Socialist And Post-Socialist Histories Reflected In The Recent Past Of The Philharmonic In Bucharest

Abstract

: I have already tackled in some previous texts the problems of Romanian musicology nowadays, related to its communist past. On the same path, I intend in this essay to follow a case study - the recent history of the Bucharest Philharmonic - in order to observe the transformations of an institution in socialist and post-socialist times. While reading the documents and volumes that have already been published about the Bucharest Philharmonic, we discover the tendencies, trends and mentalities that characterize Romanian culture as a whole: the musical definition of the nation, interwar nationalism, modernization, synchronicity, cosmopolitanism, socialist realism and communist nationalism, adaptation to international musical life. How can we write about the Philharmonic today, more than 150 years after its foundation? Research reveals that there is significant documentation covering the period up until World War II on the one hand, on the other hand there are only sporadic sources that have not been centralized and thus can still form only a fragmented image of the interwar period. Romanian musical historiography abundantly refers to the first hundred years (1868-1968), but the reader of those pages ought to maintain his/her critical spirit awake, so as to amend the ideological slippages of those writings. Most of them date back to the Communist decades and are inevitably contaminated with nationalist exaggerations, with phrasings that conformed to the censorship of the time. One can get an overall image at least of the music performed by consulting the collection of concert programmes in the Philharmonic Library. However, this image has its minuses, as – we know only too well – a concert programme printed before a concert may not coincide with the reality of last-minute changes. The Philharmonic’s ups and downs are also intertwined with the evolution of the other musical institutions in Bucharest: the (currently the National University of Music), the Society (and 1945, the Union) Composers and Musicologists, the Opera, it only because the same personalities of composed, conducted and taught, others wrote chronicles, were soloists and professors, or filled different temporary administrative positions, due to their professional status. The trends of Romanian Communist musical historiography are obvious in such an endeavour.