through-composition rather than a more rigid strophic setting.

Stylistically, these folk song arrangements belong with Bartók's mature works, and the realization of one of his most important aesthetic principles. In retaining the original folk tunes unaltered and blending them with some of the richest, most complex, and most dissonant music of the early twentieth century, Bartók achieved a nearly perfect synthesis between music of the East and West, a synthesis that Bartók spent much of his life striving for.

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