Michael Cretu

Michael Cretu has created a lot since his birth on May 18th, 1957 in Bucharest, the capital of Romania, Europe. He studied music there during the early years of life, but studies also brought him to Paris (France) and Frankfurt (Germany), ultimately earning him a degree in 1978.

Cretu was born to a Romanian father and an Austrian mother in Romania, Iasi. His uncle is Ion Voicu, a Romanian violin-player and former director of the Bucharest Philarmonic told Michael's parents that he had talent in music and as such, he studied classical music at Liceul Nr. 2 in Bucharest in 1965 and in Paris, France, in 1968. He later attended the Academy of Music in Frankfurt, Germany, from 1975 to 1978, attaining a degree in music. Cretu was taken on as a keyboard player and producer for Frank Farian.

In the 1980s, Cretu took over production for the pop quartet Hubert Kah and started writing songs with the band leader Hubert Kemmler, achieving a number of hits. Among his other work, Cretu was also one of the producers of Mike Oldfield's 1987 album Islands and the producer of Peter Schilling's 1989 The Different Story (World of Lust and Crime) album.

For the third album, Cretu teamed up with Jens Gad to work together on Le Roi Est Mort, Vive Le Roi! and launched in 1999 a new trance project Trance Atlantic Airwaves and the album The Energy of Sound.

He owns the A.R.T. Studios in Ibiza before moving to a new mansion in the Ibiza hills. His new house, near Sant Antoni de Portmany on the western coast of Ibiza, is a Moroccan-style mansion that was designed and built by Bernd Steber and Gunter Wagner in more than nine years. It also features a brand new, state-of-the-art recording studio. The Spanish High Court deemed the house to have been built illegally and in infringement of Spanish environmental regulations which led to the €18 million villa being razed in May 2009.

After Cretu's marriage to Sandra in 1988, he had an idea for a musical new-age dance project under the name of Enigma, presented by Fairstein. Cretu worked with Frank Peterson and David Fairstein to create their ground-breaking first single "Sadeness (Part I)", which became a surprise hit. MCMXC a.D., the album, which was released in 1990, was hugely successful.

Cretu was approached by Paramount Pictures to write the soundtrack of the movie Sliver and he came up with another 1993 single "Carly's Song" after the main female character's name.

In 1996 Enigma's third album Le Roi est mort, vive le Roi! was released. Stylistically, it sounded like a combination of the first and second albums, but it failed to achieve the same level of success.

In 1999 Cretu steered the project in another direction by using samples of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana for the fourth album The Screen Behind the Mirror, released in 2000. Andru Donalds and Ruth-Ann Boyle first appeared as features on this Enigma project. Although Jens Gad had been working with Cretu on the earlier albums, this was the first time that he had been given actual credits.