The Myth of the Romanian National Composer: George Enescu

• In Event: The Practice of Musical Biography in the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the Former Eastern Bloc

Abstract

The Soviet occupation of Romania and the subsequent imposition of a communist dictatorship led the composer and virtuoso violinist George Enescu to emigrate in 1946 and spend the remainder of his life in exile. Official attitudes towards him in his native country were ambivalent. As one of Romania’s most internationally renowned figures, the new regime was anxious to claim him as part of a national artistic pantheon that included the poet Mihai Eminescu and the sculptor Constantin Brâncuși. Repeated efforts were made to persuade Enescu to return, and when these proved unsuccessful the government retaliated by revoking his membership of the newly-formed Composers’ Union, symbolically erasing him from Romania’s cultural life. Enescu’s ‘erasure’ proved temporary: after his death in 1955, the regime quickly moved to exploit the celebrated musician’s reputation for propagandistic purposes. Enescu became a national symbol: the country’s leading orchestra was promptly re-named the ‘George Enescu Bucharest Philharmonic’ and the ‘George Enescu International Festival and Competition’ was established three years later in 1958. Many young Romanian composers declared Enescu’s style to be their chief inspiration, and Romanian musicologists wrote about him extensively up to the fall of the communist regime in 1989. This presentation analyses some of the principal ways in which Enescu’s image was manipulated and distorted by state ideology and censorship in communist Romania. Although Enescu spent much of his career abroad and his music was conspicuously indebted to foreign influences, Romanian commentators were at pains to emphasise the ‘national character’ of his compositions and the ‘Romanian spirituality’ that they supposedly evinced—creating accretions of myths around his life and work.

Author

• Valentina Sandu-Dediu, National U of Music Bucharest (Romania)