Romania and Hungary share a common border, if an uneasy history. They also happen to share two of the 20th century’s most talented composers, both of them born in 1881. On this week’s “Music from Marlboro,” as always, we look past nationalistic concerns to seek unity in music.
George Enescu (1881-1955) was arguably Romania’s greatest musical export, a child prodigy who excelled also as a violinist, a pianist, a conductor, and a teacher. At the age of seven, he became the youngest student ever to be admitted to the Vienna Conservatory. He graduated before his 13th birthday. From there, he went to Paris and embarked on a charmed career with too many highlights to detail here. Pablo Casals, who was affiliated with the Marlboro Music Festival for the last 13 years of his life, described him as “the greatest musical phenomenon since Mozart.”
Enescu’s Violin Sonata No. 2 in F minor (1899), was completed during his final year at the Paris Conservatory. He had already composed an ambitious, thirty-minute “Romanian Poem” (1898), when just 16, and wasn’t far from achieving world fame with his “Romanian Rhapsody No. 1” (1901). Enescu later claimed that the sonata, along with his Octet for Strings, marked the point where he felt he had truly become himself.
We’ll hear it performed at the 1974 Marlboro Music Festival, by violinist Pina Carmirelli and pianist Alan Weiss.
Hungarian composer Béla Bartók (1881-1945) was also a gifted pianist and a pioneering ethnomusicologist, who did much to deepen musical understanding through his documentary journeys and insights into the cultures of Eastern Europe and North Africa – including the region of Transylvania, which was to become the source of such complicated feelings between Hungary and Romania.
He also happened to be one of the most innovative musical thinkers of his time, beating an alternative route to modernism through the assimilation of folk music into a highly personal idiom that owes little to either Stravinsky or Schoenberg.
Bartók’s “Divertimento for String Orchestra” (1939) is a fascinating chimera – it takes its name from an 18th century form (appropriate for its neo-classical ambitions), shares qualities with the Baroque concerto grosso (with a small group of soloists at times contrasting with the greater body of the orchestra), and yet remains distinctly of its time. Even here, the composer’s love of folk music is evident.
The “Divertimento” was Bartók’s final composition before fleeing Nazi Europe for the United States. He wrote the work in only fifteen days, while staying at the Swiss chalet of conductor Paul Sacher, who had commissioned the piece. Though it was composed very quickly, as befits a divertimento – which traditionally, in the 18th century, was regarded as “entertainment” music – Bartók left meticulous instructions for its performance.
We’ll hear it played by a collection of Marlboro string players, conducted by Sándor Végh, in 1974. Végh, born in Transylvania, was one of the great chamber musicians. He participated in the first Hungarian performance of Bartók’s String Quartet No. 5.
That’s music by Enescu and Bartók on the next “Music for Marlboro,” this Wednesday evening at 6:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
Marlboro School of Music and Festival: Official Page
Sándor Végh promoting unity on this week’s “Music for Marlboro”