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Dragoș Călin Constantin Silvestri: Insights into the Beginnings of a Conducting Career While being an assistant music master at the State Opera in Bucharest, Silvestri had the opportunity to conduct several insignificant works. Still, in a talk I had with him about La Bohème, I was impressed with the way he commented upon and judged this work, especially the way he analyzed the conducting skills needed. Back then there was an amateurish atmosphere in Bucharest Opera, and the conductors used to learn the works by heart, rather than follow the score. Even George Georgescu, the most reputed Romanian conductor of the time, used to come to the piano rehearsals of soloists and the choir and learnt the works by heart while listening to the assistant music master. At the time, Georgescu, was a dilettante who had no idea about harmony and composition; by comparison, Silvestri was an exquisite professional, a specialist in forms and harmony, who believed that you cannot be a great conductor without studying a work in detail.3 Nevertheless, Constantin Silvestri found it difficult to get a stable, decently paid position. In despair and seriously depressed, he set most of his early compositions on fire, in 1938. In a memorandum to the Romanian Musicians’ Union in 1945, he pointed to authorities’ lack of understanding for his talent: Until 1935 I had numerous concerts, I won George Enescu Prize and many of my compositions were interpreted in many of the world’s concert halls by musicians such as Hermann Scherchen, Lotte Lehmann or Felix Borowski. Still, I could not get a position in this country’s institutions. I managed to get hired by the State Opera in Bucharest with great difficulty. After innumerable memoranda, and no sooner than 1941, I managed to conduct a few concerts. Both the Radio Orchestra and the Philharmonic Orchestra closed their doors to me. At the Opera, my wages were cut down four times. I conducted only matinees or cheap productions turned down by my colleagues. To survive, I had to sell my piano, although Toscanini conducted several of my works, while others were published in America! …4 Unfortunately, according to the British biographer John Gritten, Silvestri did not mention in this memorandum which of his works were interpreted by the orchestras conducted by Toscanini. In any case, although Silvestri was in excellent relations with both Jora and Paul Constantinescu, his taste did not coincide with his generation’s taste, and his friends classified him as an eccentric. His ideas were more advanced than his fellow Romanian composers’. If, in the 1930s, his avantgarde compositions had won him the reputation of ‘a lunatic’, as Silvestri himself noted5, his vast conducting comprehension reveals him as a precursor of the more conciliatory visions, generalized in recent decades under the all-comprehensive umbrella of postmodernism: a visionary, a musician before his time, as John Gritten chose to title his monograph. His precocious familiarity with avant-garde music had been facilitated by Zeno Vancea, during the visit he paid to Vancea’s estate in Târgu Mureş in 1933. Dear Zeno, thank you very much for your invitation. Unfortunately I do not think I can leave Bucharest at this moment. I must stay here to conduct and play as much as possible with the Radio. Mu finances are extremely precarious. I have been suffering for years from these irresponsible criminals leading Romanian music, people whose salaries are 60.000-70.000 lei a month for 3 or 4 positions they fill simultaneously. It is well understood that they raise barriers to young people and push them away. I have recently written a memorandum to the king but unfortunately it has reached people I have criticized, so you must understand the kind of relationships I have with everyone now…6 Silvestri was eaten up by these problems for a long time; these left deep traces in his mind, even though his art became eventually appreciated. It is not surprising, then, that in 1956 he decided to move to Paris and, after extraordinary success worldwide, he chose to become a British citizen, two years before his premature disappearance. English Version by Simina Neagu 1 http://www.oup.com/uk/academic/online/Entries/S25798/, accessed March 1st, 2013
2 John Gritten , A Musician before his Time: Constantin Silvestri – Conductor, Composer, Pianist (London : Warwick Editions, 1998): 54
3 John Gritten : 56
4 Gritten: 57
5 Gritten: 57
6 John Gritten , 57
8 Lavinia Coman, Constantin Silvestri (Bucharest: Editura Didactică şi Pedagogică, 2013)
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