George Georgescu, conductor (1887 – 1964)

Patriarch-like figure in Romanian musical culture, George Georgescu is one of the founders of the George Enescu Philharmonic in Bucharest, the institution flourishing, under his leadership, as never before or since.

A classic and fitting the intellectual and artistic profile of our cultural elite until the Communist rule, George Georgescu was born on September 12, 1887 in Sulina. Training as a cellist, this stage of his life certainly stays in the shadow of his conducting career, but had its brilliant moments nevertheless. Aged 18, he began studying the double bass class at the Bucharest Conservatoire. His teachers, recognising his special musical talent, reoriented him towards the cello, and so George Georgescu sat in the class of Constantin Dimitrescu. After graduating, and following the unexpected grand he earned after a recital at the Romanian Athenaeum, he pursued further studies in Berlin, training with Hugo Becker while also attending the composition and conducting classes. At first keeping his distance, Becker is won over by George Georgescu’s capacities, eventually not only appreciating the Romanian musician but also appointing him his successor after his retirement from the quartet led by the illustrious French violinist Henri Marteau. George Georgescu thus toured Europe for four years, his career as a cellist abruptly and unfortunately ending in 1916, when he severely injured his hand in the closing door of a tram. Even later, as a conductor, he would always acknowledge that Hugo Becker was the one who most influenced his musical development.

On the suggestion of Arthur Nikisch, the celebrated German conductor, George Georgescu devoted himself to conducting, and he did so at a level that allowed him to lead, in 1918, none other than the Berliner Phiharmoniker. Back home, he took over, with the direct help of the Romanian Royal House, the Bucharest Philharmonic, which he reformed from the ground up. Gradually incorporation top European musicians and patiently polishing the ensemble, he turned it, during the inter-war period, into one whose seasons were comparable to the offers of the most prestigious similar institutions worldwide – such brilliance as was also given by the Romanian Athenaeum’s regular guests, stars the likes of Richard Strauss, Bruno Walter, Yehudi Menuhin, Pablo Casals, Arthur Rubinstein, Alfred Cortot or Wilhelm Backhaus. As well, in parallel with that first term with the Bucharest Philharmonic, suddenly terminated in 1944 after accusations of “collaborationism”, George Georgescu was three-time director and conductor of the Bucharest Opera (1922-26, 1930-33 and 1939-40).

Here’s George Enescu in a letter from November 25, 1921, after hearing the presentation of his first symphony:

“Dear Georgescu,

For the third or fourth time in my life as a composer, so for the first time in some twenty-four years, I lived the genuine emotion, unspeakably sweet, that an author feels when he finally feels understood and performed with conviction, with love, I daresay! Thank you from the bottom of my heart, and I thank all the colleagues in the orchestra… Long may you live, for our joy, the joy of us Romanians and musicians”.

There was mutual respect and admiration between the two, one constantly performing the other’s music, throughout his decade-long career. In his turn, Enescu contributed decisively to George Georgescu’s rehabilitation in 1947: “if you still want to have music in Romania, give George Georgescu back his baton”, Enescu told Teohari Georgescu, Minister of Foreign Affairs. Enescu’s word weighed heavily for the rehabilitation, so that on January 27, 1947 George Georgescu returned at Romanian Athenaeum, albeit leading not the Philharmonic, but the Radio Symphony Orchestra.

After Enescu’s death in 1955, the Philharmonic honoured the musician by taking his name. This happened during Georgescu’s second term, and it was him who opened, on September 4, 1958, the first edition of the George Enescu Festival, just as it was him who led, on the occasion of the same festival, that memorable rendition of Bach’s Concerto for two violins, a work which has since become a tradition of the festival, with Yehudi Menuhin and David Oistrakh soloists of the Bucharest Philharmonic.

“He played a huge role in the cultural life of his country”, stated the late composer and Enescu specialist Pascal Bentoiu, adding: “he familiarised audiences with the great Classical-Romantic repertoire. He insisted on performing the greatest composers worldwide and was a fervent and highly effective supporter of Romanian music. In his immense repertoire comprising over five hundred works, more than one hundred were Romanian titles and, not content with first and last performances, he programmed this music, which he obviously deeply cared for, with admirable insistence, both in Romania and abroad”.

George Georgescu died in Bucharest on September 1, 1964.

Ștefan Costache