Anatol Vieru

The Romanian composer Anatol Vieru (1926–1998) was born into a Jewish family in Jassy, one of the cultural centres of eastern Romania. As an adolescent, he survived the pogrom in his hometown, which claimed the lives of 13,000 Jewish people in June 1941. After the war, Vieru studied composition and conducting in Bucharest and in Moscow, where Aram Khachaturian was one of his teachers. From 1955, Vieru himself taught at the Bucharest Conservatory and was appointed Professor of Composition in 1962. He is considered to be one of the defining personalities in Romanian music, founded a concert series and distinguished himself as a conductor.

Anatol Vieru repeatedly spent lengthy periods in the West. He participated in the Darmstadt Summer School and taught both in Israel and in the US. Vieru’s compositional oeuvre is expansive and diverse, and displays a remarkable stylistic development from its beginnings, which were influenced by Socialist Realism, via an avant-garde phase to a rather neo-classicist position. Vieru dedicated a great deal of his studies to the world of tonal scales and dedicated theoretical studies to this field.