In the context of the situation surrounding the Enescu manuscripts at the National "George Enescu" Museum at the beginning of March 2026, Eugen Ciurtin, historian of religions, published a new article titled "The National George Enescu Museum versus Enescu. How Enescu's own catalogue, written by Enescu, disappeared." The piece appeared on contributors.ro on March 16th and was updated on March 18th, in which he raises accusations against the institution regarding the management of Enescu's legacy.

Eugen Ciurtin, you have been concerned for several years with the issue of Enescu's heritage, a topic that has resurfaced in the past few weeks. Could you briefly explain the premises and implications of the problem regarding the Enescu Catalogue?

To address your invitation, we need to start with the broader picture, which reveals a striking contrast between everything that is fundamentally and extraordinarily good in Enescu's life and work. In a way - if you will - he ought to already be included in ethics and religious studies textbooks, even at pre-university level. In ethics textbooks because human functioning is not a neat file folder, but interaction, communication, responsibility, vision, creativity, courage. Consider how Enescu lived in times of peace - helping everyone, founding countless institutions, and even being responsible for the founding of some institutions after his death - and how he lived through wars, famine, and the disasters of Romanian politics. The last 17 years of his life were, essentially, the first 17 years of Romania's dictatorships and, above all, the abolition of the political regime in which he grew up: the monarchy. He is, ethically speaking, the most accomplished and fundamentally democratic among all of us. He should also appear in a religious studies textbook, because within the project carried out through the Institute for the History of Religions starting in 2022 - set to conclude at the World Congress of the History of Religions in Bucharest, in September 2026 - Sonotheism. Religion in Enescu, I am discovering that the study of religions can also take this kind of configuration, one that, in his case, becomes a sonic one. First and foremost, Enescu did what any historian of religions does: he observed that these religions exist, that all of them can be viewed on the same level, and that each has a distinct physiognomy that can be rendered. The presence of Ancient Greece and India in his music is nothing short of miraculous for the history of religions.

Now, to directly address your question: the manuscripts were taken over and handed in by [Romeo] Drăghici, some of which - even though they were officially handed over and recorded - were stolen. They were offered to third parties, stolen, and ended up in auctions. There are also manuscripts handled by Drăghici and [Corneliu] Bedițeanu (which is the context for my article) that were never handed over, and which ended up in the manuscript of this catalogue that, fortunately - as pointed out to me by Raluca Știrbăț, the well-known pianist, musician, and musicologist - still survives. Simply put, I hadn't found this catalogue anywhere in [Clemansa Liliana] Firca or [Pascal] Bentoiu, the leading authorities on Enescu even today, and I made the error - corrected immediately when I could - of not mentioning that it is held at the Library of the Romanian Academy. Naturally, it will need a critical edition, especially since in the only edition available, from 1996-1997, with very few first-page photographs, Titus Moisescu himself made a few mistakes and possibly omissions. The manuscript (of the catalogue) itself needs to be examined.

This manuscript was either left in Bucharest as early as 1946, when Enescu left, or at the latest, around 1954-55, it was brought to Bucharest. It never reached its intended destination because all these manuscripts were in Enescu's hands. We need to compare hands; we need to know whose hands they passed through. This is the entire history of the archive: there are thousands of unpublished documents that will need to be reviewed, published, critically edited, studied, and assimilated into Romanian culture - not just musical culture - so that we can understand how many unworthy, incompetent hands they passed through. And indeed, some have disappeared, some forever, and others were never reproduced or made accessible to the public, as is unfortunately the case with most musical manuscripts today.

So, what should be done regarding the catalogue of Enescu's works from a public perspective?

From what I have observed, until 2021, nobody was talking about creating an Enescu catalogue anymore, which struck me as extremely strange. We have no Romanian work of comparable magnitude, and we have no delay like this for any other great Romanian work - but we do for Enescu's oeuvre.

As far as I know - and I thanked Ștefan Firca and Vlad Văidean, as I also did in the article - a new edition of the second catalogue (by Clemansa Liliana Firca, 2010) - which also requires corrections and, above all, updates and completions, as historians used to say a hundred years ago - is set to be published by Vlad Văidean. So that would be a first, significant step forward. Yet the totality of the musical manuscripts, as evidenced by the Enescu musicology library published in the meantime, including investigative articles from the past five years, still requires much more.

And this strictly musical work, defined musicologically, should itself have been integrated into the history of art, culture, and even Romanian civilization. I wish there could be a day, even in my small corner, when I could contemplate an achievement we hope for with any human endeavor so rare: a complete critical edition of all his manuscripts, including the reconstruction of all already-published editions of Enescu's correspondence, which are riddled with thousands of language errors - languages that, I don't understand why, are no longer studied (those Czerny exercises, indispensable for humanistic studies: French, English, Italian, and, of course, German).

In your opinion, what might be the solutions, and who should get involved in recovering Enescu's heritage regarding those manuscripts you say were stolen by Romeo Drăghici?

By Romeo Drăghici and those around him, because we can no longer blame only him.

