Viorel Cosma (30 March 1923 – 15 August 2017) was a Romanian musician and teacher who came to wider prominence as an exceptionally prolific musicologist and a pioneering lexicographer.
[1][2][3] Viorel Cosma was born at Timișoara, the multi-ethnic economic and administrative capital of Banat, in the western part of the recently expanded Kingdom of Romania.
[3] Here he was taught by a number of Romania's leading composer-performers and musicologists, including Mihail Jora, Leon Klepper, Marțian Negrea, Constantin Silvestri, George Georgescu, Ion Dumitrescu, Dimitrie Cuclin and Zeno Vancea.
Translated into Russian and several of the principal languages of middle Europe, it was staged in Romania, Germany, the Soviet Union, Austria, Bulgaria, Belgium and the Netherlands.
Of particular note, he produced no fewer than 14 books devoted to Romania's best known composer-polymath, George Enescu (in Romanian, English, Russian, Japanese and Bulgarian).
[16] His musicological research spans five centuries, between 1500 and 2000, discovering or rediscovering the names of hundreds of Romanian artists who made musical careers in Romania and/or abroad.
It was indeed in part a reflection of Enescu's own international profile that Cosma travelled abroad on various occasion to deliver lectures on the Romanian composer, notably in France and in the United States.
[17] He also shared his specialisms in some of the western world's leading music lexicons and encyclopædias, contributing to "Grove's Dictionary", "Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart", the "Dictionnaire des interprètes et de l'interprétation musicale au XXe " of Alain Pâris, "Sohlmans musiklexikon" and other major publications with similar aspirations.