Ionel Perlea was a composer, conductor, and music teacher of Romanian origin. He was born in Ograda to a Romanian father and a German mother. After his father died, the family moved to Germany. Perlea studied at the conservatories of Leipzig and Munich.
He made his conducting debut at a concert in Bucharest in 1919, then worked as a répétiteur in Leipzig from 1922 to 1923 and in Rostock from 1923 to 1925. He made his operatic debut in Cluj-Napoca in 1927, conducting Aida. From 1928 to 1934 he conducted at the National Theatre in Bucharest and from 1934 to 1944 served as its musical director. He led the Romanian premieres of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier.
Perlea also conducted in Vienna, Stuttgart, Breslau, Berlin, and Paris, including at the Opéra-Comique. After the war, he lived mainly in Italy and worked at La Scala in Milan from 1947 to 1952. In Italy he conducted premieres including Capriccio in Genoa, Mazepa, and The Maid of Orleans in Florence. During the 1949–50 season, he was a guest conductor at the Metropolitan Opera, where he conducted Tristan und Isolde, Rigoletto, La traviata, and Carmen.
His repertoire also included Saint-Saëns’s Samson and Delilah, Mozart’s Così fan tutte, Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, Strauss’s Salome, Massenet’s Werther, and Beethoven’s Fidelio. After suffering a stroke in 1957, he conducted using only his left hand. From 1952 to 1969, he taught at the Manhattan School of Music.