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A life in music

As the world renowned GEORGE ENESCU festival begins, Joel Crotty profiles the life of romania’s most celebrated composer

September 2005

At the end of his life Romania’s most celebrated musician, George Enescu, cried out that he was sick of being remembered as the composer of the pair of Romanian Rhapsodies. During his lifetime, Enescu maintained five international careers: as a composer, conductor, violinist, pianist and teacher. Such a multifarious talent was looked upon with disbelief. There is an old saying that good conductors make lousy composers; while good composers make terrible conductors. It might be true for some but not in the case of Enescu. His musicality was complete only when he was able to allocate his energy to all aspects of music-making.

One of his students, the violinist-conductor Yehudi Menuhin, described Enescu as being the ‘most generous and selfless of hearts’. Enescu’s biographer, Noel Malcolm, recalls many cases of the composer’s selflessness including a poignant occasion when he played his violin uninterrupted for two hours to his dying friend, the painter Stefan Lucian.

George Enescu was born in August, 1881 in Liveni, in northern Romania. He developed a love of music from his parents. His father, Costache Enescu, a minor landowner and estate administrator, was a singer, violinist and choral conductor, while his mother, Maria, played the guitar and piano. At the age of four he commenced violin lessons and showed particular promise. The young boy was taken to Eduard Caudella, Professor of Violin and Director of the Conservatorium in Iasi, and he recommended that Enescu go to Vienna for expert tuition.

Early promise

In 1888, he travelled with his parents to Vienna and commenced his studies at the conservatorium connected to the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. Enescu was all of seven years of age. He rapidly progressed through the grades and by the age of nine was proficient in playing Paganini’s D Major Concerto. In 1893 he took his final exams and gained first grades in all subjects.

Two years later Enescu arrived in Paris with the primary aim of studying composition at the Paris Conservatoire. He presented his portfolio and his letters of recommendation to Jules Massenet. A cursory look through the manuscripts was all that was required for the great composer to have Enescu accepted into his course.

Unlike in Vienna where he warmed to all his teachers, he found most of the French contingent dull. He sat through endless harmony classes of Ambroise Thomas and Theodore Dubois and was completely bored with the instruction he received from his violin teacher, Martin-Pierre-Joseph Marsick. The only person who ignited his quest for musical knowledge was his composition teacher, Massenet. The impressionable Enescu found him to be a thoroughly competent instructor who engaged his charges in thought provoking debate. Massenet resigned from the Conservatoire in 1896 and another famous composer, Gabriel Faure, replaced him. Although Enescu found Faure’s music to be invaluable as a benchmark for his own compositions, he considered him to be a fairly ordinary teacher.

After Massenet’s departure, Enescu found Andre Gedalge to be extremely helpful in the area of compositional craftsmanship. He instilled in the budding composer the need for clear-cut form and the beauty of contrapuntal design. While at the Conservatoire he developed lasting friendships with fellow composers, Jean Roger-Ducasse, Florent Schmitt and Maurice Ravel. Menuhin recalls being with Enescu in the mid-1920s and witnessing Ravel burst through the door with the singular reason of having his Romanian friend play through his freshly composed Violin Sonata. He kindly read through the score once, and then with Ravel at the piano played the work from memory.
His brilliance as an all round musician was noted by the Romanian aristocracy, and he was a familiar figure in the musical soirees at court. For his seventeenth birthday Queen Elizabeth, wife of King Carol I, gave Enescu the completed issues of the Bach-Gesellschaft edition of Johann Sebastian Bach’s works. In 1898, Enescu’s gift to the queen was a song-cycle, Der Blaser, based on her poetry. Throughout the turbulent first half of the twentieth century, Enescu’s loyalty and devotion to the royal family never waned.

Although he made frequent trips to Romania, he made his home in Paris. From this base he was able to compose while at the same time secure a regular income from his engagements as either a violinist or pianist. At the outbreak of the first world war he returned to Romania and remained there for the next four years. During this period he played numerous charity concerts ranging from aiding the Romanian Red Cross to stoking the funds for an organ in Bucharest’s spectacular Atheneum. He even travelled to St Petersburg in 1917 to play for the Russian Red Cross during the stormy months before that country’s revolution.

The war had devastated the Romanian economy, and Enescu’s savings were whittled away. Furthermore, the peasant land reforms initiated by King Ferdinand saw much of his father’s estates being expropriated, and thus Enescu’s future nest egg disappeared by royal decree. (This financial situation was to occur again after the second world war when the communists confiscated the property Enescu had accumulated in the 1920s and 1930s, and disallowed his hard-earned funds to be transferred out of the country.)

