In Enesco’s opera, however, the arc of Œdipe’s life peaks at the very end, where, to a rush of lush, cathartic orchestration recalling Richard Strauss’s best moments, he achieves self-realization and proclaims that while fate will have its way, he is not at fault. In the original ancient drama, Oedipus accepts his grim fate, hopes the best for his heirs, and resigns himself to death, with the somber final line, “No man is happy until he is dead,” uttered after he leaves the stage. Set to a libretto by the French-Jewish modernist playwright Edmond Fleg, the plot of Œdipe follows Sophocles’s foundational Oedipus Rex, but with a distinctly modernist twist. Wartime disruption did little for innovative musical performance in Eastern Europe, and the postwar Stalinism imposed on the country had little time for a de facto émigré composer whose work evoked Western “decadence.” Only in the post-Stalin thaw period, which witnessed Romanian assertions of political independence within the communist bloc, did Enesco posthumously ascend into the national pantheon.Īlmost totally forgotten in the West, Œdipe returns to the Paris Opéra for the first time since its premiere, in this new production by the émigré Lebanese director Wajdi Mouawad. Œdipe did not find its way to Romania until 1958, where it premiered three years after Enesco’s death. Whilst Romanian folk motifs packed his early compositions, by the time he composed his only opera Œdipe, which premiered in Paris in 1936, his work was suffused in a late Romantic fusion of post-Wagnerian expressionism and impressionistic symbolism of the French composers around whom Enesco came of age, including Debussy, Fauré, and Ravel. Identified as a musical prodigy in early childhood, Enesco left Romania at age seven for Vienna to study at its Conservatory and then proceeded, at fourteen, to Paris, where he continued his studies and later taught, performed as a violinist and pianist, and composed. One might ask, however, whether Enesco, whose dates placed him on the cusp of cultural modernism, was more a “European” composer than a strictly Romanian one. Enesco (Enescu, as he was born) holds a place in his country’s cultural tradition so strong that he features on Romania’s national currency and gives his name to its leading philharmonia and national classical music festival. This season, the Paris Opéra opened with the seminal work of Romania’s national composer, Georges Enesco (1881-1955).
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