Two Ways of Approaching George Enescu’s Music: Pan-Europeanism and the Lyrical Aesthetic Constellation
Vlad Văidean
This study pleads for interpreting the idiom of “Enescianism” in a trans-stylistic key, that is, through the prism of a “constellation” of aesthetic categories. Thus, I first single out memory, as the sovereign aesthetic instance in Enescu’s music. Its technical realisation is achieved through Enescu’s cyclic interweaving of musical ideas, and its poetic effect is a sense of continuous time, which can be understood in the terms of Bergson’s philosophy of durée. Technical implications (the frequently elusive and baffling processes at play in Enescian writing) also have an Enescian species of oneirism, manifested not so much as deep dreaming, but as reverie, which gives rise to a sense of weightlessness and immersion in another dimension. Finally, at the affective level, a decisive weight is held by the melancholic and nostalgic attitude, which Enescu understood in an autochthonist sense, as dor (longing). Its capacity to materialize musically meant, for Enescu, a superlative potentiation of the parlando rubato style, and its poetic effect implies a sense of space relived as native landscape, which in turn can be understood in relation to a philosophical conception (that of the “Mioritic space” formulated by Lucian Blaga). All these aesthetic categories form a “constellation” because they never appear in isolation, but call upon and enhance each other. And the most conducive to the emergence of this “constellation” are the slow parts or sections in Enescu’s music, where they often bear the connotations of the evening and/or nocturnal pastoral, within which a key ingredient is the sacral dimension of the sound of bells.
Carillon nocturne and the Bell-Like Sound at the Piano Prior to 1916
Oana Kariotoglou Popescu
George Enescu’s Carillon nocturne Op. 18 (1916) reimagines the sound of bells on the acoustic piano, but so far there has been little analysis of exactly how it accomplishes this. Scholars have not discussed details about the context in which Carillon nocturne was created, the influence of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, and how Enescu’s notation builds upon an idea from Camille Saint-Saëns’s Fifth Piano Concerto. Situated against a background of bells that ring out across the nineteenth and early twentieth century piano repertoire, this study analyses Enescu’s writing as a play with selected overtones of the Pythagorean series and with timing and dynamics borrowed from the rope-activated bell and the wooden simantira, two outdoor sound sources specific to the local Orthodox church rite.
Cantabile et Presto or Enescu among Flutists
Sára Aksza Grosz
In order to graduate from the Paris Conservatory, an instrumentalist had to win the concours. The annual competition pieces were written by famous professors, until one of them, Paul Taffanel (1844-1908) proposed to commission them from composers. The idea of the “Paganini of the Flute” persuaded the directors of the institute, including Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924) who requested from his former student, George Enescu (1881-1955) four morceaux de concours (2-2 for years 1904 and 1906) and even appointed him as a jury member (1904-1910, violin and piano sections). Thus Enescu, a violin First Prize winner himself (1899), among the competition pieces for harp, trumpet and viola, composed and dedicated his Cantabile et Presto for flute and piano (1904) to Taffanel. This paper aims to capture its possible models, genesis, and influence on the French School’s flutist-composers generation. Moreover, by zooming in the likewise competition pieces (1906) of Philippe Gaubert (1879-1941) and Taffanel (1907), further connections might be established between them and Enescu, as well as other flutists.
Enescu’s Works Performed on the North American Continent (1902-1921)
Irina Nițu
Some of Enescu’s early works, already impregnated with the innovative spirit of the mature Romanian musician, clearly imprinted the name of the composer in the memory of the public and the music critics in the USA, before they had even met him. As the press of the time reflected, the first American auditions of Enescu’s music were only a preamble to the extremely strong soul connection and rich concert activity that the Romanian musician carried out on the North American continent. Without wishing to be exhaustive, the present research represents a gesture of recovery and grouping of important historical events for George Enescu, highlighting the role that his compositions played in the initiation and continuity of recitals, concerts and tours of great success overseas. From 1923, when the artist first arrived on the American continent, until 1950 – the last year he was able to return to the United States – George Enescu was in constant request as a conductor, composer, violinist or pianist, his name appearing on the posters and concert programs of the most important symphony orchestras of the time.
Enescian Imprints in the Violin Concerto Chimeras by Doina Rotaru
Olguța Lupu
Written in 2020, on the occasion of the centenary of the Union of Romanian Composers and Musicologists, the concert Himere for violin and orchestra brings together multiple references to mythology, archaic music and certain creators with a special national reverberation (Paciurea, Enescu, Eminescu, Brâncuși, Olah), constituting a refined and subtle homage to Romanian culture. Towards the end of the Concerto, the composer inserts a quotation from the Sonata No. 3 for Piano and Violin “in Romanian folk character” by George Enescu. The selection of the quotation is not accidental, as its first cell is a juxtaposition of Enescu’s melody. On another level, the entire Concert is a gradual search for and recomposition of this Enescu melodic structure. The delicate reverence for George Enescu, who founded the Society of Romanian Composers a century ago (1920), is at the same time a symbol of multiple congruences on the creative level, because Doina Rotaru’s affinity for traditional music and the Romanian ethos integrates, values and continues Enescu’s contribution.
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