American experience

To compensate for these significant setbacks after the first world war Enescu pushed composition to the side and concentrated on conducting and performing simply because it gave him a secure income. In the United States he was warmly welcomed, and Enescu enjoyed his trips to the new world because he found he was accepted as both a composer and a performer-conductor. American audiences were aware of his orchestral music due to the promotional efforts of conductors Walter Damrosch and Frederick Stock, and during the 1920s Enescu directed the Philadelphia, Cleveland, Boston and Cincinnati Orchestras.

In 1936 he was short-listed to replace Arturo Toscanini as the permanent conductor of the New York Philharmonic. Each of the candidates was given a short season to demonstrate their musical and interpersonal skills. They were given a free hand to choose their programmes. Enescu included work by his compatriots – Mihail Jora, Ion Nonna Otescu, Sabin Dragoi, Marcel Mihalovici and Dinu Lipatti but the American public was not keen on this unknown repertoire, and box-office takings were down during his time on the podium. However, Enescu’s efforts in demonstrating a creative streak went nowhere as the selection panel chose the English conductor, John Barbirolli.
Enescu did not have to programme Romanian music for the New York job but he was totally committed to publicising the work of his countrymen and women. He financially backed a composition prize for Romanian composers, and he supported the careers of promising musicians such as pianist Clara Haskil and pianist-composer Dinu Lipatti. In 1921 Enescu lobbied the Romanian finance minister to ensure that Haskil would be able to continue her studies in Paris. His interest in Lipatti’s career went beyond the musical to the personal, as Enescu was his godfather. While he was pleased to be connected with the elite class of Romanian musicians and composers, he also strove to raise the musical standards in the general community and to that end he gave master classes and sat on numerous philanthropic committees that had musically benevolent aims.

Although he worked tirelessly for Romanian music, he was essentially apolitical. He disliked any type of fanaticism and during the 1930s and 1940s he wisely maintained a silence on issues other than musical ones. However, the Romanian-American conductor Sergiu Comissiona recalls a time in the 1930s when members of the Iron Guard – the Romanian fascist movement – infiltrated an Enescu concert to disrupt his performance of the Violin Sonata by the Jewish composer, Ernest Bloch. Enescu pacified the restless anti-Semites by going on stage and announcing that he would not play the work. This disclosure was greeted with wild applause, and they settled back to hear some ‘decent’ music only to be confronted by Ravel’s Jewish-inspired piece, Khaddisch.

Marriage and later life

In 1939 Enescu married Princess Maruca Cantacuzino. Her Bucharest residence was a splendid mansion right in the heart of the capital. The house, situated in Calea Victoriei, is now the Enescu Museum. But more importantly it is also the headquarters of the Union of Romanian Composers and Musicologists. During the second world war, Enescu stayed in Romania. Just as in the first world war, Romania initially started out as a neutral country but gradually the gravitational pull toward the Axis powers proved too inviting and Romania was embroiled in the European conflict. During these torrid times, Enescu focussed on music making. He completed a number of compositions, recorded his Second and Third Violin Sonatas with Lipatti, and performed in public airing politically safe composers such as Beethoven.

After the communist takeover, Enescu and his wife left their homeland to settle in Paris. With their assets confiscated by the new regime Enescu was forced back into the spotlight as either a soloist or a conductor. But by the early 1950s, heart trouble, hearing problems and a degenerative spinal condition made such work impossible to carry out. With the lack of an income, the Enescus sank into poverty and they resided in two dingy basement rooms. He died on the night of 3rd May, 1955.

George Enescu was a musical genius. He had a phenomenal musical memory; he was adept at playing the violin and piano; he wrote numerous quality scores across the genres; and he conducted with restraint but always with exceptional clarity. As a mark of respect his birthplace, Liveni, has been renamed George Enescu, and the 50,000 – 5 RON banknote feature his portrait. But for all this visual support, he would probably be more appreciative of the annual George Enescu Festival as it provides an opportunity for musicians and the general public to keep in touch with his music.

 

Dr Joel Crotty is a lecturer in the School of Music-Conservatorium, Monash University, Australia, and is also a music critic for the Melbourne Age. The author acknowledges Noel Malcolm’s George Enescu: his life and music [London], Toccata Press, 1990.