Bartók worked as a piano teacher for most of his life. He began to give piano lessons as a teenager while still in Pozsony, and eventually succeeded his own teacher, István Thomán, at the Budapest Academy of Music in 1907, where he taught for nearly thirty years. During his last years in America he maintained private students. If, ironically, piano teaching was not his primary musical and creative focus, falling rather distantly behind composition, folksong study and performance, he was nevertheless a conscientious and thorough teacher. Although a few notable performers, such as György Sándor, emerged from his studio, he never established the kind of following enjoyed by his colleague at the Academy, Ernoʺ Dohnányi. Piano teaching provided a basic source of income that enabled him to devote himself to his more compelling occupations. Bartók's greatest pedagogical contributions may be, therefore, not a pianistic legacy through his students, but the creative results of applications of his compositional work to teaching purposes. From the beginning his pedagogical ideas were bound up with folksong study, which was the primary catalyst in the development of his unique musical language. As he wrote much later, in 1940: