Allegro barbaro for solo piano is one of Bartók's most famous pieces, and one of his most frequently performed compositions. This piece typifies Bartók's early compositional esthetic in many respects, most obviously in its use of folk elements drawn from Hungarian, Romanian, and Slovak folk music traditions. This combination of Eastern European folk tunes results in interesting melodic and harmonic textures, especially in the blending of Hungarian and Romanian scales: the former are largely pentatonic or whole tone, while the latter are more chromatic. Bartók also uses modal scales in this piece. The work is quite long—over 200 measures—and is comprised of a number of contrasting sections. The rhythmic repetition of the accompaniment is reflected in the melody, which features repeating motives surrounding a single pitch.

Bartók's discovery of Eastern European folk music, and his use of it in his compositions, parallels the musical development of one of his contemporaries, Igor Stravinsky. Like Bartók, Stravinsky began employing dance rhythms and folk tunes in the first decades of the twentieth century. In Bartók's Allegro barbaro, the use of pounding ostinatos suggest a number of Stravinsky's contemporaneous compositions. While it is not known how well Bartók knew Stravinsky's music around 1910-1911, by the early '20s it is almost certain that Bartók was familiar with many of Stravinsky's works, and this familiarity is more immediately evident in the former's piano music of the 1920s.

Bartók's Allegro barbaro is an example of what could be called integrated folk style; that is, like Stravinsky, Bartók's knowledge and understanding of folk music traditions became highly developed, so much so that both composers were able to construct "authentic" folk material as part of their own compositional idiom. Neither Stravinsky nor Bartók could be said to be simply borrowing or quoting folk material; instead, they created their own. Bartók himself wrote that, in using folk music, the composer's goal should be "to assimilate the idiom of folk music so completely that he is able to forget all about it." Useful parallels may be drawn between the Allegro barbaro and two of Stravinsky's works: The Rite of Spring and The Wedding. Bartók's piece is similar to the "Rite" in that the "primitive" is strongly evoked, particularly in the forceful rhythmic figures. In The Wedding, which was completed some years after the Allegro barbaro, the difficulty in distinguishing between authentic and new folk material recalls Bartók's accomplished integration of folk material. Many scholars see the Allegro barbaro as a pivotal moment in Bartók's stylistic development: after it, his music began to display the characteristics of his mature works, including complex, carefully crafted structure, percussive piano timbres, clear, spare textures, and harmonic color employed with confidence.

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