The scale, the grave dimension of the alienation of what the Romanian state received from Enescu (Drăghici being only a representative) is so large that it grows, year after year, sometimes month after month. Certainly, multiple parties were involved, including the two security agencies that managed Enescu - a monarchist - under both the People's Republic of Romania and the Socialist Republic of Romania - as well as events after '90. All of this, in fact, calls precisely for a total mapping of these episodes, with corrections where possible.

But to answer your question directly: I can do so only, I repeat, from my small corner. We have institutions, we have authorities, therefore we have responsibilities, starting with the president and the prime minister - I would add, no matter which president or prime minister, and even more so any minister of culture - to establish a "zero moment" in which the things that were not done get done, and the things that were done poorly are redone from scratch, cleanly. Obviously, it involves all of us; obviously, it requires many competencies. This is how I envision it from my corner.

Because, in a way, the progress of research has shown that there is an intersection of multiple competencies that can bring benefits. That is, we can truly know what happened with one manuscript or another. And for that, all efforts must be brought together. Within the Institute for the History of Religions of the Romanian Academy, I have tried to do this through a broad presentation of manuscripts with religious themes - including unpublished ones, and those no one has seen, probably since Bentoiu and Firca, so for more than fifteen years, and which have never been analyzed, some never even analyzed by Enescu himself, who composed them.

So, there is an enormous amount of work to be done, and knowing about the few thousand unpublished pages I have already consulted across several archives, I can say, as far as I know, that this study is only at the beginning.

So, finally, I would ask you to explain what, in your opinion, should be the consequences of the alarm you are raising, and of what nature these should be.

Certainly, the entire unfortunate history of storing these materials in containers - entirely unsuitable, even for just a single week - as one of the conclusions of the ministerial commission (which worked for three days and, following these conclusions, will operate for an indefinite period) demonstrated, requires, first and foremost, their urgent relocation to a space that is truly safe - in other words, a vault - because such a treasure cannot be put at risk.

No one can be held responsible for what might happen or what has already happened. On the other hand, any public statements regarding the intactness of the manuscripts remain to be proven, because a mere visual impression of a few experts who are not musicologists, in just a few hours, cannot substitute - and no one claimed it could - for the kind of expertise this archive needs, which, it seems, it has not received in the past seventy years.

Moreover, Enescu has already entered the public domain. That is, we are already removed from the moment of conclusion and separation from this great work. It is therefore appropriate to respect all ethical and scientific principles to do justice to the magnitude and power of this oeuvre, which - as three of the artistic directors of the Enescu Festival and the current director, Maestro Cristian Măcelaru, have stated - these manuscripts are alive, and they must remain so for all of us. They must be accessible to everyone, even if only in digital form, accessible to researchers and to anyone daring enough to see what a great work by an incredible man who lived among us truly represents.

I requested a statement from the National "George Enescu" Museum regarding the comments made above by historian Eugen Ciurtin. The institution responded through Dr. Vlad Văidean, a researcher and collaborator of the museum, involved in updating and finalizing the thematic catalogue of Enescu's works - a fundamental research project initiated by the late musicologist Clemansa Liliana Firca.

In his article on the GECA catalogue, Eugen Ciurtin claimed that it had disappeared from the records of the National "George Enescu" Museum. What information do you hold regarding the Enescu Catalogue?

The existence (though not the actual content) of this autograph catalogue of Enescu's own works was publicly noted by Titus Moisescu and in other studies of his, long before the 1995 edition referenced by Eugen Ciurtin in his investigative article. Of particular interest is the mention of the document in a text published in the journal Muzica (Year 32, No. 3/354, March 1982, p. 14-16), in which Moisescu not only reports that a list of Enescu's musical creations, organized by the composer himself into three periods (Oeuvres d'enfance, Travaux d'école à Paris, and Oeuvres définitives), "is in the collection of Romeo Drăghici." In addition, Moisescu notes in the preceding footnote that Clemansa Liliana Firca had already finalized the first volume of the Thematic Catalogue of George Enescu's Works - a volume that, as is well known, would appear in 1985, three years after this enthusiastic announcement. Given that Titus Moisescu was the editor of Firca's first catalogue, it remains puzzling why the content of Enescu's autograph catalogue was not bibliographically exploited by Clemansa Firca at that time. Either the author simply omitted referencing Moisescu's data (integrating it only in the fully restructured version of her project, inaugurated in 2010 under the title The New Thematic Catalogue of George Enescu's Works), or Moisescu failed to make it available to her (even though he had transcribed it as early as 1975, and after 1983 - the year of Romeo Drăghici's death - the precious document was no longer under the "collection" it had previously belonged to).

