Béla Bartók

It was on March 25, 1881, that Hungarian composer and pianist Béla Bartók was born Béla Viktor János Bartók in the small Banatian town of Nagyszentmiklós 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.