16/06/2019 Reactionary Composer of the Week: George Enescu – The Orthosphere

APRIL 27, 2012 BY SVEIN SELLANRAA

Reactionary Composer of the Week:

George Enescu

This week’s reactionary composer, the Romanian George Enescu (1881-1955), was suggested by a
reader. Said reader, a musicologist with an interest in Enescu, sent me an extremely informative e-
mail on the subject, so I’ll let him take it from here:

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If anything I say about Enescu seems like the exaggerations of an enthusiast, I invite
you to consult Noel Malcolm’s excellent biography (1990), which is my main source for
anecdotes. I may also occasionally be thinking of the chapter in Janos Starker’s recent
autobiography (2005, I believe) in which he encountered Enescu in Bucharest around
1946-47.

As a man, Enescu was not very political. He came from the peasantry, but his father
was a well-to-do land manager, so he had the best education and upbringing available
in rural Romania. (The unification of Moldova and Wallachia took place about 20
years before he was born; Transylvania followed, of course, after Trianon.) As a young
boy, he attended conservatory first in Vienna, then in Paris.

It quickly became evident that even among great musical talents, Enescu’s was
unusual. Among other things, he memorized essentially the entire corpus of piano,
orchestral, and chamber literature, and could reproduce it spontaneously at the piano
at will. His student Menuhin tells us that Enescu memorized the freshly-written Ravel
violin sonata as he was reading it, so that by the second read-through, he set the score
aside. Likewise, Norbert Brainin (Amadeus Quartet) said that Enescu could play any of
the Beethoven string quartets at the piano without music, Menuhin said that he’d seen
Enescu play entire acts of Wagner without music, etc. Enescu was a first-rate pianist,
violinist, and conductor — he routinely performed with the leading orchestras (Berlin
Phil, Vienna, NY Phil, etc) as a violinist and as a conductor, and he was shortlisted to
replace Toscanini in New York in 1936, though the job ultimately went to Barbirolli
instead.

While a student, Enescu decided to become a composer, and quickly produced four
student symphonies and his first works of lasting significance, the Op. 6 Violin Sonata
and the Op. 7 Octet. The Op. 6 Sonata recalls Fauré to some extent, but its harmonic,
formal, and expressive language is individual. It is still widely played and studied.
The Op. 7 Octet is quite different — a 45-minute symphony for strings with elaborate
and complex polyphonic writing. It is almost too hard to play because all the players
must know the score and play like soloists. Note that these works are not in any way
“nationalist” except insofar as Enescu’s early life played some role in forming him;
rather, they were sophisticated and cosmopolitan, recalling French neomodal
harmony (Fauré, Lili Boulanger, etc.) and Viennese chromaticism respectively.

Enescu produced a number of brilliant works in his late teens and early twenties — the
Piano Suite Op. 10 (composer’s partial recording), the first two symphonies,
and the D major Suite for orchestra. But then he fell silent, spending some 20 years
on the monumental opera Oedipe, a work that I admit I do not begin to understand. In
my view, this silence recalls Sibelius’s wrestling with his 8th Symphony, or Falla’s
with Atlantida.

Moreover, he had married into the aristocracy, and found constant touring was the
only way to support his wife, the Princess Cantacuzino, in her accustomed style.
During this period, he completed at least two more symphonies in short score with
orchestration notes; they have been reconstructed by Bentoiu and the musicologist
Cornel Taranu, and they are superb, particularly the 5th. I am not aware of any
commercial recordings, however.

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But Enescu’s later life was not entirely without issue. He composed a stunning violin
sonata (Enescu and Lipatti), two superb piano sonatas (both Lipatti), and
several substantial pieces of chamber music. In the interesting grab-bag of the 3rd
piano suite, he wrote this arresting piece — note the striking effects of the
pianissimo doublings in the high register, which create a haze of non-harmonic
partials around the melody. To my ears, it sounds rather like ring modulations.

Enescu’s oeuvre shows a complete mastery of modern techniques, an adventurous

harmonic and melodic sense, and the ability to assimilate “popular” musical concepts
without in any way compromising his architectonic sense or descending to mere
quotation. For instance, the 3rd Violin Sonata cited above produces an entirely
synthetic “folk language” in which pervasive and refined portamento, “parlando
rubato,” and so forth are deployed in the service of basically classical goals, just as in
Schubert’s Ländlerand Chopin’s waltzes.