There are also at least two other lists of Enescu's own works: one included in an autobiographical note dated "Bucharest, March 1942" (thus later than the one known under the GECA designation, but less detailed), submitted to the Romanian Academy at its request (and already reproduced in facsimile in Studii de muzicologie (Musicology Studies), Vol. III, 1967, p. 215-220); and another attached to the publishing contract of Enescu's works, concluded between Éditions Salabert and the "George Enescu" Museum in 1963. Unfortunately, nothing more is known about this contract-annex list beyond the fact that it exists, so I am very curious to learn whether Mr. Ciurtin is perhaps referring to this document when, at the conclusion of his article, he informs readers about the existence of "another Enescu Catalogue by Enescu," a manuscript and unpublished, leaving its disclosure… for another time. The strategy is clever and has a certain "detective" charm, designed to keep the spotlight on the subject (and on the author striving to place himself in the public debate). Yet I believe Enescu research should, even in its detective guise, remain nourished by what its greatest achievements have demonstrated as a set of cardinal and vital virtues, imposed by emanation from the very model around which it revolves: the elegance and weight of tone, the careful weighing of every detail, and the quiet decency implied by the ascetic resolve to reveal only results that are clear and fully controlled in all their consequences.

Another issue under discussion is the availability of a catalogue of Enescu's works in digital format. Since Enescu's music entered the public domain in 2025, are there any steps being taken in this regard?

Soon it will be three years since I have immersed myself in this work of immense responsibility - the continuation and completion of the Thematic Catalogue of Enescu's Works, redesigned by Clemansa Liliana Firca (following her first chronological cataloging attempt, published in 1985) into three volumes devoted mainly to the principal musical genres (chamber; vocal-symphonic and concertante; choral and opera). Of these, she only managed to publish the first volume and to complete roughly half of the second. It must be emphasized that such a vast undertaking can only proceed under the patronage of the Enescu Museum - that is, the institution that houses the most substantial collection of Enescu manuscripts. Invoking my name - even respectfully - as a contributor to the Catalogue, yet framing it as if it were merely a private endeavor and implying that the Enescu Museum is acting "against Enescu," creates a discrepancy that is more than questionable.

The creation of a public digital platform providing access to the full corpus of Enescu manuscripts could indeed be a desirable goal, modeled after the sumptuous digital edifices dedicated to other canonical composers of Enescu's stature. Yet the very distinctive way in which Enescu's creativity operates - with the often feverish, sometimes illegible layering and overlapping of sketches in distinct scripts - requires, probably more than in other cases, very close guidance. This is only possible through the proper preparation of the catalogue, which will necessarily serve as both the structural backbone and the map for the digital platform itself.

In the above-mentioned article, there is talk of manuscripts allegedly stolen from Enescu's archive by Romeo Drăghici, the founder of the Enescu Museum. What can you tell us about these documents?

It is very difficult, from the level of an institution, to issue any public verdict on the guilt of Romeo Drăghici. What can be stated, even based on Drăghici's own testimony, is that he possessed his own Enescu collection. Enescu documents from this collection reached other repositories as a result of an official "decentralization" policy aimed at enhancing the prestige and holdings of other local libraries and museums: most of those now in public collections - from the Romanian Academy Library, the National Archives, the "George Enescu" Memorial House in Dorohoi, and others - originated from his well-known "collection." Private collections, difficult to trace, further amplify this frustrating dispersal of Enescu's heritage, especially in its iconographic and epistolary dimensions (yet, despite ultra-alarmist reports, it should still be emphasized that none of the auctions in recent years have brought to light previously unknown manuscripts of Enescu's musical works).

Yet, to go from this point to accusing the current Enescu Museum of complicity in theft - on the grounds that it has never openly reproached its shadowy founding parent for his manipulations - is still a long stretch. Had a constructive dialogue been sought beforehand with those for whom Enescu research has become their very reason for being, it would have been clear that the Museum has long been working to clarify inherited ambiguities. Its efforts in research, as well as in initiating procedures for re-inventorying, re-evaluating, and cataloguing Enescu manuscripts, have shed considerable light on the matter. One may lament, with much pathos, the tardiness of all these undertakings, yet it must be remembered that they are carried out against a backdrop of extremely limited financial and logistical resources - resources that are more than fully compensated for by the passion of the few who are involved.

What strategies for protecting Enescu's heritage do you intend to pursue going forward?

Classification and re-inventorying, combined with the re-evaluation of manuscripts, are long-term, painstaking processes that cannot be carried out without direct access to the heritage documents. Their storage in containers - a solution designed for a maximum period of two years, corresponding to the expected duration of the consolidation and restoration work at the Cantacuzino Palace and the Memorial House in Bucharest - was what made it possible to continue activities of the utmost importance, dedicated exclusively to safeguarding Enescu's legacy. Relocating the documents elsewhere would have substantially hindered, if not entirely blocked, the ability to carry out cataloguing dossiers over all these years - a point so heavily criticized. Similarly, it would have been nearly impossible to monitor them continuously and update inventories periodically.

All specialized staff at the Museum are constantly engaged in researching cultural assets, whether for the preparation of MNGE publications, the presentation of scholarly communications at national and international symposiums, or the organization of temporary exhibitions showcased at major artistic events in Romania and abroad. Given that the main headquarters is currently closed, awaiting renovation, the Museum's entire cultural activity relies on research and access to its heritage documents. Consequently, everyone involved in the Museum's work is first and foremost committed to ensuring that it is genuinely protected and valued - not brought into the spotlight through media scandals.