Béla Viktor János Bartók (1881-1945). Hungarian composer and pianist Béla Bartók was born in the small town of in the Kingdom of Hungary, Austria-Hungary (since 1920 Sânnicolau Mare, or “Great St. Nicholas,” Romania). He got his first piano lessons from his mother, but from the age of 18 he studied under a student of another great Hungarian composer, Franz Liszt (1811-1886). At the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest he met Zoltán Kodály (1882-1967), becoming lifelong friends. Not only did Kodály influence Bartók’s music, he was also heavily influenced by the music of Richard Strauss (1864-1949), whom he met in 1902, by the French composer Claude Debussy (1862-1918), by Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) and by old Magyar folk melodies. Indeed, Bartók was one of the founders of study of ethnomusicology, a passion in which his friend Kodály joined him, studying and incorporating much Hungarian country music into his own compositions.