Malcolm says somewhere that Enescu was never really a modernist because, while he
happily and masterfully drew up modernist materials in the service of his artistic
goals, he never felt any of the disgust, alienation, or revolutionary sentiment that were
so often the motivations behind modernist experiments. Thus, for me, Enescu’s work
represents the road not taken in modern classical music: what if the search for new
forms of organization and expression had taken place in the context of love for and
engagement with our artistic forebears?

P.S. On reread, I see that I was going to conclude without mentioning the Romanian
Rhapsodies Op. 11, nos. 1 and 2. Op. 11 no. 1 is probably Enescu’s most widely-
performed and -recorded work by a wide margin, which is a shame, because it’s
basically a party piece and doesn’t represent his oeuvre. Still, since it is so widely
known, it must be accounted for, so let us allow Celibidache to do it. Note that even
the debased genre of the medley is elevated by Enescu’s loving touch — feminine
endings appear unexpectly to create enjambment, unexpected contrapuntal potential is
uncovered, canons lead to logical but surprising harmonic regions, tempi evolve
seamlessly to allow for the emergence of new hypermeters, countersubjects undergo
their own development to reinforce the accumulation of formal energy.

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17 thoughts on “Reactionary Composer of the Week:

George Enescu”

bbtp | April 27, 2012 at 3:19 PM

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There is also a fine version of

the Octet here: h p://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4zm6LZ9Fv4

Reply

Alex | April 27, 2012 at 4:20 PM

“Enescu’s oeuvre shows a complete mastery of modern techniques”.

No doubt that’s why his music is so rebarbative.

Reply

bbtp | April 27, 2012 at 8:32 PM

Alex, I suspect you clicked the first link and didn’t like it. If it’s too
“modernist” for your taste, try the links to the Piano Suite op. 10 or the
Rhapsody op. 11.

Reply

Viorel | March 7, 2015 at 1:26 PM

What a superficial commentary

Reply

thomasbertonneau | April 27, 2012 at 11:08 PM

Enescu’s idiom was Impressionist. He was at his best, as was Claude
Debussy, in miniatures. He was at his best, when a empting large-scale
composition, when he adopted neo-baroque models, as in at least one of his
orchestral suites. The dance-forms and the pa erns of passacaglia and
fugue impose orderliness and direction on the music. The works involving
a solo instrument in a featured role, like the Symphonie Concertante for
Cello and Orchestra, also work well because the solo part tends to focus the
composer’s a ention. In a concerto there is a demand for dialogue and self-
explanatory musical rhetoric.

Enescu intended his symphonies to be spiritual dramas, like those of

Beethoven, but the Impressionist’s tendency to exploit atmospheric effects
too often got the best of him. He First Symphony offers the clearest outline:
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It resembles in part the famous D-Minor Symphony by Cesar Franck and in

part “La mer” by Debussy. The Second and Third Symphonies sprawl.
They suffer somewhat from a lack of memorable thematic material, but
mostly from the incapacity to signal clearly to the listener where the
“argument” wants to go. Passing individual episodes (the Third Symphony
integrates a wordless chorus into the orchestra) are fascinating exercises in
colorism, without however adding up to a truly purposive “journey” from
a noticeable “here” to a definite and convincingly inevitable “there.” Yet I
would describe Enescu’s large-scale compositions as fascinating, even as
worthwhile failures.

“Édipe,” Enescu’s opera, belongs in a category with Karol Szymanowski’s

“King Roger” (an adaptation of Euripides’ “Bacchae”), Igor Stravinsky’s
similarly named “Oedipus,” and Arnold Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aron.”
Each is a study in cultural sickness, particularly in the perversion of
religion, and in civilizational breakdown, culminating in one form or
another of mob-action and lynching. “Édipe,” like T. S. Eliot’s “Waste
Land,” belongs to the misunderstood category of formally modern,
culturally reactionary works of art. Traditionalist intellectuals should study
“Édipe,” “King Roger,” Stravinsky’s “Oedipus,” and “Moses und Aron”
closely.

Reply

Sis | April 28, 2012 at 3:33 AM

Op. 7 octet sounds stressed out to me, the violin harmonies are interesting
though; perhaps he wrote this during his touring years while married to the
princess?

piano suite Op. 10 sounds like rainy day music

carillon’s nocturnes –this is my favorite…I like nocturnes. Very imaginative

use of the music.

