Stefan Neaga
Stefan Neaga was a Moldavian Soviet composer, pianist, conductor, and music educator. He was born in Chisinau on November 24 (December 7), 1900, into the family of the traditional folk musician Timofey Neaga. He died in Chisinau on May 30, 1951, from heart disease.
Neaga completed his piano studies at the Chisinau Music School in 1917. He moved to Bucharest in 1920, where he performed with a folk-instrument orchestra and studied piano at the Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, graduating in 1927. He completed composition studies there in 1933. From 1937 to 1939, he pursued further study at the École Normale in Paris, taking composition with Nadia Boulanger, piano with Alfred Cortot, and conducting with Charles Münch.
After returning to Moldavia in 1940, Neaga took an active part in Chisinau's musical life. He taught at the Chisinau Conservatory in 1940–1941 and 1944–1950, helped establish the Union of Composers of Moldavia, and taught at the Moscow Conservatory while it was based in Saratov from 1942 to 1944. From 1947, he conducted the Moldavian State Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra. He chaired the board of the Union of Composers of the Moldavian SSR from 1946 to 1948.
Neaga's works helped establish the Moldavian Soviet school of composition. They include the Poem on the Dniester (1943); the cantatas Stephen the Great (1945), Bessarabians (1947), and Jubilee Cantata (1949); the oratorio Song of Rebirth (1951); a violin concerto (1943); chamber works; songs; and choral compositions. He received the second-degree Stalin Prize in 1950 and was named an Honored Artist of the Moldavian SSR in 1943.