Enescu in Bucharest

Author(s): Noel Malcolm

Source: Tempo, New Series, No. 140 (Mar., 1982), pp. 31-34
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/944838 .
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 FIRST PERFORMANCES 3

and amplified-supposedly to penetrate the thick blanket of string sound. Alas,

balancewas the main problem in both performances. The complex rhythms in the
winds, well rehearsed by Richard Orton and other rehearsal conductors, did not
come across at all clearly. On the first night only tuba and vibraphone could be
heard clearly, and the second night was still not ideal in this respect.
In addition to instrumental sound the work employs a tape that contains a
weaving shuttle noise to co-ordinate it with the orchestra-this, like the gauze,
lighting, and rows of string players, Stockhausen maintains appeared to him in a
dream. The work also contains four 'events', the most prominent of them a
trumpet solo, excellently performed on both nights by David Lancaster. The
drummer's part in the viola 'event' was the least effective, as this production
allowed him little room to move on and off the stage: as a result he could not
make a real gesture of his solo. There is no denying, however, that these perform-
ances under Richard Orton were of a basically high standard, and symbolized the
positive attributes of York University's Music Department.

Enescu in Bucharest
Noel Malcolm

SOMETHINGwould clearly be amiss if Martinfuwere known to the concert-goer

only as the composer of a Bohemian Rhapsody, or Szymanowski only for a
Polish one. Yet this is what has happened in the West to George Enescu, whose
centenary (his dates were 188I-19 g) was celebrated last autumn in Bucharest
with a special edition of the triennial Festival which bears his name. The Festival
was not well publicized abroad, and one reason for Enescu's neglect must be that
Romania is less successful as an advertiser and exporter of its music than many
of its neighbours-Supraphon is a household name, Electrecord is not. This
certainly does not reflect any lack of enthusiasm within Romania, where Enescu
is revered as both the foundation and the summit of modern Romanian music.
But even the reverence of his compatriots may in some ways work against the
wider understanding of Enescu's music; by insisting almost possessively on the
national importance of his work, they contribute to the false impression that he
was, by European standards, a figure of merely provincial significance.
This impression could at times be felt during the three-day symposium with
which the Festival began. Again and again, we were told that Enescu expressed
the spirit of Romanian folk-music, of the Romanian landscape, or even, as the
Chinese pianist Li Ming-Chang informed us, of Romanian vegetation. This
tendency reached its nadir with the showing, at the symposium, of the television
film 'Poema Romana', in which an assortment of suitably Romanian images ac-
companied Enescu's early symphonic suite of that name. The piece, while in-
dubitably Romanian in its programme, is also slightly tedious, with a main sub-
ject which sounds like Fingal's Caveplayed at i6 r.p.m.; it was livened up on the
film by a multiplying lens which could repeat the same image 24 times in a grid.
Regiments of shepherds followed regiments of sheep, over the Carpathians and
far away. Enescu needs this sort of help as much as Fingal's Cave needs plastic
sporrans.

