George Enescu stands for his music and his scores, for the interpretation of his creation, but it also stands for its research and archiving, a less visible but still crucially important direction for a true understanding of Enescu's universe. Musicologist Vlad Văidean, a researcher at the National University of Music in Bucharest, is considered one of the most highly regarded specialists on Enescu's manuscripts, and this is the occasion for the following dialog:

It is 70 years since George Enescu passed away in Paris, and I would like to open the discussion by asking you what George Enescu means to you, one of the most knowledgeable young researchers of Enescu's creation in Romania today?

Overwhelming question. It is difficult for me to answer it, because George Enescu has practically been my bread and butter for a few years now, at least since I decided to turn my longtime passion for him into a PhD thesis on George Enescu. Once I gave this thesis, I was co-opted by the George Enescu National Museum to collaborate in finalizing a project that was also initiated a long time ago by Clemansa Liliana Firca, the late musicologist, probably the greatest specialist in researching Enescu's manuscripts, a project that involves cataloguing all of George Enescu's work, whether we are talking about finished works or sketches or unfinished works. It is an activity whose ultimate goal is to map as comprehensively as possible everything that remains on paper in the mind of George Enescu.

At first glance, when you hear about this impressive activity of mapping the whole of Enescu's creation, you might think that it means something rather dull, routine, but I know that the researcher's perspective is quite different. What does this passionate and rewarding work actually look like?

Yes, it is. It is both exciting and difficult. Fortunately, Miss Firca has left a system that I actually respect in making the catalog. She got to catalog George Enescu's chamber music in a first volume of three projected volumes. She also got to realize part of the second volume, which would include the concert-orchestral and vocal-orchestral creation, and the third volume would be devoted to the Oedipus opera and other plans that Enescu had in the genre of opera or oratorio or cantata, especially when he was a student in Paris. This work is also overwhelming because it is a great thrill for me to come into direct contact with Enescu's writing. I have permanent access to the manuscripts kept in the archives of the George Enescu Museum and it is something to be in permanent contact with his writing, which is, as is well known, very complicated, hieroglyphic in sketches on the one hand, but on the other hand, in the finished scores, it is of an impressive clarity and almost calligraphic calligraphy.In fact, this cataloguing approach would be, after all, the most appropriate opportunity for everyone to realize the breadth of George Enescu's creation, and for many people to be clear about what he left behind and what belongs to him, and what belongs to his successors, because there are some works by Enescu that were completed posthumously by Cornel Țăranu, for example, Pascal Bentoiu. It is a good opportunity for everyone to be at peace with the appearance of this catalog, because it is indeed Enescu's hand, the majority of some works, while in the case of other works it is not the majority of his hand, I won't go into precise details now.

In the course of your research, what new aspects have you uncovered that have perhaps led to the revelation of new facets to the Enescu legacy?

Beyond this work that may seem like a termite bibliography related to the cataloging of Enescu's creations…

It really is a job that not just anyone can do and deserves our respect and admiration.

Yes, it is sisyphean. This work also involves me hunting, with all the tools at my disposal, for the utopian ideal of achieving an exhaustive coverage of the huge bibliography on George Enescu. And in this bibliographical hunt, I am increasingly overwhelmed by my attempt to organize and exploit in a coherent narrative the information detectable in the publications of the time about George Enescu's abundant artistic manifestations on the North American continent and in Great Britain. As we all know, George Enescu's career as a musician was highly mobile, cosmopolitan, almost pan-European I might say, for half a century he was tirelessly engaged in very long annual tours, which criss-crossed the meridians of the Western world, from Moscow to San Francisco. Two of George Enescu's most popular destinations in his career as a performer, composer and teacher were North America (and Canada) and Great Britain.In fact, he enjoyed an extremely warm reception in the American artistic life, which he himself described with admiration several times on the occasion of each annual concert tour or of the interpretation courses he gave there, especially in the interwar decades. Indeed, there are four significant mature works that Enescu composed at the urging of American ensembles and patrons, the Suita "Săteasca", for example, the Third Suite for orchestra, written at the behest of the New York Philharmonic, the two string quartets op. 22 and the Concert Overture on Romanian folk themes op. 32. Great Britain also became a favorite artistic space for George Enescu, especially in the years after the Second World War. He collaborated annually with several British orchestras. His master classes at the summer schools in Brighton and Bryanstone also attracted great interest. George Enescu's American and English itineraries were extensive. They have not so far been documented in a systematic way, of course because it is difficult to physically consult the overwhelming multitude of newspapers and magazines in which Enescu is mentioned.But this approach, which until not so long ago seemed so impractical, is now, in the age in which we live, somewhat easier to accomplish because of the availability of comprehensive online archives, such as those of several American newspapers. I have been engaged for some time now in chronologically organizing the references to George Enescu collected from these online platforms, and as a result of this work, enough data is already emerging to enrich or even correct information in George Enescu's artistic biography, including some interviews that were forgotten between the pages of some American newspapers. All this deserves to be capitalized for the most accurate documentation of Enescu's biography. And much more! For example, there would be another desideratum that I am thinking about, a more orderly organization of the immense memoirs that have been preserved about George Enescu, because having come into contact with so many people and having such an overwhelming personality, almost hypnotizing for many, inevitably, many people felt the need to comment on the contact they had with him. It would be very good if the innumerable testimonies, memories, notes about him could be organized, put through a critical filter, so that they could be integrated into a more comprehensive biography of George Enescu.

Finally, what advice would you have for those unfamiliar with Enescu's music, who would like to learn more about it, but are perhaps intimidated by the complexity of his language? How would you advise the average, curious person to approach George Enescu?

To approach him without any prejudice, when I say him, I mean his music, first of all, that is to say, to leave aside this prejudice, although it is true to a large extent, which you formulated before, that his music is impenetrable to many. But also leave aside the prejudice that George Enescu is primarily a national bard of the Romanian soul. He is that too, but more than that, I would say that George Enescu is simply a composer of universal music, of European music. A benevolent, but at the same time intimidated, listener can approach listening to his music with ears as open as possible, as patient as possible, so that it is not difficult to listen to a particular work several times. In fact, this is one of the basic requirements that Pascal Bentoiu, the great Enescu exegete, once formulated, when he said that George Enescu's mature works, in order to be fully penetrated and understood, require a minimum of five or six listens. That may seem hard nowadays, when we are so confounded by so many adjacent activities, but I can guarantee that once the buzz of Enescu's music has touched you in the slightest, it is very hard to let it go. After that, it stays with you, it accompanies your life all the time, it's one of those pieces of music that never wears out its charms whenever you listen to it.