I see why Celibidache is the most popular. It is cute and happy with decent
melodies. That director is amusing to watch as well.

Reply

Alex | April 28, 2012 at 7:27 AM

Reactionary lovers of music would have no truck with any modern or
avant-garde composer. They would denounce impressionism, serialism,
minimalism, experimental music etc., as pretentious manifestations of the

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spirit of modernism in works of art. They would declare that after the death
of say Brahms, or Beethoven, or Bach, no music has been composed worth
listening to.

An even deeper dyed reactionary might want to go back to Palestrina as the

ideal model. The ultimate reactionary would only be content listening to
monophonic liturgical music.

A truly reactionary composer of today would be writing neo-Gregorian

chants.

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timt | April 28, 2012 at 10:48 AM

Stern, uncompromising words, Alex! But I suspect the ‘true reactionary
composer’ you identify there, composing ‘neo-Gregorian chants’ would
not exist anyway, as Gregorian chants don’t really have a composer –
just as folk-songs don’t have a composer, or jokes don’t have a writer,
etc. I like Svein’s focus on modernist/post-modernist composers and
look forward to them every week.

Reply

Alex | April 28, 2012 at 11:51 AM

The origins of the Gregorian chant are, perhaps, lost in antiquity. We
know, I think, that Pope Gregory the Great didn’t personally
inaugurate the plainsong tradition.

But I cling to my supposition because a modern composer might

compose a neo-Gregorian chant on the analogy of, let’s say, Ralph
Vaughan Williams’ use of a traditional melody in his Fantasia on
Greensleeves.

There are no reactionary modern composers – if the sense of

‘reactionary’ is taken to mean an artist seeking to completely restore
an earlier order of art, or someone trying to revitalize traditional but
moribund institutions etc.

thomasbertonneau | April 28, 2012 at 12:48 PM

It is worth formulating explicitly what makes George Enescu a “reactionary
composer.”

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First, although he is not a “folksong” composer in the manner of Bela

Bartók or Gustav Holst, he composes under the influence (the deep and
abiding influence) of Romanian ethnic music and of the acoustic
atmosphere of his countryside childhood. Ingredients in the mixture are:
The rhythms of the Romanian language, Moldavian fiddling, and the
Orthodox service, including chant. After Enescu’s long sojourn in Paris, the
composer’s music making assimilates Gregorian chant, which listeners will
detect in the tone poem for orchestra with voices “Vox Maris.”

Second, Enescu’s music reacts with anguish and nostalgia to modernity’s

destruction of the traditional world, not merely in the paroxysm of World
War I, but also in the steady assault on popular custom and in the
mechanical routinization of life associated with urban life and the industrial
economy. When Enescu recalls the church bells that punctuated village life
in his early years, he mourns the passing of that life and condemns the
trends that relentlessly erase age-old habits and institutions. Where the
music turns complex and dissonant – that is a type of painful keening for
the destruction that modernity brings down on so much of what has made
life genuinely humane and livable in a previous age.

Third, Enescu understood music (and art generally) as spiritual rather than
as merely aesthetic. When the solo instrument sings, it is the equivalent of
the village priest in intense prayer; when the orchestra answers, it is the
congregation joining in spirit with the priest. In this way, Enescu’s
Symphonie Concertante for cello and orchestra and his Caprice Roumain
for violin and orchestra resemble Ernest Bloch’s “Schelomo” and O orino
Respighi’s “Concerto Gregoriano.” All are exercises in the re-
spiritualization of music for the spiritually apostate twentieth century.

Reply

Alex | April 28, 2012 at 1:43 PM

Do the mere influences of traditional forms, degrees of aesthetic interest,
and subliminal references – when expressed in a modern work of art –
make that work “reactionary”? If so, then all works of art from any period
could be described as reactionary because no composer, painter, poet, etc.,
works in a cultural vacuum.

Reply

thomasbertonneau | April 28, 2012 at 3:21 PM

Let me throw it back to you, Alex. In their day, Bach, Beethoven, and
Brahms all had detractors who considered their music to be
unacceptably ultra-modern and offensive to musical norms. Eduard
Hanslick famously denounced Wagner and Bruckner in the same

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sweeping judgment. If any alteration from some degree-zero of this

genre or that were a destruction of tradition then would not all new
composition or new painting or new poetry be destructively anti-
traditional? Greco-Roman music was monodic; Gothic Catholicism
invented polyphony, which is unique to the Western World. Western
music is thus founded on a radical innovation. Josquin and Perotin were
radical innovators. Precisely because human beings exist in time, in the
historical continuum, and precisely because they must react somehow to
their circumstances, the mode of expression will, in order to remain
vital, always be a dialogue between the present moment and the past.
Where the artist is of a conservative element, this reaction will entail the
revival of old forms in the new context in a way that is critically
appropriate in that new context.

