Michael Cretu

Michael Cretu (Mihai Crețu, ; born 18 May 1957) is a Romanian-born German musician, composer and record producer.

Cretu was born on 18 May 1957 in Bucharest, Romanian People's Republic, to a Romanian father and Austrian mother.

In 1965, he studied the piano and classical music at Colegiul Tehnic Nr.

2 in Bucharest, followed by further study in Paris for five months in 1968.

Around this time, Cretu wished to pursue a career in pop music after listening to "Golden Slumbers" on Abbey Road (1969) by The Beatles, calling the song "beautiful".

After he informed his mother, Cretu recalled: "She goes, 'Aaargh! Disaster! Do you want to end up starving?'" In 1975, Cretu relocated to Bad Homburg, West Germany and studied at the Academy of Music in Frankfurt, where he graduated with a degree in musical composition in 1978.

Cretu went on to speak four languages.

After graduating from the Academy of Music, Cretu remained in West Germany and took up work as a session musician.

Among Cretu's first jobs was being taken on as keyboardist and producer for West-German recording artist Frank Farian, and playing keyboards on "Rivers of Babylon" by Boney M.

Cretu began a music career in 1976 as a solo artist and released numerous studio albums as well as writing and producing albums for his then-wife, German pop singer Sandra.

It contains the singles "Shadows Over My Head" and "Wild River" released in 1978, and "Moonlight Flower" and "Love Me" (the latter two singles became popular hits in the Philippines) from 1979.

Cretu's first solo album was released in 1979, titled Moon, Light & Flowers.

He also worked with artists through the 1980s, including Peter Cornelius, Hubert Kah, and Mike Oldfield.

Cretu was sometimes identified as "Curly" or "Curly M.C.", in reference to his curly hair and creț meaning "curly" in Romanian.

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.

In 1981, Cretu co-formed the West-German new wave band Moti Special with other session players.

His second album, Legionäre, was released in 1983 and features German lyrics sung by him.

Their debut album Motivation (1985) contained the single "Cold Days, Hot Nights" which became a hit around Europe.

Cretu's third solo album was titled Die Chinesische Mauer and was released in 1985.

The literal English translation is The Chinese Wall.

As with the second album, it features German lyrics sung by Cretu and is co-produced by Armand Volker.

This album was also released as a separate album with English-language lyrics and a different track listing under the name The Invisible Man.

Several of the tracks on The Invisible Man were edited slightly and, therefore, had different lengths than the German-language versions on Die Chinesische Mauer.

This featured the song "Samurai", which became a hit.

In 1985, Cretu produced, arranged and played the keyboards, drums, and programming on The Long Play (1985), the first studio album from West-German pop singer Sandra.

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.

The two began a relationship, and were married in 1988.

He gained worldwide fame as the founder and musician behind the musical project Enigma, which he formed in 1990.

Cretu scored an unexpected worldwide commercial hit with the debut Enigma album MCMXC a.D. (1990), helped by its lead single, "Sadeness (Part I)".

Cretu left the group before they released their second album in 1990.

In 1992, Cretu worked with Peter Cornelius on Return to Innocence, to provide the guitar riffs.

For the third album, Cretu teamed up with Jens Gad to work together on Le Roi Est Mort, Vive Le Roi! and launched in 1998 a new trance project Trance Atlantic Air Waves and the album The Energy of Sound.

He owned the A.R.T. Studios in Ibiza before moving to a new mansion in the Ibiza hills.

His former house, near Sant Antoni de Portmany on the western coast of Ibiza, was a Moroccan-style mansion that was designed and built by Bernd Steber and Gunter Wagner in more than nine years.

It also featured a new 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.

Cretu was encouraged to pursue a solo project by Oldfield, who was impressed by his studio production skills and musical ideas.

This led to the creation of his musical project Enigma, which Cretu said was born from the idea of making music that he himself liked, while bringing in a sense of mysticism.

Cretu continues to produce Enigma albums and singles; the most recent is The Fall of a Rebel Angel (2016), its eighth overall.

Enigma has sold an estimated 70 million albums worldwide, Cretu's management company Crocodile-Music stated that Cretu's produced recordings have sold 100 million copies worldwide.