When I was a child, and later, as a teenager, I circled around the Romanian Athenaeum without knowing what the edifice was good for. Then I began to think that it had been built for George Enescu… And when I first entered the concert hall, climbing one of its spiral staircases, a noble fragrance was wafting in the air that enticed you to stay there forever.Yes, over there is the stage whereon the orchestra plays, and here, in these chairs, we sit and listen and set out on a journey to centuries past. But where is Enescu? I was told he was in Paris and he would come home before long, as the war would soon break out. When the British night air raids began, I trembled for the Athenaeum, but it was guarded by Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Wagner, and it came out unscathed by the end of the hostilities. Then some knavish German pilots, showing no respect to the four composers, wounded its dome with a bomb, and the wound took a long time to heal. We were all hurt, most of all George Enescu, our mentor, whom we, the violinists, were struggling to measure up to.The violin didn't work out for me, so I switched to composition, although I had been practicing it in secret since I was a child. Later on, my own compositions went on stage at the Athenaeum, and it seemed to me it was quite a gentle giant. In fact, it kept silent, letting us frolic in the hall, for it knew it was eternal, while we where only mortal crickets.When I saw the Athenaeum on illustrated postcards of Bucharest, I began to look at it with different eyes, because I thought we too had had city trustees who had imagined what our capital would be like in future. Why aren't these generous people visiting us any more, why are they lying under tombstones?Now I am recounting that day in the life of the Romanian Athenaeum I announced in the title. I had been copying for a long time the orchestral parts of the Easter Oratorio by Paul Constantinescu, and the first concert was forthcoming. A great fuss, excitement, mistake-hunt through the thousands of pages to be used by the soloists, choir and orchestra.March 3, 1946 was the day. The monumental composition was conducted by George Enescu, and Jesus' part was performed by Father Iancu D. Petrescu of Visarion church, the great scholar of Byzantine music paleography.Rehearsals advanced painstakingly, but step by step the oratorio was coming out, heralding a historic moment in Romanian music. When Jesus' turn came to sing, Father Iancu stood up to his 6 ft. 8" bony height and began in such a low voice that all orchestral nuances had to be toned down. That silence was so mysterious and… Jesus-like, that everyone wept and wept without being able to check their tears. All the suffering in the world, which our Savior sees, and wished to quell through His gentleness, was right there before our eyes.I was under an utter spell at the concert: very close to the stage, I was contemplating the great Enescu at the rostrum, himself a monument of gentleness and delicacy.When I looked back at the audience, I shuddered: hundreds of priests' black beards. Had they been immortalized on photographic plate, it would have turned out one of the most fantastic pictures of the century. I cannot describe it, but I'll let the reader imagine it.The clergy of Bucharest were in the concert hall to attend Paul Constantinescu's Easter Oratorio. Spiritual solidarity was born then among all those present. But it would soon be scattered to the winds, in the stormy decades to come, starting maybe even the day after.Too many tombstones… Too many tombstones over the Romanian spirit.
by Theodor Grigoriu