There is a different type of reaction, associated with the Left, which is

worth considering. In the Soviet Union, the commissars of music tried to
freeze the concert idiom at the moment (more or less) of Tchaikovsky
and Rimsky-Korsakov. Comrade Zhdanov banned polyphony on the
grounds that “the workers” would not understand it and that they
required only simple, singable tunes. Mao in China went further, urging
the mobs of the Cultural Revolution to smash Western instruments and
burn sheet-music. The favored music of Communist China was the mass
song. The justification was the same as in Russia; only the application
was more severe. Islam would ban music altogether, except for the
ululations of the muezzin.

There is, of course, an irreducible element of subjectivity in all aesthetic

taste. People who discover that they dislike Liszt, Wagner, Bruckner,
Mahler, Enescu, Stravinsky, or Bartok should not listen to those
composers. Nor should anyone cajole such people to listen to music to
which they are unsympathetic. Or should one? I take advantage of the
AV equipment in my classrooms to give students the opportunity to
listen to all sorts of music that they would otherwise never encounter.
Whenever I have an early morning class, I arrive early and put a CD in
the disc player. A few students invariably acknowledge at the end of the
semester that they have learned to appreciate some of what I have
offered them. And they often admit that at first they were extremely
prejudiced against anything except the current “pop” idiom. But I have
never really cajoled them; I have only made an opportunity.

I remember how difficult it was for me to listen, say, to the slow

movements of the Brahms symphonies when I first became interested in
serious music as a teenager. I remember telling one of my teachers at the
high school that Brahms’ slow movements seemed to me to be an
incomprehensible muddle. “Boring” would have been my summation.
By degrees I came to terms with the Brahmsian andantes and adagios
although it was an arduous struggle. The difficulty comes from Brahms’
sense of harmonic progression, in which chromatic shifts play an
important role and from Brahms’ relentlessly polyphonic textures. In
other words: His modernity. It took audiences some time to appreciate
the “rootedness” of the Brahms symphonies in Bach and Beethoven, but

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eventually people saw the beauty that had been there all along. The
history of the reception of the Brahms symphonies parallels my personal
coming-to-terms with them (or rather the other way around).

Best to Alex — TFB

Reply

Alex | April 28, 2012 at 5:16 PM

Thank you for your thoughtful observations – which of course throw
a critical light on the boundaries of my taste in music. I already
know that in many ways I’m a narrow man.

I have tried to listen to performances on the radio, borrowed and

even bought CDs of a number of the composers in your list (Liszt, et
al.) in hopes of ‘educating’ my musical sensibility. It’s all been a
waste of time. Apart from some of Mahler’s more ‘accessible’ works,
I would not willingly listen to any music composed by the rest of
composers you mention.

The pleasure I get from the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, Handel,
Haydn, Mozart, and to a lesser extent Beethoven, Schubert, and
Brahms, can always be counted on and I never weary of it.
Sometimes I explore further – but only, as it were, ‘backwards’ in the
direction of Thomas Tallis and his contemporaries.

I guess what I took issue with is the use of the word ‘reactionary’ as
a description of certain modern composers (or indeed any
composer). It doesn’t make sense – at least to me – to say that one
can hear a reactionary spirit in the sounds of music, whether it was
intended by the composer or not.

On the other hand, I’m not hostile to the literature of reactionary

writers. Maybe the blogmasters, here at the Orthosphere, might
eventually open a discussion on their merits and influence.

thomasbertonneau | April 28, 2012 at 7:23 PM

It is true that “reactionary” has an almost exclusively political connotation
(it is by the way a coinage of the Left). In art, “conservative” or
“traditionalist” might be the be er word, but then there is immediate
trouble, because someone like Stravinsky simultaneously innovates and
honors the tradition. My proposed term, “modern anti-modernist,” is an
a empt to reconcile the verbal discrepancies.

