Violeta Dinescu

Violeta Dinescu was born in Bucharest on 13 July 1953 and is one of the best-known Romanian composers outside her country, where she developed her work before settling in Germany. Her career is best understood against the backdrop of Romania at the time, a totalitarian regime in which avant-garde composers asserted their tendencies against a highly restrictive ideology.

She studied composition with Marbe at the Academy in Bucharest, where she obtained her bachelor's degree in 1977 and her master's degree in 1978. Between 1978 and 1982 she taught at the George Enescu Lyceum. In 1982 she won a scholarship to study in the Federal Republic of Germany and decided to remain there. She taught at the Higher School of Sacred Music in Heidelberg, at the conservatoires in Frankfurt and Bayreuth, and in 1996 she became Professor of Applied Composition at the University of Oldenburg. Her works have been performed around the world, and she has lectured in Europe, South Africa and the United States.

Her language combines openness to new techniques and systems with an inspiration that never becomes subordinate to them. During her study of Romanian folk music, between 1972 and 1978, she incorporated features such as rubato, variable pulses, heterophony and a rhapsodic melodic character. This influence is central, though it does not confine a style that is often complex, experimental and written in a virtuosic instrumental idiom. In works such as Anna Perenna (1979) she employs mathematical operations, with numerical sequences and ratios generating the musical material.

Her legacy lies in having united folk tradition and the avant-garde in a personal idiom, through a broad output that encompasses stage, orchestra, chamber music and voice.