George Enescu (I): Can You Spot the Mistake?

The issue of the Romanian National Treasure, transferred to Moscow for “safety reasons” (sic!) during World War I, remains – more than a century later – a painful wound and unresolved matter for Romanians to this day.

After King Carol I and the Romanian government decided that Romania would not enter the war on either side, they attempted to keep the country neutral for two years. However, when entry into the war could no longer be avoided, Romania chose to join the Entente. The armies of the Central Powers swiftly rejected and overwhelmed the poor defenses of an ill-trained and understaffed Romanian army. After the Battle of Argeș, which lasted only three days, Bucharest's fate was sealed. The German, Bulgarian, and Ottoman armies, led by Field Marshal August von Mackensen, entered the Romanian capital on December 6th, 1916. The Royal Family, the government, all state institutions, the National Bank, all bureaucrats, and the upper class fled toward Iași (Iassy). George Enescu was among those who found refuge in Iași, which for many centuries had been the capital of Moldova – the region where Enescu was born in 1881 – until its unification with Wallachia in 1859, when Bucharest became the capital of both principalities that formed Romania.

The counterattacks and continued advance of the Central Powers’ armies in Romania between September and December 1916 found George Enescu in Bucharest. He had arrived in the Romanian capital several months earlier, immediately after learning that Queen Elisabeth of Romania – his "vice-mother," as he used to call her – was on her deathbed. However, upon arriving in Bucharest, he was running a high fever and was diagnosed with mumps. Quarantined in a room at the hotel across the street from the Royal Palace, right next to our beloved concert hall, the Romanian Athenaeum, George Enescu was unable to see Carmen Sylva (the queen’s literary pseudonym) or attend her funeral. (I will dedicate several later blog posts to Enescu’s contribution to the queen’s funeral, and to the compositions he was working on while Bucharest was under attack).

In Iași, George Enescu founded an orchestra, played his violin for wounded soldiers in improvised camp hospitals, organized and performed in charity events to raise money for orphans and the families of soldiers who had died in battle – yet he never stopped composing.

But as enemy armies drew closer, the Crown Council decided it would be wise to send the National Treasure to safety. The initial plan was to send all valuables to London, thanks to the kinship between the British and Romanian royal families. However, due to the German and Austro-Hungarian blockade, that plan quickly collapsed. The only remaining option was to send everything east – into the Russian Empire … terrible decision with terrible consequences.

On December 14th, 1916, a train departed from Iași station, arriving in Moscow a week later. It carried 1,738 crates containing 91.5 metric tons of gold coins and ingots, along with two crates of royal family jewels. When rumors spread that a second transport was being prepared – with the rest of the valuables belonging to the state (the National Bank, the Romanian Academy, museums, etc.) and the Church, some of Romania's wealthiest individuals began pleading with the authorities to save their most prized possessions as well.

Among them was George Enescu, who repeatedly appealed to one of the most influential members of the government, Ion G. Duca, asking him to send his "children" – as he used to call his compositions – to safety. The second train left Iași on July 27th, 1917, carrying, among other public and private treasures, the crate marked “Lada 91 – Musique Manuscrite Georges Enesco”. Ion G. Duca would later regret for the rest of his life the decision to grant Enescu’s request and send the manuscripts to Moscow (more on this in a future blog post).

This was the context in which George Enescu composed his Third Symphony, a cyclical and Dantesque masterpiece, born from the torments of both personal and national war, yet culminating in an open ending brimming with hope, that reveals an extraordinarily deep love for humanity.

The first sketches of the opening movement were drafted shortly after the loss of his “vice-mother,” a figure he mourned profoundly. Perhaps from this grief comes the heavy and somber funeral march-like C ostinato – a one-measure introduction – followed by one of the most daunting themes ever written, enveloped in a mysterious, Romanian folk-like ethos. The prevailing sentiment throughout this movement is that of a perpetual Sisyphus-like climb, suggested by the numerous ascending scales, interrupted by moments of release – plateaus adorned with strong French perfumes and Romanian folk ornamentation. It is a captivating blend, quintessential to Enescu’s musical language. He began assembling sketches and orchestrating the first movement in May 1916, in Sinaia, a picturesque town in the Carpathian Mountains, where King Carol I built the Royal Family’s summer residence: the spectacular Peleș Castle. Often likened to a Romanian Neuschwanstein, the castle houses a small theater whose ceiling was painted by none other than Gustav Klimt, where Enescu performed regularly, sometimes accompanied by the queen herself.

The magic of the place and his closeness to the Royal Family convinced Enescu to build his own

residence here, Vila Luminiș, constructed between 1923 and 1926. It would later become the place where he began orchestrating his magnum opus, the opera Œdipe. Due to the unforeseen fall of Bucharest to the Central Powers and the subsequent exile to Iași, he managed to complete the first movement of the symphony only a year later, on May 28th, 1917.