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32 TEMPO

For Enescu was, in fact, one of the most universal figures of his time in
European music. Having studied at the Conservatories of Vienna and Paris, he
combined many elements of the Germanic and French traditions. His phenomenal
memory absorbed almost the entire classical canon (including, Menuhin tells us,
58 volumes of the Bach-Gesellschaft edition), and his career as violinist, pianist,
conductor, and teacher brought him into contact with most major European
composers from Brahms to Shostakovich. Two of the best papers at the sympos-
ium were on his relations with the music of France and Italy, by Alain Paris and
Roman Vlad respectively; the latter (himself Romanian by origin) gave some new
details about Enescu's influence on the compositions of Vlad's own teacher,
Casella.
More papers about the contexts of Enescu's musical life would have been
welcome, especially for the crucial period, in Paris from i 895 to the First World
War, when he was working his way through the entire range of available styles
and influences. He arrived in Paris having already, as he later put it, absorbed
Wagner into his bloodstream; he was thus a natural candidate for a place in the
Franckian tradition. A definite Chausson-Duparc style can indeed be heard in
some of his early works (e.g. the op. 4 songs, I898; the Piano Quartet op. 16,
1909; and the posthumously-published Piano Trio, 19I 6), complete with some
mild attacks of Chaussonitis, the compulsive filling-in of the piano part with
tremolo and arpeggio figurations1. But he w-asheld back from unqualified adher-
ence to this tradition by what he learned from Faure; his profound debt to Faure
can be heard, for example, in the harmonic delicacy and linear fluency of one of
his most successful early works, the Second Violin Sonata (op. 6, 1899). As a
pupil of Massenet, Faure, and Ge(dalgeat the Conservatoire, his circle of fellow-
students and friends included Ravel, Charles Koechlin, Florent Schmitt, and
Roger-Ducasse.2 With Ravel he assimilated the music of Debussy (Enescu and
Ravel went together to the repe'tition gerneraleof Pelleas); Enescu's Second Suite
for Piano (op. 10, 1903) is full of Debussian inflections. This list of influences
could be continued, for instance with his debt to Strauss in his orchestral writing;
but it would be wrong to think of the early Enescu as a mere weather-vane of
musical fashions. Sometimes he was actually in advance of the styles he was
'copying': for example, parts of the First Piano Quartet (op. 16, 1909) anticipate
the later chamber works of Faure's last decade. Some of his works seem to fit
no available category, such as the extraordinary and powerful Octet for Strings
(op. 7, I900). Some aspects of his writing are more or less constant, notably his
fascination with polyphonic textures (which does not point directly at any par-
ticular model or 'influence'). And in the course of all these early steps in various
stylistic directions, Enescu was following inner requirements, selecting and
accumulating the expressive resources needed for a musical language which was
to be utterly individual.
The turning-point came with Enescu's completion, at the end of the First
World War, of his Third Symphony. Appropriately, this was included in the

I The dates are of completion of composition (excluding any subsequent revisions). Enescu was unaware,
when he wrote the op.4 songs, that two of his texts had already been set by Duparc; see M. Voicana (ed.)
GeorgeEnescu, Monografie, (Bucharest, 1971) vol. I pp. I8 i, 187. His early Wagnerianism is described in
Les Souvenirsde GeorgeEnescu,ed. B. Gavoty (Paris, i193), pp. 5, 88.
2 Gedalge's pupils, in addition to these four contemporaries of Enescu, also included Nadia Boulanger,
Honegger, Milhaud and Ibert. Of all these, Gedalge wrote in 1923, Enescu was 'the only one to have real
ideas and inspiration'.-M. Pincherle, The World of the Virtuoso(London, 1964) p.sII .

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 FIRST PERFORMANCES 33

opening concert of the Festival. Less appropriately, it was preceded by a woman

wearing a bow-tie who spoke for ten minutes about the significance of Enescu for
the development of socialism. She did not mention, however, that the order of
the programme had been reversed, and I wondered how many foreign members
of the audience heard the symphony for the first and only time in their lives and
went away thinking it was Theodor Grigoriu's Homage to Enescu. The Third
Symphony is usually presented as one of the summits of Enescu's achievement; it
fits the approved pattern of a composer's oeuvre culminating in a choral symphony.
In fact it is the culmination only of Enescu's romantic symphonic style. It is
richly scored and luxurious in harmony; yet the music is so continuously phrased
and shaped by such a persistently strong emotional charge that it begins to assume
an utterly impersonal air of rhetorical monumentality.
Enescu apparentlyneeded to get this self-defeating opulence outof his system,
for within a few years he had at last found and formed his own musical language.
The result, or rather the occasion, was his opera Oedipe, of which the first com-
plete (though unscored) draft was written between the summer of I92I and
November I922. Two different performances of the opera were given during
the Festival. The one I went to was semi-staged, that is, in costume with a mini-
mum of stage action (but some dancing) on a concert-hall stage without a set.
This was not as unsatisfactory as it may sound, since the opera is dramatically a
very static work; very little actually happens on stage, and most scenes are
securely anchored by a chorus which has a large but passive role. The opera owes
all its dramatic tension to the music itself. And there can be few scenes in mod-
ern opera comparable, for sheer ever-increasing tension, with the third act of
Oedipe, in which the hero gradually discovers, through his interrogation of
Tiresias and the shepherd, first that the man he killed was Laios and then that he
is that man's son. By this point, the lack of a few props was immaterial; the
audience seemed to be literally holding its breath.
That this music should have such a direct and powerful effect is a tribute to
the way which Enescu constructed what is in fact a score of great harmonic and
rhythmic complexity. There is a constant tendency towards polyphonic writing,
producing elaborate rhythmic cross-currents and frequent chromatic shiftings
of the music's harmonic centre. At times it is possible to detect the flavour of
Romanian folk-scales, but they have been so thoroughly assimilated into Enescu's
idiom that they can scarcely be set apart from other ingredients such as the
Faurean modal style3. The scoring is often both light in texture and dark in
sonority; this is achieved to a large extent by a skilful use of the lower range of
the woodwind (especially bass clarinet and contra-bassoon). Some of the more
intricate melodic details tend to get lost in performance, because they have been
entrusted to a solo string instrument or to single notes on the piano; this exces-
sive lightness of touch may partly be explained by the composer's remark, in a
letter to Gaubert (who conducted the premiere), that 'II y a le role d'Oedipe qui
est lourd. J'ai orchestre aussi doucement que j'ai pu, de facon qu'il puisse se
menager . . .'4 But it also reflects a growing tendency in Enescu's later work