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Some (Stravinsky, for example) would argue that instrumental music can
be the bearer of no semantic import whatever. (Roger Scruton also makes
this argument.) I remain unconvinced and believe that Spengler was right
in his claim that in Western art, all the genres become fused: That music
becomes semantic and poetry musical, and so forth.

I am pleased to tell you, Alex, that I share your delight in Bach, Handel,
Haydn, and Mozart.

Sincerely…

Reply

timt | April 29, 2012 at 5:06 AM

It is quite interesting how a number of educated musical figures have a
strong identification with this traditionalist label – Svein here of course, and
R. J. Stove, and Scruton (who I really know li le of, either musically or
philosophically). Surely not a coincidence! Maybe it’s partly due to an
awareness of the musical achievements in western civilisation of the past
600 years, and the way many of these have been abandoned in the short
space of 50 years.

I’m enjoying most of the composers Svein is linking to here; I’m not sure if
they are, in the final definition, ‘reactionary’ – whatever it means, or we
decide it means – but they certainly represent a reaction to many of the
more egregious parts of the 20th century.

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Seadragonconquerer | April 29, 2012 at 8:27 AM

I don’t hear Enescu as a “reactionary” composer; try on George Lloyd’s
post-WW II symphonies – wri en in the style of Berlioz – for that label. He
seems to have drawn freely from both traditional harmony and form,
mixed in certain early 20th-century innovations – impressionism in
particular – and produced some wonderful, essentially conservative music.
I listen frequently to the Op. 30 Piano Quartet, a masterpiece cut from the
same Transylvanian cloth as the exquisite Piano Sonata #1, as well as the
early Roumanian Poem and Violin Sonata #3. Though not in my Top 10
(Rachmaninoff, Sibelius, Vaughn Williams, Brahms, Bax, etc.), I enjoy
Enescu’s music very much…way more than, say, the noises produced by
Stravinsky or any other of the self-conscious avant-garde.

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thewhitechrist | May 7, 2012 at 12:02 PM

Since you are dealing with an area of study I greatly love, even after
reading all these posts, I still don’t see how Enescu can be considered
‘reactionary,’ in the same way, say, as Tavener, who clearly has both ‘gone
back to chant’ and has also imbued his music (or tried to) with the
Weltanschauung of Patristic Orthodoxy.

In reading the lives of the some of the composers of the early 20th Century,
I became struck with the almost tacit assumption that those who were in
the forefront of ‘progressive ‘ social causes, or who were incarnations of
those same ‘social causes’ themselves (one thinks of Sco Joplin, Go schalk,
etc.) – for example, the fascination/absorption of people like Debussy with
Balinese tone pa erns/scales, etc. precisely because it was NOT
Western/European.

I know that is just one example, but reactionary has to have some
connection with the society, and not just the music alone. That is why
Bruckner is considered ‘reactionary’ even though he espoused much of
Wagner, precisely because Bruckner was a traditionalist catholic, whereas
R. Strauss appeared to have li le use for faith, the Church, and models of
piety re: Death (the Four Last Songs are vastly different from the Four
Serious Songs of Brahms, for instance). E. Michael Jones’ book on music as
cultural tool was clearly delineated in his “Dionysos Rising: The Birth of
Cultural Revolution Out of the Spirit of Music.” Seeing Schoenberg as the
musical equivalent of Antichrist gave me both patristic insight, as well as
racial reason to LOATHE this Jew’s music, for the very reasons it OUGHT
to be loathed- it is both ‘anti-incarnational’ and blasphemous, which are
strong terms to use in a field that almost strives to be ‘morally neutral.’
Which is a shame. Imagine how much crap that passes for music could
have been axed at the beginning, because it was not ‘morally uplifting’….
music from Elvis et al. on the one hand, and Partch, the serialists post Berg,
and the ‘sodomite faction’ – Bli stein, Rorem, Bernstein, etc. if we had only
used biblical/religious modes of determining a music’s ‘worth.’

Of course, to some (anarchists, or at best antinomians) this smacks of Nazi

models for ‘good music.’ Yes, it does. And I don’t see anything wrong with
it, when you contrast the now-lauded ‘eintartete musik’ that is suffused
with vulgarity, sexuality, and bestiality in contrast to simple peasant
German marches, and the amazing intelligence of a Wagner- moral
reprobate that he was…..

But it IS still a question that needs to be asked, and a term (‘reactionary’)

that needs to be defined.

– Fr. John+

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