CURRICULUM VITAE

Prof. Raluca Chifane-Wagenhäuser is not only a pianist with unique charisma on stage, but also a professor with skills that have been proven to bear extraordinary results even in the second generation of students.
Since 1997 she has been successfully teaching and training students in masterclasses and music camps in Europe and Asia. She has developed her own outstanding, brilliant style that combines artistic education with specific training methods and leads her students to significant successes. Many of them have won international competitions or professorships at well-known universities of their home countries.

Since 2003 she is the president of the ECM (European College of Music) in Germany and has been developing methods for teaching music to different generations (LLL=LifeLong Learning) – tailor-made, specific solutions for early childhood, youth, university, alumni and piano teachers and for the 3rd and 4th generations.

From 2008 to 2024, she has been teaching piano and chamber music at the Trossingen University of Music to students at all levels (BA, MA, PhD for piano performing). Numerous winners of international competitions testify to her fantastic work. Her students have also won the competitions of all piano classes at the university over the last 15 years and have been able to play with various orchestras piano concertos by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Liszt, Skryabin, Prokofiev, Ravel, Gershwin, Manuel de Falla and other composers.

Starting with 2015 she teaches piano and chamber music at the College of Arts and Media of the Tongji University in Shanghai. She is also a member of the team at the Interdisciplinary Sound Research Centre of the same university.

Since 2019 she has got also a guest professorship at the Dalian University in China.

Starting with 2025 Prof. Raluca Chifane-Wagenhäuser is the Founder and President of the Eurasian Collegium Musicum. The aim of this new Community is to bring the SilkRoad Tradition on a modern improved high level of existence involving the new generations of students and artists.
Being invited in 2025 to work as foreign expert for Education & Culture at the College of Arts and Media of the Tongji University she creates and develops together with renowned artists and professionals for applied sciences, projects with artistic interferences and researches based on humanity issues and humanitarian solutions as well as Piano mastercourses, concerts, competitions and art exhibitions.

Since she is interested in a lively, modern and sustainable offer of her holistic work, Raluca Chifane-Wagenhäuser initiates and implements the principle of a disruptive thinking in the music industry regarding education, music studies, artist management and concert life

Raluca Chifane-Wagenhäuser was born in Kronstadt and grew up in Bucharest Romania. She majored the piano performing degree at Colleges for high gifted musicians such as “G. Enescu” and “Dinu Lipatti” National College of Music. At the National University of Music Bucharest, she also graduated in music theory, music history and musicology, aesthetics, harmony, chamber music and Lied.

Winning a 2-year full Scholarship of the Land of Baden-Württemberg in Germany in 1994 she was able to brilliantly perform many years based on her well-structured technical skills and musical knowledges. She is a product of the Romanian, Russian, French and German piano schools she has learned, developed and since then exquisitely combines.

She owes a great deal to her exchanges with professors Boris Lvov, Victor Merzhanov and Wolfgang Wagenhäuser, whose suggestions she took on board and implemented in a highly independent manner from the outset while her study and soloist graduation "Summa cum Laude" at the Goldstein College of Music.

At the age of 11, she won first prize at the international Yamaha piano competition in Stresa, Italy. Further prizes as well as radio and television recordings followed. RCW regularly produces recordings.
She continuously plays and researches on the diversity of sound stiles existing in the entire European piano repertoire extended from Spain, Italy, Norway, France to Romania and Russia. But the German composers from the Baroque period, Classic, Romantic epoch through the Expressionism and Post-Romanticism have been from the very beginning her main Mentors. Those are still accompanying and leading her artistic interests which combined as well with her love for philosophy, meditation, architecture, foreign languages, physics and psychology are offering her undoubtable clear sources of inspiration.
Over the years Raluca Chifane-Wagenhäuser has published two books on piano playing and she continuously works on applied piano principles, sound techniques, as well as on fundamental aesthetic stiles.

Following this path, the pianist frequently tours in Asia and Europe with Concerts in famous locations such as Ongakudo Concert Hall, Bunka Hall Kanazawa, Qintai Concert Hall Wuhan, Shanghai Oriental Art Center, Romanian Atheneum or Weinbrenner Saal in Baden-Baden Germany.

For seven years from 2008 until 2014 as CEO of the European College of Music Prof. Raluca Chifane-Wagenhäuser has been the initiator and the artistic director of the Sommer Music Festival "Micul Paris" held in Bucharest- Romania.

The Festival took place under the patronage of the Presidential Office - Department for Culture and Religious Affairs and has been organized in cooperation with the National Romanian Radio Symphony Orchestra and the music lyceum "Dinu Lipatti".

Through this European project and cooperation with ECM, the lyceum was designated by the Ministery of Education into college, achieved higher status among all other music highschools in Bucharest and in the hole country and changed its name into the National College of Music "Dinu Lipatti".

Since 2017, she has been a regular special guest at the Russian Piano School festival in Shanghai. There she performs with former prizewinners of the most prestigious competitions, such as Tchaikovsky, Leeds and van Cliburn, and teaches in masterclasses alongside other prizewinners inspiring and delighting the very talented and well educated audience.

Raluca Chifane-Wagenhaeuser holds yearly intensive preparatory Master Courses for the entrance exams especially at German and European Music universities focusing on the divers but optimal repertoire and high-quality requirements. The success quote is impressive and is backgrounded by her own developed teaching system.
Her mentorship for piano artists is well known and very often required. A few years ago, being asked by several young university teachers, she started working on a new project with the main topic “Artistic piano pedagogy for the academic field”, since this subject of “Further training and artistic education” is not existent at any university in the world.

Last not least since 2008 she is regularly invited as a jury member at many and various national and international competitions all over the world.