ENESCU

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,

Ever since the mid-18th century, the city off the Dâmboviţa banks has enjoyed a particular sentimental popularity, not only from the point of view of its merry, party-loving, enterprising inhabitants, but also in the memory of tourists, who christened Romania's Capital

Modernism has brought to paroxysm the need of personal mythologies, immanent to Western civilization. No wonder that some of the heroes and saints of the avant-garde came from those peripheral European territories still uncharted from a spiritual point of view. By the beginning

It has been said – for good reason – that the Romanian word dor [aprox. yearning] is untranslatable, which made all foreign lexicographers leave it in its original form in most literary texts. But in music there is also a dor enescian [Enescian yearning], which someone

Alfredo Casella: Enescu is delicate and sensitive, communicative too, like all Latins. Despite his spontaneous and amazingly rich inventiveness, his creation illustrates a process of will, which no artist can overlook. I have seen such a perfect accord between intention

The history of world music has witnessed many spectacular overturns in the hierarchy of values, when names of purely local interest whose death was not even announced in an obituary (Johann Sebastian Bach) became world famous personalities a century later. Quite often, internationally

For the sparkling sculptor of modern art, music represented a secret passion. It was only after the master's death that his close friends, V. G. Paleolog and Marcel Mihalovici revealed to the world the place the art of sounds took in the atmosphere of the mysterious

It comes as no surprise that a genuinely encyclopedic spirit of Nicolae Iorga's caliber, conversant with history, literature, religion, church, army, commerce, education, trades, guilds, arts, etc. , etc. , should be passionate about music. His existence was markedly

Let us not be deceived by articles and books issued by courtesy or for which we pay, and this so seldom. We are not loved abroad. Even if people remember the fine welcome we give people – which is so comprehensive according to the customs, and at times even sufficiently

The threshold between the millenniums is an opportunity for evaluation: tributes, jubilees, festivals. Archives are being browsed, masterpieces are reappraised, and writings are redefined in the current context, then recirculated in today's competition. Everything becomes

Like diaries and memoirs, portraits and especially self-portraits represent a favorite means of inserting the creator's self into history. One may eventually infer, if not directly grasp a writer's or a painter's positions and opinions about his milieu and

6 March 1960So I am finally taken out as well, led inside an office hid in that tiny niche of the arched corridor; examined, identified, undressed. I am only left one towel, one bar of soap, one toothbrush, one toothpaste, two pairs of socks, one shirt, one pair of underwear,