Sándor Veress, who was born in 1907 at Kolozsvár, a major town of Transylvania (now Cluj, Rumania), studied at the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, with Kodály for composition, Bartók for piano, and Lajtha for folksong research. From the age of twenty he was a prolific composer, of marked individuality—already strongly evident in the works of his first period, written in a very distinctive neo-classical contrapuntal idiom with strong national inflexions. By 1939 he had produced an impressive body of works, including two powerful and concentrated string quartets, a series of witty chamber-music sonatinas (1931–33) and the more expansive Violin Sonata No.2 (1939), a Partita for small orchestra (1936), the lyrical and poetic two-movement Violin Concerto (1937–39), a ‘Transylvanian Cantata’ for mixed chorus (1935), anda ballet The Magic Flute(1937).