GEORGE ENESCU'S OPERA OEDIPE AND THE SENSATIONAL STORY OF ITS DEDICATION

Enescu (left, on violin) with Romania's queen Elizabeth and other musicians.

Departing from our usual format (given we are still away from London), we would like to draw attention to George Enescu's masterpiece Oedipe, which we saw last night at the Bucharest National Opera. Enescu is considered Romania's greatest composer, but whilst almost everything music-related is named after him, and his face appears on the 5 lei banknote (along with the atonal opening contrabassoon motif from the opera's overture) the actual music on which his artistic reputation stands is often overlooked and certainly performed less frequently than it deserves to be.


The opera, with a libretto in French by Edmond Fleg, was started in 1922 and completed in 1931. Although it falls squarely in the Deco period, its sinuous graceful and lush textures belong really to the earlier Art Nouveau aesthetic. Enescu made much of his career in France and, the language of the opera aside, the music shows the unsurprising influence of the French impressionists (Debussy, Ravel, etc), most obviously his colouristic, non-functional use of tonal harmony. The orchestration is also a tour-de-force, its immensely-subtle fabric managing to be both rich and finely-etched in the manner of Mahler's late symphonies. There seems to be little influence from the ethos of neo-classicism prevalent in France at the time. Enescu employs a large orchestra and goes straight for the jugular of musical expression. He doesn't treat the myth as a series of emotionally- static, even ironic tableaux in the manner of Stravinsky's almost-contemporary treatment of the same myth. There does however seem to be a clear influence of Austro-German expressionism – the drowning scene of Wozzeck clearly comes to mind in the encounter with the Sphinx and the blinding scene. The rapidly-shifting tonality of the rest of the work is replaced by a world of strange pedal-points, extreme registers and instrumental colours, tiny, pregnant flecks of melody and ostinato, Sprechstimme-like vocal writing and sudden, devastating climaxes and silences. Whilst the extremity of the expressive content of the music is matched by extremity (and strangeness) of style, these scenes do not feel like a graft from another work. The opera does have a style where expressionism and more 'conventional' music – such as set choral pieces and dances at the opening of the first act, and the triumphant music after the Sphinx's demise – seem like extensions of a unitary, supple compositional style that can encompass opposites.
Enescu grew up in Moldavia and throughout the opera one can glimpse seems the musical mannerisms characteristic of Romanian folk ballads or dances being seamlessly worked into this musical style. In particular, one thinks of the doina-like song Oedipe sings to himself just before arriving at the crossroads, where he kills Laios. The composer never had the chance to write another opera, a great pity as he seems to have had a natural knack for this art-form, making it truly his own.

Enescu dedicated Oedipe to the Princess Maruca Rosetti, and the love story behind this is simply sensational. A lady in waiting to Romania's queen Marie and descendant of the Cantacuzenes, an old Romanian boyar family, Maruca was a sort of Romanian Alma Mahler. Married to the richest man in Romania, she became a femme fatale, collecting illustrious and talented admirers, after catching her husband in her sister's bed. She met Enescu in the summer of 1907 at Sinaia, Romania's royal mountain retreat, and it was reportedly love at first sight (in a letter she refers to him as “man, god or demon... destiny incarnate”). At the end of that summer Enescu had to return to Paris, leaving Maruca at her landed estate, comparing her love to that of Isolde for Tristan and considering divorce from her husband. Just as she was about to leave for Paris to be reunited with her lover, she received a letter from him accusing her of cheating with another aristocrat. She was so incensed that she immediately cancelled the tickets and booked different ones for Italy. After a revenge affair with an English lord, she reunited with the contrite Enescu a month later in Paris. In 1913 she left on a long journey to Norway to find herself and take some breathing space from the intense affair. For the next few stormy years, the relationship was on and off several times. Whilst on a break she met the philosopher and academic Nae Ionescu (Mircea Eliade's teacher) one of the architects of Romanian fascism. A charismatic figure at the height of his popularity, he soon began an affair with the princess, which lasted five years. Ionescu eventually left her for the aristocratic pianist Cella Delavrancea, but told one of his pupils that his life had been broken in two at the moment of his separation from Maruca. Maruca herself retreated at her family estate in Tescani where she fell into a deep depression and came to believe that she was cursed. Apparently the curse had come from a witch who had been the gypsy lover of her grandfather. The grandfather was said to have abandoned his wife for the gypsy, but when his son grew up he sent the gypsy away, incurring a curse upon his family. In the wake of her break-up with Nae Ionescu Maruca disfigured herself either by throwing acid on her face, setting herself on fire or both (sources differ) - she wore a black veil for the rest of her life. Hearing about this Enescu rushed to her side and, after a brief period in a mental institution, nursed her back to health and they married in 1937.