Anatol Vieru

Anatol Vieru (Iași, 1926 – Bucharest, 1998) was one of the Romanian composers of greatest international standing in the second half of the twentieth century, and also a music theorist. His output, ranging from opera and symphony to chamber music and film, clearly reflects the aesthetic changes in his country over several decades, from socialist realism to a more personal style, more detached from the avant-garde.

He trained at the Bucharest Conservatory between 1946 and 1951, with teachers including Constantinescu, Rogalski, Silvestri and Klepper, and then studied at the Moscow Conservatory with Khachaturian. His time in the Soviet capital brought him into deep contact with Russian music, an influence that remained in his writing. He resumed his studies in 1958 and obtained his doctorate in 1978 at the Dima Conservatory in Cluj-Napoca with a thesis on modes and an intervallic model of musical thought, which he later set out in Cartea modurilor. The theorist Dan Vuza later formulated that model in mathematical terms.

Vieru combined composition with intensive teaching and editorial work. He conducted at the National Theatre in Bucharest and served as editor-in-chief of the journal Muzica, the organ of the Union of Romanian Composers. From 1955 he taught orchestration at the Bucharest Conservatory and, between 1970 and 1997, he gave classes and lectures at institutions as varied as Sarah Lawrence College, the Juilliard School and the conservatories of Moscow and Jerusalem. In 1973 he spent time in West Berlin on a DAAD scholarship. That same year, 1970, he founded the Parallel Musics concert series in Bucharest, devoted to relating contemporary music to earlier styles, above all the pre-Classical.

His work went through clearly distinct phases. After the patriotic songs and large choral works of the Stalinist years, he adopted avant-garde elements in the 1960s and 1970s and then showed a neoclassical tendency around 1980. As early as Mioriţa (1957) he tested a personal method based on modes and serial technique, with a polystylistic effect. Opera occupies a central place in his output; in Iona, Praznicul calicilor and Ultimele zile, ultimele ore his sense of instrumental colour and of parody stands out, which he linked to Luca Caragiale's satire of corrupt nineteenth-century Romania. His last works convey a calmer musical personality, further removed from confrontational expression.

His legacy is measured by the breadth of his catalogue, which includes seven symphonies, string quartets and numerous chamber works, and by his honours, among them the Enescu Prize, the Grand Prize of 1996 for his career, and international distinctions in Geneva, New York and Vienna. At the end of the 1990s he was probably the Romanian composer best known outside his country.