10 Of The Greatest Romanian Composers You Should Know

Start with: “Romanian Rhapsody No. 1”Teacher of Yehudi Menuhin

George Enescu was born in Liveni, a village later renamed George Enescu in his honor. A child prodigy, he wrote a piece for violin and piano at the age of five, and at seven became the youngest student ever admitted to the Vienna Conservatory. He went on to study in Paris with Massenet and Fauré, and the Colonne Orchestra premiered his Poème roumain when he was 16.

He was a great violinist and teacher as well as a composer, and Yehudi Menuhin was his most famous pupil. His two Romanian Rhapsodies (1901) are his best-known works, built on folk tunes. His only opera, Œdipe, premiered in Paris in 1936 and was staged at London’s Royal Opera House for the first time in 2016.

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Start with: “Bruckner’s Symphony No. 8, conducted by Celibidache”

Sergiu Celibidache was a conductor, composer and teacher, best known as one of the great conductors of the 20th century. Raised in Iași, he studied in Bucharest, Paris and Berlin, where German officials misspelled his surname Celebidachi as Celibidache, and the new spelling stuck. In Berlin he also took up Zen Buddhism, which shaped his ideas about music for the rest of his life.

After World War II he led the Berlin Philharmonic as principal conductor from 1945 to 1952, and from 1979 until his death he was music director of the Munich Philharmonic. He refused to release studio recordings, believing music could only be fully experienced live. His career was also marked by a long legal fight brought by the trombonist Abbie Conant, which the courts decided in her favor.

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Start with: “Romanian Folk Dances”Pioneer of ethnomusicology

Béla Bartók was born in Nagyszentmiklós, now Sânnicolau Mare in Romania. He wrote his first piece, The Course of the Danube, as a boy and played it at his first public recital at 11. In 1903 he wrote his first major orchestral work, the symphonic poem Kossuth.

With Zoltán Kodály he recorded thousands of folk songs, including Hungarian, Slovak and Romanian melodies, and became one of the founders of ethnomusicology. That research shaped his own music, from the Romanian Folk Dances to his only opera, Bluebeard’s Castle (1911), and the Concerto for Orchestra. He became a US citizen in 1945, shortly before he died in New York.

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Start with: “Atmosphères”

György Ligeti was born to a Hungarian Jewish family in Dicsőszentmárton, now Târnăveni in Romania, and grew up in Cluj. His studies were interrupted by forced labor during World War II. He graduated from the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest in 1949 and researched the folk music of Transylvania, but the Communist authorities restricted what he could write.

After fleeing to Austria in 1956 he worked in the electronic studio in Cologne, then made his breakthrough with Atmosphères, built from dense clouds of sound he called micropolyphony. Stanley Kubrick used his music in 2001: A Space Odyssey. He later wrote the opera Le Grand Macabre and three books of piano études, and taught in Hamburg until 1989.

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Start with: “Metastaseis”Architect and composer

Iannis Xenakis was born in Brăila, Romania, to Greek parents, and was sent to school in Greece, where he sang Palestrina and Mozart in the boys’ choir. In the resistance during World War II he was badly wounded by shrapnel from a tank shell, losing the sight of one eye.

He fled to Paris, where he worked for the architect Le Corbusier and designed the Philips Pavilion for the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. He brought the same mathematical thinking to music. Metastaseis (1953–54) gives every player in the orchestra an independent part, and later works used probability and the physics of gases to shape masses of sound.

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Start with: “Waves of the Danube”Over 300 works

Ion Ivanovici was born in Timișoara, then in the Austrian Empire, to a Banat Serbian family, and was given a flute as a child. He spent most of his life in Galați, rose to officer rank in the Romanian army as a military bandmaster, and in 1900 became general inspector of military music.

He wrote more than 300 works, but one waltz made him famous: Waves of the Danube, known in German as Donauwellen. First published in Bucharest in 1880, it found a new audience in the United States in 1946, when Al Jolson and Saul Chaplin adapted it as “The Anniversary Song”. In 1889 he also won the march competition for the Paris World Exhibition, beating 116 other entries.

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Start with: “Kafka Fragments”

György Kurtág was born in Lugoj, Romania, to Hungarian Jewish parents, and moved to Budapest in 1946, where he studied at the Franz Liszt Academy and became a close friend of Ligeti. A year in Paris in 1957 and 1958, studying with Messiaen and Milhaud and discovering Webern and Beckett, sent him into a crisis, and therapy with Marianne Stein taught him to build music from the smallest gestures.

The string quartet he wrote on his return in 1959 became his Opus 1. His music is famous for its tiny, intense movements: Kafka Fragments sets 40 short extracts from Kafka for soprano and violin. He taught at the Liszt Academy until 1993, and his opera Fin de partie, after Beckett’s Endgame, premiered at La Scala in 2018.

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Start with: “Le Grand Blond avec une chaussure noire”🏆 Two Césars

Vladimir Cosma was born in Bucharest into a family of musicians and won first prizes in violin and composition at the Bucharest Conservatory. In 1963 he moved to Paris to continue at the Conservatoire, working with Nadia Boulanger, and soon developed a passion for jazz and film music alongside his classical work.

His first film score was Yves Robert’s Alexandre le Bienheureux in 1968, and he has since written more than 300 scores for film and television, including Le Grand Blond avec une chaussure noire, with Gheorghe Zamfir on pan flute, and Les Aventures de Rabbi Jacob. He won César awards for Diva (1981) and Le Bal (1984).

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Start with: “Fantasia No. 1”

Bálint Bakfark was born around 1507 in Brassó, now Brașov in Romania, to a Transylvanian Saxon family. Raised at the court of John Zápolya in Buda, he became one of the most admired lute virtuosos of the Renaissance, and from 1549 to 1566 he was court lutenist to Sigismund II Augustus of Poland.

His first book, the Intabulatura, was printed in Lyon in 1553. His surviving fantasias and arrangements of motets, madrigals and chansons are remarkable for keeping every vocal line intact on a single lute, and they were said to be too hard for most players. He died of plague in Padua in 1576, and most of his manuscripts were burned with his belongings, as was the practice for plague victims.

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Start with: “Speaking Drums”

Péter Eötvös was born in Székelyudvarhely, now Odorheiu Secuiesc in Romania, though his family fled when he was one. He entered the Franz Liszt Academy at 14 on Kodály’s advice, and as a teenager was already writing for theater and film. In 1966 he followed Kurtág and Ligeti to Cologne, where he worked with Karlheinz Stockhausen as performer, engineer and copyist.

Pierre Boulez chose him to lead the Ensemble InterContemporain, which he directed from 1979 to 1991, and he was principal guest conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra from 1985 to 1988. As a composer he was best known for his operas, including Three Sisters (1998), after Chekhov, Lady Sarashina and Love and Other Demons.

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