George Enescu

The fact that Liveni – the village in northeast Romania where George Enescu was born – is now named "George Enescu" is a good indicator of his stature in his native country. A child prodigy on the violin, he studied in Vienna (where he played before Brahms) before travelling to Paris, where his composition teachers included Fauré and Massenet. But it was as a virtuoso violinist that Enescu was best known in his lifetime; resident principally in France but retaining close ties with his native Romania, where he was regarded as a national hero, with his own private apartment in the royal castle of Peleş. His violin pupils included Yehudi Menuhin (who considered him "the most extraordinary human being, the greatest musician" he had ever known) but Enescu is remembered today principally for his own compositions, which include three powerful and expansive late-romantic symphonies (1905–1918), a vigorous body of string chamber music and three striking Violin Sonatas, of which the Third (1926) adopts a virtuosic and harmonically daring folk style. His opera Oedipe (1931) is arguably his masterpiece, but his two exuberant orchestral Romanian Rhapsodies (1901) remain phenomenally popular in Romania, where Enescu's name appears on conservatories, concert halls, banknotes and even an airport.