George Enescu

Considered by many to be Romania’s greatest composer, George Enescu was one of the most gifted all-round musicians of the 20th century, excelling as composer, teacher, conductor, violinist, and pianist. It was a matter of some regret to Enescu himself that his career as one of the most eminent violinists of his generation left him limited time for composition. Yet he produced a substantial body of music in all the major genres—music with a distinctive stylistic profile, drawing together elements of German symphonies, French music from the turn of the 20th century, and the traditional (folk) music of his native Romania. Enescu conspicuously lacked the capacity for self-advancement, and he made some unfortunate choices about the publication and promotion of his music. Partly for this reason, his compositions are less well known today than those of his coevals from East-Central Europe, most notably Béla Bartók.

Early Years: Studies in Vienna and Paris (1881–1900)

Born into a family of modest means in Liveni, a town in western Moldavia, Enescu’s youthful talents as a violinist and composer were so exceptional that he was accepted as a student at the Vienna Conservatory at the age of seven. He graduated in 1893, but spent a further year there in the composition class of the renowned Austrian composer Robert Fuchs. He then spent four years at the Paris Conservatoire, where his fellow students included Maurice Ravel, Alfredo Casella, Alfred Cortot, and Jacques Thibaud. This two-fold education helped shape Enescu as a composer. Thus, the four so-called “School Symphonies,” along with early songs and chamber works, reveal an obvious affinity with Austro-German Romantic music, culminating in the Octet for Strings of 1900—a work of considerable power, maturity, and complexity. At the same time, Enescu’s early music responded to modern French music, and especially to the music of his teacher Gabriel Fauré, whose shadow falls on the Barcarolle for piano (1897) and Second Violin Sonata (1899), as well as later works, such as the Sept chansons de Clément Marot for voice and piano (1908)—a song cycle of consummate nuance and sensitivity.

Enescu: Octet in C major for Strings, Op. 7

Middle Period: Between Bucharest and Paris (1901–1945)

Already during his student years, Enescu had achieved real success, particularly with his orchestral Poème roumain, Op. 1, which was completed in 1897 and performed to rapturous acclaim in Romania the following year. It earned him the patronage of the Queen of Romania, including the use of a study at Peleş Castle, in the town of Sinaia, where he later built a house. In the aftermath of his studies, he divided his time between Paris and Romania, pursuing a dual career as a performer and composer. Up to and during the years of World War I, he worked on his Second and Third Symphonies, Opp. 17 and 21 (1914; 1918): the former is post-Wagnerian in its idiom, while the latter embraces the delicate, evanescent sonorities of modern French music, colored by the mystical ambience of a wordless chorus.

During the interwar years, Enescu devoted much of his energy to his masterpiece, the opera Oedipe, Op. 23 (1931). In this work, he reined in the eclecticism of earlier works, drawing together elements of style—German, French, and Romanian—that had previously been channelled into separate compositions. The musical style of the opera is marked by complex, multilayered textures, sitting somewhere between Gustav Mahler’s fragmentation, and Claude Debussy’s variegation, of the late-Romantic orchestra. Overall, the work spells out Enescu’s credo as a man and a composer: despite the Christian overtones of the final act, it is first and foremost a humanist message, celebrating the moral victory that comes with self-knowledge. 

Romania features prominently in Enescu’s music of the interwar period. Partly this was about evocations of landscape, as in the Third Orchestral Suite (Suite Villageoise), Op. 27 (1938), and the Impressions d’enfance, Op. 28, for violin and piano (1940). But it was also about the deployment of traditional music from Moldavia, especially the popular music of professional Roma fiddlers, in which there are clear synergies with Middle Eastern (Ottoman) traditions. This is characteristic of works such as the Third Violin Sonata, Op. 25 (1926), as well as parts of the Third Piano Sonata, Op. 24 No. 3, and Second Cello Sonata, Op. 26 No. 2 (both 1935). 

Enescu: Violin Sonata No. 3 for Violin and Piano, Op. 25, "Dans le caractère populaire roumain"

Late Period: Years of Exile (1945–1955)

Enescu stayed in Romania during World War II, but in the postwar period—the era of Communist Romania—he went into exile in Paris. These were difficult years, plagued by health issues, and by the increasing mental instability of his wife, Princess Maruca Cantacuzino. His output declined during this time, but the surviving works are among his finest. They include the Ouverture de concert sur des thèmes dans le caractère populaire roumain, Op. 32 (“Concert Overture on Popular Romanian Themes,” 1948), the String Quartet No. 2, Op. 22 No. 2 (1951), and his last major work, the Chamber Symphony, Op. 33 (1954). He died, following a major stroke, in 1955.

Legacy

Enescu played a key role in the promotion of new music in Romania during the interwar period. He was an obvious choice to chair the Society of Romanian Composers, which was founded in 1920 and merged into the Romanian Section of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) in 1925. However, in the very different political climate of the postwar years, such developments were curtailed. Enescu was too big a figure to be ignored by the political establishment, but the spotlight fell on his more popular works, such as the two orchestral Romanian Rhapsodies of 1901. After his death, which coincided with what has sometimes been described as a “cultural thaw” across the Eastern Bloc, a group of modernist composers emerged in Romania (as in Poland), and Enescu’s more complex music was not just reevaluated, but became foundational for new developments by younger composers, such as Pascal Bentoiu (1927–2016), Ştefan Niculescu (1927–2008), Myriam Marbé (1931–1997), and Aurel Stroe (1932–2008).

Watching and Listening

Two of Enescu’s works in the Digital Archive come from opposite ends of his creative development. The Octet, composed in 1900, invites comparison with Felix Mendelssohn’s Octet (1825), but is actually closer to the works of Johannes Brahms in the developing variation of its motives (short series of notes) and its tendency to saturate every level of the texture with thematic elements. The Octet extends the concept of cyclic form—the sharing of thematic material between movements—by giving each movement an independent existence, but in such a way that the whole piece resembles a composite sonata-form movement. Given the scale of the work, this structure represented an architectural challenge that Enescu himself compared to an engineer launching his first suspension bridge over a river—it is an apt analogy. The truly remarkable feature of the work is that its intensity is maintained across a 40-minute span, with no real break.

In 1927, Enescu gave the first Paris performance of his Third Violin Sonata “dans la caractére populaire roumaine” (“in Romanian folk style”), composed a year earlier. It soon became clear that the violin-piano repertory had acquired one of its most extraordinary and truly original works. The musical material is explicitly related to popular Romanian idioms, and to convey the improvisatory manner of these styles, Enescu devised radically new approaches to composing for both instruments. The violin part combines a calculated imprecision of pitch and rhythm with a remarkable diversity of colors, including bowing on the fingerboard and a range of different vibratos. The piano adopts multiple roles, ranging from cimbalom-like accompaniments to heavily ornamented textures, and it often plays strategically out of phase with the violin. Enescu’s overall achievement in this work was to employ the most sophisticated notational means to create the illusion of a freely evolving improvisation. 

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