Mircea

None of the totalitarian regimes of this century had any particular liking for the modern art trends and made them eventually disappear from the area controlled by them. Too free a manifestation of one's personality meant escaping their power. In Nazi Germany just as

Who is this Roman Vlad who composed 'The Seagull'? a well-known director asked me, a great music fan, therefore always present at the concerts and shows of the Enescu Festival. The meaning of this question was suggested by its intonation: Who is this Roman Vlad

BALLET OPENING NIGHT AT THE NATIONAL ROMANIAN OPERA The two ballets staged by Alexa Mezincescu in her recent premiere on the boards of the National Romanian Opera in Bucharest, The Firebird and The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky, marked, at the moment of their creation

I was touched and amazed to discover this skinny little girl, thin and long legged, who was doing her exercises in the ballet room with the concentration of a mature artist. The way she led her body had lost any trace of effort and it was describing meanings known only to

Some time in the autumn of 1994, Sorin Alexandrescu asked in an interview in 22 magazine why, in the canonical battle between the various radical-democrat and nationalist structures of the opposition (and of the government), more attention is not paid to the real traditions

I am overcome with horror at the thought that we, Romanians, are facing 'eternity': the proverb. We enter other nations' proverbs like the Scotsman, the Irishman, the Jew, and – in the Balkan Peninsula – the Gypsy. We've brought shame upon ourselves,

 I must admit I didn't quite understand in the beginning why, shortly after 1989, the Western mass-media has so hastily labeled us as suffering from a deep identity crisis. I was downright indignant: after having sadistically experimented Communism on us for half

Chapter IIROMANIANISM AND AUTOCHTHONISMexcerpts Continuing the clash of ideas of the previous decades, the 1930s too witnessed a confrontation on the evolution formula of the Romanian make-up. Two directions were pitted against each other. One favorable to the maintenance

Romanian bravery is neither a musketeer's, nor itinerant (like the Western knights'), or quixotic; it does not take initiatives: a typical example is [Mircea the Elder's battle against the Turks at] Nikopol. I do not attack, I defend myself; I do not tease,

Mihaela Marinescu: Did you know maestro Ionel Perlea before visiting him in New York in 1967?Theodor Grigoriu: No, I didn't, he had left the country a long time before. He was a legend to my generation, like Enescu, like Lipatti. Before my trip to the United States

Aida, March 17, 1920. I waited for it. With the justifiable, feverish impatience you feel before an ideal dream comes true!, wrote the Rampa magazine on March 18, 1920, hailing the opening of the first lyrical season. People liked the cheap, but very beautiful stage design,

On 20 November 1921 an enthusiastic letter written by the poet Cincinat Pavelescu is published in Rampa, a letter which we see fit to transcribe in full: Dear Mr. Editor in Chief, My life's absorbing activities of incessant work at the head of a newspaper without any