3 Another source of modal scales was the Byzantine liturgical music of the Romanian Orthodox Church.
Work has only recently begun, among Romanian musicologists, on Enescu's debt to this source; perhaps it
was previously suspected of being culturally retrograde. But when Enescu was asked, in a newspaper inter-
view of 1928, about the future of Romanian music, he replied: 'I myself think that the most important,
necessary and urgently useful work that needs to be done in Romanian music is the recovery of church
music' (R. Dianu, 'Cu d. George Enescu despre el si despre altii', in Rampa, 23 Jul. 1928, p.3).
4 Letter dated 4 Sept. 1934, published in La RevueRoumained'Histoire de lArt, V (I968) p. 182.

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34 TEMPO

towards the individual characterization of each thread of his musical texture, a

tendency which, in addition, led him to specify in minute detail every inflection
of tempo, dynamic, timbre, and mood in each instrumental part. (In the process,
he bowed and sometimes fingered all his string parts, thus breaking the Keller
Rule that composers who are also expert violinists do not interfere in such
matters. Enescu, incidentally, was also an expert cellist.)
This development helps to explain why much of his best later work took the
form of chamber music. In these works (especially the Piano Quintet op. 29,
1940; the Second Piano Quartet op. 30, i944; and the Second String Quartet
op. 22 no. 2, 1951) the idiom is further refined; the expressive intensity of the
instrumental lines is restrained and enhanced by a harmonic atmosphere of elusive
suspensions. Unfortunately, these works were least well represented at the
Festival; only the comparatively early First Piano Sonata (op. 24 no. i, 1924) was
offered, in a finely contemplative performance by Vlad Dimulescu. But it would
be churlish to complain of a Festival (of more than 40 concerts) which included
no fewverthan 23 works by Enescu. At present, one could not hope to hear as
many of this in a lifetime of English concert-going. Only when Enescu ceases to
be thought of as a mere violinist-composer, or as a mere folklorist, will there be
some grounds for hope.

JONATHAN Worksavailablefrom our

hire library
HARVEY Smiling Immortal (1977)for
Inner Light 2 (1977for voices chamber orchestra
and ensemble full score ?7-00 Veils and Melodies (1978)for
prepared tapes three
Magnificatand N7uncDimittis Album
(1978) for choir and organ ?1-75 (1978)for wind quintet
O Jseu NomenDulce (1979) Hymn (1979) for chorus and orchestra
Motet for SATB ?0-80 Becoming (1979)forclarinetandpiano
Passion and Resurrection Concelebration(1979/81)for five
(1981) Libretto ?1-00. To be shown players
on BBC 1 on Easter Sunday (11 April) Toccata (1980)for organand
at 9.40 p.m. prerecorded tape
Resurrection (1981)for double MortuosPlango, VivosVocem
choir and organ ?3-50 (1989) for prerecordedtape
String Quartet (1977)study score ModernskyMusic (1981)for four
in preparation. Recently recordedby players
the Arditti Quartetfor RCA Whomye adore (1981)for orchestra
FABER MUSIC LTD
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