The second movement is a dark Scherzo that unmistakably represents the sound of war – a true danse macabre, featuring xylophone solos (yes, Enescu was a protégé of Saint-Saëns, to whom he owed the performance of his Op. 1, the Romanian Poem, when he was only sixteen, and to whom he later dedicated his Orchestral Suite No. 1), a thunder machine and percussive hand strikes on the wooden back of the solo double bass, used when the percussion section alone wasn't colorful enough. The perpetuum mobile is shattered by a climactic pandemonium, where a standing (!) brass fanfare floods the concert hall with the sensation of a real military invasion,

accompanied by ghostly sounds of the strings section in the background (an eerie echo of The Ghosts, an oratorio Enescu had begun composing in November 1916 – more on that in a future blog post). As the war fanfare fades, the danse macabre returns, but less powerful, and eventually vanishes entirely, as though receding into the distance. Still in Iași, and profoundly shaken by the horrors of war, Enescu completed this movement on October 28th, 1917. 

The third movement is one of the most mystical and enigmatic pieces of music written during World War I, a work in striking contrast to the violent and chaotic reality of those awful times. It is not only the wordless choir that calls to mind the much more famous wartime masterpiece The Planets by Gustav Holst, but also the celestial and otherworldly instrumental colors, along with the imponderable and ethereal harmonies. Yet this is likely no more than a coincidence, a pure result  of Zeitgeist: the two composers never heard each other’s works, composed more or less simultaneously. For the choral parts, Enescu requests, if possible, that the contralto voices be replaced with boys’ voices (Si possible des voix de jeunes garçons). This is meaningful both in terms of color and theosophical symbolism: in the final section before the transcendental coda, Enescu introduces the delicate sound of a small bell, akin to those used in Catholic Mass during the moment of Elevation (une sonnette devra avoir à-peu-près la sonorité des sonnettes que l’on emploie dans les églises catholiques au moment de l’Élévation), followed by the church-like timbre of a solo harmonium. The symphony concludes with the endless Sisyphus-like ascending scales from the first movement, this time in C major, the cleanest and purest of tonalities, as the

C pedals of the timpani and double bass gently fade into silence. Interestingly, Enescu composed most of this movement in Dorohoi, just 15 kilometers from his birthplace. The completion of the symphony thus symbolically closes the circle of life, returning to the realm of his childhood, nearly three months before the end of the war.

Many Enescu scholars consider this symphony to be inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy, going beyond the well-known symbolism of the number three (Symphony No. 3, in three movements). From this perspective, Enescu made a symbolic switch between Purgatorio, represented by the earthly first movement, and Inferno, the war Scherzo; while there is no doubt that the final movement evokes Paradise. 

According to the newspapers of the time, George Enescu himself conducted the world premiere on May 25th, 1919 (a date disputed to the conflicting informations between press and archives of the concert series), at the Romanian Athenaeum, with the Orchestra of the Ministry of Education and the choir of the Carmen Choral Society. 

A perfectionist to the core, Enescu undertook significant revisions before the Paris premiere, conducted by Gabriel Pierné in February 1921: First movement – revised on June 21st, 1920 at Le Châtelet (the name of the villa belonging to his future wife, Maria Tescanu Rosetti, Princess

Cantacuzino after her first husband, in Vers-chez-les-Blanc, near Lausanne), Second movement – revised on January 2nd, 1921 in Paris, Third movement – revised on January 30th, 1921, again at Le Châtelet. Yet even then, Enescu remained unsatisfied, and he revisited the score once more four years before his death, completing his final revision on June 12th, 1951. These countless revisions are one of the key reasons why many of Enescu’s major works were not published during his lifetime. This includes his Third Symphony, which was finally published in 1965, a decade after his death, by the publishing house of the Romanian Composers’ Union, under the auspices of Salabert Paris – this is what Salabert continues to publish ever since.

Recently, while I was studying to conduct this astonishing masterpiece for the first time, I encountered many questions during my time spent with the score in the intimacy of my musical laboratory. But one small detail kept bothering me for days: at the very beginning of the first theme, in the second bar of the symphony, why does Enescu add a B-flat grace note (appoggiatura) only to the two solo cellos, even though they are playing in perfect unison with the fourth flute, first clarinet, and violas?

Why is it that every time the generative material of the first theme reappears, in every instance of the main motif, that grace note is completely absent?

And since I firmly believe that the manuscript often holds the key to such questions, I turned to the source itself:

At first glance, nothing seemed unusual compared to the published score. Indeed, that B-flat grace note was present only in the solo cellos. So I began comparing the staff of the violas with the one of the two solo cellos, searching for microscopic differences. And it struck me! Advise: look careful and think outside the box!

Did you see it? If not, let me offer a clue: look carefully at the dynamics and expression instructions for violas: p[iano] sost.[enuto] cant.[abile]. 

And now compare it with the cellos: sost.[enuto] cant.[abile]. Oh! But where is the dynamic of the cellos? EUREKA!!! That is NOT a grace note, that is the letter P from ‘piano’...

Funny manuscript transcription which has been perpetuated for exactly 60 years, isn’t it?