Miklós Bretán

As a director, Bretan staged works by fellow Romanian composers—Brediceanu, Drăgoi, Monţia, Negrea—as well as by members of the European canon further afield: Mozart, Gluck, Wagner, Verdi, Puccini, others. He was named director-general of the Romanian Theater and Opera of Cluj in 1944.

In October 2013, another bust, also the work of the sculptor Ana Rus, was unveiled at the central alley of "Simion Barnuțiu" Park in Cluj, being donated to the city by the composer's daughter. Another bust is placed at the Iuliu Maniu Square in Alba Iulia, and is standing next to Lucian Blaga's bust.

In November 2011, at the Tudor Jarda Music High School in Bistrița, Bretan's bronze bust, made by the artist Ana Rus from Bucharest, was unveiled at the initiative of Judit Bretan Le Bovit, the composer's daughter.

In 2010, two busts of the composer busts were inaugurated in Cluj-Napoca. One in front of the Romanian National Opera, Cluj-Napoca, and another in front of the Cluj-Napoca Hungarian Opera.

Refusing to become a member of the Romanian Communist Party in 1948, he was not favoured by the Romanian communist regime, who treated the composer as a "non-person". Biographer Hartmut Gagelmann attributes Bretan's lack of wider recognition to censorship by the Communist Party of Romania, though this claim has been disputed by contemporary scholars.

Bretan also worked as a translator of libretti, translating his own Luceafărul into Hungarian and Golem into Romanian and German. In 1928 he translated Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice into Romanian.

Bretan composed six operatic works. His best-known work is the opera Luceafărul (1921) based on a poem by the Romantic poet Mihai Eminescu. In addition, he composed numerous lieder, a requiem, and several pieces of sacred music—as well as a handful of choral, chamber, and orchestral pieces.

He was an actor, known for A Gyurkovics leányok (1917), A Métely (1918) and Din Grozaviile lumii (1920).

In 1915 Bretan married pianist Nora Osvát. In 1944, Osvát's family, who were Jewish, were transported to the Auschwitz concentration camp and murdered.

In addition to composing, Bretan held various positions as baritone singer, actor, stage director, and director-general. He made his professional debut as a singer in 1913 in Bratislava, continuing on to roles in Oradea and at the Hungarian Theatre of Cluj, where he served as first baritone from 1922 to 1940. Over his career he performed works by Verdi, Gounod, Bizet, Puccini, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Delibes, and Rossini.

Bretan was born in Năsăud. He studied at the Conservatory of Cluj (1906–1908), the Vienna Music Academy (1908) where he studied with Gustav Geiringer and Julius Meixner. In 1912 he enrolled at the National Hungarian Royal Academy of Music in Budapest. In 1916, he received a degree in law at the University of Cluj.

Between 1900 and 1962, Bretan wrote over 200 lieder based on texts by Endre Ady, Eminescu, Octavian Goga, Heinrich Heine, Nikolaus Lenau, and others. Bretan primarily chose poetic texts in Romanian, Hungarian, and German, occasionally penning his own translation of the source material into another of the three languages.

Miklós Bretán was born on March 25, 1887 in Naszód, Hungary.