Mozart

Echoes

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

A Portrait In Smithereens

At night, when sleep is slow to come in a somewhat strange bed, you listen tensely to any sort of noise and try to decode the shades momentarily cast by car lights on the white of the walls. That is how I realized she was there, waiting on the threshold of the door. You

Echoes: Excerpts From The Farewell Concert

In an obituary published in the Tages Anzeiger of Zurich, Mario Gerteis draws a suggestive portrait of Celibidache in his youth. A nervous fiery ball, halfway between histrionics and insight, between passion and obsession. His dark locks hanging over his face in disorder,

P.S. With Victor Brauner (This Is How I Would Like To Write)

With immense delicacy and great scrupulousness he [Gellu Naum] would each time talk about Victor Brauner – the friend from his youth years he had met on the occasion of an exhibition opened at Mozart Hall in Bucharest. It was 1935. The twenty-year old youth, Gellu Naum,

Vienna

All roads to the West go through Vienna. Generous crossroads where the western world fuses with the horizons of eastern Europe and the Germanic spirit seems to have rich confluences with Latinity, the old Austrian metropolis still conveys the same charm that those claras

My Aunts From Tel Aviv

excerpt Big scandal occasioned by Remembrance Day and Independence Day (Yom Ha-Zikaron, Yom Ha-Hatzmaut), because the Minister of the Armed Forces ordered 40,000 Israeli flags in Taiwan instead of the domestic industry, preferring foreign silk,and this friend of mine who

Time For The Sublime

Just as there comes a time for getting married and for retiring, there also comes a time for the sublime. After one has knocked together some fortune, he starts thinking about growing rich spiritually, too. . . It just won't do to own a dwelling with an inner staircase.

Gogu Georgescu And Gică Petrescu

On some days I feel universal when listening to Hora în căruţă (Jig in the Cart); I can even picture a cart then, all its joints rattling among the frozen missiles of the world. I get dizzy and a teardrop warms up the Murmansk under my eyelids. Hora Stacatto (Stacatto

The Architect

Emil Popescu was an architect. His specialty was the oil factories and we can say, without any exaggeration, that wherever in the country an oil factory had been built in the last five or six years, one could easily tell it was the work of architect Popescu's skilled

Don Juan

excerpt Nobody listened to him or did so intermittently, the Russian mumbled something, excited by the other's mumbling, Mr. A. V. Emilian was drinking, capitalizing on the exaggerated attention the strange guest was receiving from the little old lady. This one-nighter,

Traviata On The Grass

excerpt When I first met her, she said she adored Pablo Neruda's poetry and La Fontaine's erotic fables, which are un petit secret délicieux and, once a month, she would listen to a fragment of Le Petit Prince, interpreted by Gérard Philippe. She also told me

The Violin Player Ion Voicu

It is hard to say when the Gypsies came to Romania for the first time, and then settled for good, but the oldest documents date from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when the royal charters mentioned the fiddler slaves, sold alongside the dependencies and objects from