Paris

The Conductor

The Romanian realm has given great creating spirits to the world, in all fields of activity: philosophers, historians, sociologists, scientists that made epoch-making discoveries, inventors, writers (poets, prose writers, and dramatists), brilliant musicians, painters, and

I May Count Myself As Having Been Born Under A Lucky Star

As early as my years of instruction, while at The Academy of Music in Bucharest – as part of the group of the grand and incomparable professional singer and mentor Constantin Stroescu (Enrico Caruso's partner in Boston, 1915, in Leoncavallo's Pagliacci) – destiny

Echoes

Aida, March 17, 1920. I waited for it. With the justifiable, feverish impatience you feel before an ideal dream comes true!, wrote the Rampa magazine on March 18, 1920, hailing the opening of the first lyrical season. People liked the cheap, but very beautiful stage design,

Letters

Enescu:Dear Georgescu,This is what I got from professor Hajak (Targu Mures). He plays well and it would be a good policy to have him play one of the concertos he proposed with the Philharmonic. I did not mean to bother you with this matter, but he insists, as you can see.

George Georgescu's Image In My Mind And Soul

Director of the George Enescu Philharmonic in Bucharest At a certain point, the evolution of Romanian culture goes through a moment when, owing to strong personalities, the distance separating it from the level attained by the universal culture is suddenly annulled, and

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

The Last Saint Of Music

Among all 20th-century great Romanian conductors, indubitably the most extravagant, original, paradoxical maestro of the baton remained Sergiu Celibidache. Perhaps only Herbert von Karajan enjoyed the status of absolute star during his life time as the Romanian conductor

The Romanian School Of Conductors

It is no secret to anyone that in Romania every person who has a good voice and musical talent has sung at least once, in his or her youth, in a choir. People say about Banat, the western region on the boundary with Hungary and Yugoslavia that it is the land of choirs, because

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,

Gellu Naum

(1. 08. 1915-29. 09. 2001) Gellu Naum (1915-2001) was the only writer pertaining to the historical Romanian surrealist avant-garde who survived, rather untouched but also more or less unheard, the vicissitudes of a half a century of Communist rule. He started publishing

Modernity Without Avant-Garde: B. Fundoianu (Benjamin Fondane)

excerptsFondane's interest in the psychological mechanisms of illusion did not come from a strictly neutral or intellectual curiosity. Deeper resources of his personality contributed, and his poetry is testimony to that. As a general rule, only the disillusioned are

Quote

The play unfolds in our time. The first scene, or exposition scene, brings the Jew and king Belshazzar face to face: a parable of two enemy peoples, Jewish and pagan, of slavery and absolute power, of the weak and the strong, of the poor and the rich… The crux of the tragedy