Paolo Isotta recently wrote a beautiful article in Corriere della Sera on the occasion of the sixty years since the passing of Enescu, the master of variation who split notes into four
I am sharing this on the occasion of his birthday
Friday May 1, 2015 CORRIERE DELLA SERA © ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
«After Mozart, George Enescu is the greatest musical phenomenon to have come into the world», says Pablo Casals. On May 5th, it will be 60 years since Enescu left this world; and his time is yet to come. Born in Moldova, at age 14 he left Vienna, where he had already obtained all his diplomas, to settle in Paris, where, for Composition, he was a pupil of Massenet and Fauré. He was one of the greatest violinists who ever lived: he was a virtuoso pianist; he was a conductor. An excess of qualities harmed him: he took hours away from sleep to compose. He was one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century. At the beginning of the century, his two Romanian Rhapsodies for orchestra became very well known: and although, especially the Second, are of a very high nobility and inspiration, far from easy folklore (I think of Strauss's Aus Italien), even their success did not benefit Enescu.
I will immediately show a consequence of such a misunderstanding: in his only musical Drama, Oedipe (first performed in Paris in 1936), he resorts, at certain points, to techniques proper to the popular music of his Homeland: because of this, everyone speaks of a sort of syncretism on his part between Romanian popular reality and classical antiquity. In fact, Enescu studies an ancient tradition with roots in Indo-European Dacia and Scythia from which Latinized Romania originates: he finds there the traces of a primordial nomos common to such peoples as to Hellas. In the same way, the Maestro studies the sumptuous barbaric polyphony of Byzantine liturgical chant with its so-called heterophony and makes a most modern application of it already in his Symphonies.
But in Europe, the creators in possession of sufficient culture to transpose ancient modality into living and autonomous invention are Maurice Emmanuel, Gino Marinuzzi (with the symphonic Poem Sicania, from 1911, and with the Opera Jacquerie, from 1917) and Franco Alfano: already with Risurrezione, from 1904, which a superficial literature considers Verismo Opera; and with La leggenda di Sakuntala, from 1921, where the Author recreates ancient Indian ragas anticipating Olivier Messiaen by decades; and the greatest of all, Karol Szymanowski, who died in 1937.
Enescu is great already at age 24 with the First Symphony. A first movement of well-constructed Sonata form gives way to a Lent: after a call from the horn, echoes of horns with mutes lead to a dark chromatic swamp in which harmony and melody almost sink: and if one truly wants to see an influence of Wagner, it is here, in this sort of evocation of the Prelude to Act III of Parsifal. When one emerges from the swamp, the orchestra begins to sing with a wonderful melodic efflorescence; and the sensual dissonant harmonies seem to me to owe more to Franck (I think of Psyché) than to Wagner. The third movement, Vif et vigoureux, relatively shorter, is a gust of joy and youth that passes with great formal refinement and a masterful hand of orchestration.
The vast Second Symphony reaches peaks especially in the passages of more pushed modernity, namely in the Development of the first movement and in the third. This is bipartite, with a slow introduction and an extended fast part: an absolute masterpiece of cyclic conception with respect to the rest of the Symphony and of contrapuntal elaboration leading to the overlapping and combination of all themes. From a stylistic point of view, we can speak of a strong influence of Skrjabin's Poème de l’extase: an influence that leads, so to speak, to a Skrjabin purified of Theosophical dross.
The Third Symphony features a Scherzo embedded between two slow fluvial movements. The first, in an expanded Sonata form, is in a "mixolydian" C major: the initial exposition of the main theme, which seems to arise from abyssal darkness, will become the metaphysical return into darkness at the end. Such an exposition is a slow introduction: the timpani beats out menacing and funeral dactyls.
The Scherzo (Vivace, ma non troppo) is the hardest page ever written by the Author. It intends to express the images of the most terrible war in history. An atrocious march, of the same genre as those of Mahler and Shostakovich but not related to them stylistically, grows while approaching the listener: the writing for percussion is masterful; once it reaches the climax, a sort of chromatic marsh ensues that makes one think of the mud of the trenches; then a series of malignant flashes that in turn evoke grenades, mortars, and cannons. A dissonant Chorale of brass, the trumpet in an extremely high position, screams all the agony; then the
the tempo fades away descending towards silence, with the last spasms of the contrabassoon and the timpani: the flesh is stripped to a skeleton. Together with Shostakovich's Dance Macabre from the Eighth [Symphony], this Scherzo is the greatest Triumph of Death in twentieth-century music.
But then comes catharsis. The Lento ma non troppo finale, which lasts 19 minutes, is the purification from all human dross in a contemplation to which only the adjective sublime can be applied: everything has the metaphysical calm of one who contemplates the human condition from heavenly spheres; and the female choir humming on the vowel A provides an extraordinary timbral contribution. The influence of Sirenes, the third of Debussy's Nocturnes, is obvious: but here too Enescu safeguards his originality. The final minutes possess diamond-like colors achieved also through the use of the bell. The glorification of C major seems the exact opposite of the unsettling C major of Shostakovich's Eighth.
Oedipe is one of the greatest musical Dramas of the twentieth century. The poet Edmond Fleg invents with great art a text that begins before the birth of Oedipus to reach the light of Colonus in the IV act: Sophocles is his primary source; but Oedipus's struggle against Fate, his rebellion against an original guilt—he who is innocent—leads him to redemption through suffering, which is indeed implicit in Sophocles himself but here, as a man of the twentieth century sees it, cannot fail to be seen in a Christian key. The wonderful light of the score in the IV act, that A-flat major, that B major and then the G major finale are truly transfigured. On the contrary, the dramatic gloom of the first three acts is terrifying; Enescu employs there the means of an authentic avant-garde artist, yet measuring every detail. To Sophocles is added also, in the II act, the dialogue with the Sphinx and her death, and the musical means employed far surpass that use of quarter tones that musicologists like to point out and which would bother any other composer: the orchestral introduction describes his cursed place sown with corpses with spectral colors never heard before, the strings with mutes and the piccolo trumpet in D: and here one's thoughts cannot run to any of the painters who have depicted the scene, not even Moreau: or not even this Moreau: but to that of Hercules and the Lernaean Hydra. Then when the monster speaks, a new timbral atmosphere surrounds it: here translucent: harmonics of the strings, piano and celesta: translucent but even more sinister. The score, which has an entirely new sound (it is futile to speak of the influence of Stravinsky or others), is at once a monument to drama (there is also a completely original use of the Wagnerian technique of leitmotifs), to harmony, and to orchestration. One of its surprising features is rhythmic invention, as original as it is inexhaustible; from this perspective, the Author has few comparisons in the twentieth century; and the subtlety of his French prosody makes him at least equal to Debussy himself.
Of Enescu's other three Symphonies and his chamber music I will speak in a future book of mine: but I will say one more thing: in the music of this Great Master, you will never find the same theme stated twice in the same way: continuous Variation is one of his deities.