George Enescu

Who is George Enescu?

George Enescu was a Romanian composer, violinist, pianist, and conductor widely considered the most significant Romanian musician in history and among the leading musical figures of early twentieth-century Europe. A child prodigy, he entered the Vienna Conservatory at age seven and later studied composition and violin at the Paris Conservatoire under teachers including Jules Massenet and Gabriel Fauré. He achieved international fame both as a virtuoso violinist, performing and teaching pupils such as Yehudi Menuhin, and as a composer whose works blended Romanian folk idioms with French late-Romantic and modernist influences. His best-known compositions include the two "Romanian Rhapsodies," the opera "Oedipe," and numerous chamber and orchestral works that drew on the lăutar (folk fiddler) tradition of his homeland. Enescu divided his career between Romania, where he was a central figure in Bucharest's musical life, and Paris, where he ultimately settled and died in 1955. The George Enescu International Festival, founded in his honor and held in Bucharest, remains one of the most prestigious classical music festivals in Europe.

Sources: Noel Malcolm, George Enescu: His Life and Music (1990) · George Enescu, Souvenirs (memoirs, dictated to Bernard Gavoty, 1955) · George Enescu International Festival archives