Twelve minutes that made a composer

Born

19 August 1881

Village

Liveni-Vârnav

First violin

at age 4

Vienna

1888–1894

He was three when the taraf found him. A band was playing at a spa near his native village, and the boy stood listening; the next day he tried to become the band himself — a violin of sewing thread on a piece of wood, a cimbalom of sticks, a nai blown between his lips.

His father gave him his first musical notions at four, and his parents gave him a little three-stringed violin. Furious at not being taken seriously, the child threw the toy into the fire — then, given the dreamed-of real violin, began playing by ear on a single string, with a single finger, melodies heard in the village. His guides were his parents and a famed lăutar, Niculae Chioru.

In 1886 Eduard Caudella, composer and professor at the Iași Conservatory, noticed the boy's extraordinary talent and steered him toward musical studies; the first attempts at composition date from the next year, when Enescu was six. Between 1888 and 1894 he studied at the Vienna Conservatory — violin with Bachrich and Hellmesberger junior, piano with Ludwig, harmony and composition with Fuchs — made his violin debut at eight, and the Viennese press called him a Romanian Mozart.

Paris followed, 1895 to 1899: violin with White and Marsick, composition with Massenet and Fauré, counterpoint with Gédalge, classmates including Ravel. On 6 February 1898, aged sixteen, his Poema Română opened the Concerts Colonne — the composing debut, under his protectress Elena Bibescu's wing.

Meanwhile Born the same year, 1881: Béla Bartók — who would take the opposite road, the systematic collection of traditional music.

Finished

14 August 1901

Age

19

Model

Liszt

Dedication

Crocé-Spinelli

Nineteen years old — five days short of twenty when he finished it on 14 August 1901 — Enescu wrote the First Rhapsody the way he had learned music: from memory. He never did field research and never chased authenticity; his exceptional memory kept the tunes he had heard as a child, and he set them for orchestra, probably noting them down by ear.

The model was Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies, and like Liszt he drew on popular rather than folk sources: a drinking song, wedding horas, a shepherd's tune, a showpiece lark. The piece opens with “Am un leu şi vreau să-l beu” — I have a leu and I want to drink it — on a dreamy solo clarinet, like a distant shepherd's shawm; the oboe continues, and the song returns twice more, each time with larger forces and a faster step.

After it, dance chases dance and the tempo keeps climbing: Hora lui Dobrică with its upward violin swing over two harps standing in for the dulcimer, an interpolated sârba, the somber “Mugur, mugurel”, “Ciobănaşul”, “Hora morii”, and “Ciocârlia”, the lark — a bird concert in the woodwinds over string eighth-notes — before the music spins to its Prestissimo close. The connecting motives between the borrowings are Enescu's own, folk-inspired melodies.

He later waved the piece away as just a few tunes thrown together without thinking. The sketches say otherwise: he worked out the order of the melodies, and the best instrumental dress for each, with care. He dedicated the score to his Paris classmate, the composer and teacher Bernard-Louis Crocé-Spinelli.

Date

23 February 1903

Hall

Romanian Athenaeum

Conductor

the composer, 21

Rest of the programme

E. Wachmann

The hall first heard it from a lone clarinet. On 23 February 1903 — 8 March by the new calendar — a 21-year-old stepped onto the podium of the Romanian Athenaeum and conducted the absolute premiere of his two Romanian Rhapsodies, Op. 11. Bucharest's symphony orchestra was Eduard Wachmann's; for the rest of that evening's programme, Wachmann took the baton back.

What else was played that night is not documented: the Museum's account names no other titles. What the Museum does hold is Wachmann's esteem made solid — a silvered-metal oak branch given to the young violinist-composer, inscribed “Violonistului şi compozitorului român George Enescu”.

Two days later, on 25 February, Enescu was on the same stage as soloist, composer and conductor at once, for the premiere of his First Orchestral Suite — a separate concert, not the same evening. And no Bucharest press review of those February nights survives in the Museum's archive: the triumph is certain, its contemporary words are not.

Meanwhile Two months earlier, a 14 December 1902 announcement promised a public dress rehearsal: Saint-Saëns and Paganini on the young man's violin. That same year, Cuba leased Guantánamo Bay to the United States “in perpetuity”.

Print

Enoch, Paris

America

Stokowski, Philadelphia

Boston

1912 · 1939

Catalogue

33 opus numbers

The score reached print years after the premiere, at Enoch in Paris — the surviving Enoch full score is dated [1909], plate E. & C. 6058, though some references give [1905]. Whatever the year, the exotic, dynamic, melodically beautiful piece with its spectacular orchestration walked straight into the repertoire of the great orchestras, conducted in concert and on record by most of the world's great conductors.

International fame came above all through the First Rhapsody: it was heard across the seas in the USA under Leopold Stokowski with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Boston took it into repertoire in February 1912 under Max Fiedler; by the 1930s it was a Boston Pops staple; the last subscription performances before 2022 were led by the composer himself, in January 1939.

One opus out of thirty-three — and it covered the other thirty-two. Enescu grew bitter about the singular popularity of a youthful piece, a subtle and serious composer eclipsed by his own warhorse; yet the appeal proved indestructible. Oedipus, premiered in 1936, was hailed as the masterpiece and summation of his art. He died in Paris on 4 May 1955.

Meanwhile At the 1936 Oedipus premiere, critics hailed the opera as the masterpiece and summation of his art.