String Pioneers: George Enescu Blended the Sounds of Romanian Culture and Language into His Complex Compositions

By Brian Wise | From the May/June 2025 issue of Strings

By all accounts, George Enescu was worshipped as much at home during his lifetime in Romania as Jean Sibelius was in Finland. Enescu’s Romanian Rhapsody No. 1, composed at age 20 and still his most beloved work, could be heard as roughly analogous to Sibelius’ Finlandia. But comparing popular curtain-raisers has its limitations, for while Sibelius established a varied place in modern concert life, Enescu, for all his considerable gifts, has been a stubbornly neglected figure.

Some attribute this inattention to Enescu’s quietly perfectionist nature, which limited his output to just 33 opuses and made him a decidedly unflashy advocate for his work (though he was once a leading candidate to replace Arturo Toscanini as music director of the New York Philharmonic).

Others feel that he suffered from a kind of one-hit-wonder syndrome, in which his folkloristic Romanian Rhapsodies Nos. 1 and 2 overshadowed the rest of his catalog, which includes three completed symphonies, two string quartets, three violin sonatas, and two cello sonatas.

Still others believe that Enescu’s detailed scores, thick with articulations and other markings, require a special patience to learn and understand. That is a leading theory for Cristian Măcelaru, the Romanian-born artistic director of the George Enescu International Festival in Bucharest and music director designate of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.

“I think the first issue, and actually something that I’ve confronted myself, is when you first open an Enescu score, it’s overwhelmingly difficult to understand the musical language, because he was so obsessed with trying to capture the sound that he was trying to portray,” says Măcelaru, who early in his career played violin in the Miami and Houston symphony orchestras.

“In Enescu, there is a lot of room for personal input, but first you have to understand what he means by all these markings, because every note will have two or three markings.”

An extraordinary musical polymath, Enescu was a skilled violinist, solid pianist, dynamic conductor, and an inspiring teacher whose students included Yehudi Menuhin. Ardently Romanian but a longtime Parisian, he was pulled in many directions and talented in all. Stories of him playing complete Wagner operas or Bach cantatas from memory at the piano are legendary.

Enescu was born in 1881 in Liveni, Romania (later renamed “George Enescu”), and began writing music for the violin at age four, after a Romani violinist taught him the instrument. At age seven, he left his parents’ farm for the Vienna Conservatory, where he studied for five years and met his idol, Brahms. Studies at the Paris Conservatoire followed, where he breathed the fragrant harmonies of Gabriel Fauré and studied violin with the Belgian Martin Pierre Marsick. For much of the rest of his life, Paris was the hub of Enescu’s busy touring career, but he remained attached to his homeland and returned there often.

In Enescu’s first large-scale work, the Octet for strings of 1900, six themes are introduced near the outset. “I am essentially a polyphonist and not a connector of pretty chords,” the 19-year-old Enescu asserted in an accompanying statement. “When a melodic line, or better, a superimposition of melodic lines cannot be discerned, there is no composition.” The densely textured work has found a certain cult-like fascination among chamber musicians, and it has been recorded by the Gringolts Quartet, the Sinfonia of London, and an ensemble led by violinist Vilde Frang.

Măcelaru compares the tough-to-balance Octet to a Richard Strauss tone poem. “When you look at Enescu’s music, everyone has an extremely interesting part that is not necessarily in rhythmic unison with anybody else,” he explains. “Everyone has an individual line. But just like with Strauss, you have to be comfortable having a part that is spectacular but also basically unheard.”

Violinist Tai Murray has performed much of Enescu’s solo violin repertoire along with the Octet. “Even though I know it really well, every time the rehearsal process begins with a different group, it doesn’t feel like I can start from 50. I always start from zero,” she says of the Octet. “That’s because of everybody’s emotional and physical impact on the piece. It’s going to be a totally different beast with a different group of people. And it is a beast.” 

Channeling a Village Fiddler 

After writing two violin sonatas in a late-Romantic, somewhat French style, Enescu paid homage to his homeland in 1926 with the Violin Sonata No. 3, subtitled “in the Romanian folk character.” Unlike Bartók, who transcribed and quoted whole folk melodies, Enescu set out to write a grand evocation. Crammed with wailing portamentos, faux-improvised phrases, and delirious mood swings, each of the sonata’s three movements is intensely rhapsodic.

Interpreters must contend with Enescu’s obsessive craftsmanship, says London-based Romanian violinist Remus Azoitei, who has recorded Enescu’s violin works. “One note can have six or seven articulation marks—lines, triangles, dots, glissandi, a la Punta del Arco—in trying to capture this rhapsodic language and explain it to a traditionally formed instrumentalist,” he notes. “A classical violinist has to sound like a village fiddler.”

“He’s trying to figure out a way to notate the spoken heritage,” adds Murray. “He uses the violin in a very spoken-language way. His markings tend to not just be dynamic but [about] what shape you want in the middle of that note.” And though Enescu writes his expressive markings in French, the sounds grow out of the Romanian language. “A lot of his markings are to try and bring out the memory of the rhythm of that language.”

Azoitei also calls attention to Enescu’s character pieces, some of which he left unfinished, including the charming Torso Sonata in A minor. “But for me, the big prize goes to Impressions d’enfance,” he says, referring to a ten-movement suite (Childhood Impressions) for violin and piano, in which a folkloristic manner meets a more chromatic idiom.

“He was not interested in his works being performed all the time, anywhere,” Azoitei says. “He was interested in performances that really capture the spirit, and he made them very difficult with good reason. He had a lot to say and made them in a way that no mediocre violinist or pianist could ever tackle them. That’s why Enescu’s music is not often played.”

Despite this, promotional efforts have been ongoing since Enescu’s death in 1955, especially through the George Enescu Festival, which runs in alternation with the George Enescu International Competition, featuring violin, cello, and piano categories. The festival, which begins its 27th edition this August, is notable for encouraging visiting artists and orchestras to play at least one work by its namesake, the theory being that they will go on to perform and disseminate it elsewhere. This year’s event is expected to include some 45 Enescu performances.

Festival artistic director Măcelaru recorded Enescu’s Symphonies Nos. 1–3 with the Orchestre National de France for a 2024 release on Deutsche Grammophon, believed to be the first-ever Enescu recording on the label. Ma˘celaru hopes to see more exposure for the composer’s chamber works, including the two piano quintets and his final completed score, the crisply elegant Chamber Symphony, Op. 33. It had a lengthy gestation, like many of Enescu’s late works, including the String Quartet No. 2, drafted in the 1920s and finished in 1952 after seven revisions.

Though it can be tempting to summarize Enescu’s journey as a linear progression—from Austro-German- and French-influenced music to folkloristic showpieces and, ultimately, an international, modernist idiom—the reality is more complex. As music historian Erik Levi has written, there was a constant shift in the balance of all of these elements at any given time in his life, depending on the type of music he was writing.

A greater awareness of Romanian culture should only help Enescu’s exposure. “During his lifetime there was such a discriminatory view of Romani,” says Murray. “I’m sure there was a semi-attempt to, if not ignore him, to ignore that part of him, which I can only imagine influenced people wanting to program or listen to his music. That sort of loss of connection between then and now is probably why there are just now people discovering him.”

Murray sees a growing interest among her peers. “The need to unearth his works is happening. I like this plan of action.”