Remembering George Draga at 75
On 28 April 2010, the National “George Enescu” Museum, at the initiative of general director Laura Manolache, celebrated, in his absence, the 75th birthday of one of its most enthusiastic members of its team. The intention behind the event was double: to launch George Draga’s Concert Mass – the first of (we hope) a long series of scores by George Draga to be published by Editura Muzicală (the Musical Publishing House) – and to give Bucharest’s music fans the opportunity to listen to some of the composer’s more recent (and less known) chamber music. Some of the pieces included in the programme had already been premiered at the same National “George Enescu” Museum on 28 October 2008, in a George Draga musical portrait. That concert – as Laura Manolache stressed on both occasions – was meant to celebrate George Draga’s return to the museum team, where he was going to finish the work of identifying, indexing and analysing George Enescu’s manuscripts. Tragically, the composer’s death a few days before he should have started work on the manuscripts turned the musical portrait into a commemorative event. The work on Enescu’s manuscripts was finished by George Draga’s colleague and friend, musicologist Clemansa Firca, at a time that followed shortly after the concert on 28 April 2010, which brought Draga back to the Cantacuzino Palace through his music. A coincidence like this shows that, within the large family of Romanian musicians, there are continuities whose meaning should not be left unnoticed.
George Draga – who would have turned 75 on 26 April 2010, had he still been among us – was one of those composers who didn’t care much about trends and political commandments. He felt trapped by them under communism and avoided them as much as he could, while his genuine artistic existence took place outside them, governed by his love for music as an ars vivendi. He was present as a composer and musicologist in Romanian musical life before 1989, but, in fact, he was secretly waiting for better times, for less political intrusion into the artists’s intimate process of creation, in order to reveal the core of his own “philosophy of composition”. From this period, the works he cared about the most were the symphonic poem “Sarmizegetusa” (an elegiac musing on the birth of the Romanian people, which juxtaposes, through music, highly visual imagery inspired from the ruins of the Dacian capital Sarmizegetusa and from Trajan’s Column in Rome) and a number of symphonic and vocal-symphonic pieces that reveal his lifelong preference for music written for large ensembles. He also worked extensively as a musicologist: he published analyses of works by composers such as Aurel Stroe, Ştefan Niculescu, Tiberiu Olah, Wilhelm Berger, Cornel Ţăranu, Zeno Vancea. As editor of the “Muzica” journal he was proud to recognize and promote young musicologists whose potential he appreciated and encouraged – a feature of his personality which was warmly recalled by Laura Manolache and Valentina Sandu-Dediu on the occasion of the launching of the Concert Mass score and the musical programme on 28 April 2010.
George Draga’s early life was not easy. He was born in Bârsa, Arad county, in 1935 and lost his father in World War II, when he was only five. His mother, recognising his potential, decided to encourage him to take the only education option that seemed available to him – the Musical Military School in Bucharest – even though that meant sending him away from home at a very tender age. Tough as it might have been at the beginning, this military school forged his character and taught him to pursue the promise he had been born for: music. He played the clarinet in high-school, but then went on to study composition at the Bucharest Conservatoire. Following graduation in 1963, he became editor of the “Muzica” journal, where he worked until 1993. He was then employed by the National “George Enescu” Museum, where he was mainly a researcher of George Enescu’s manuscripts, which he indexed and analysed (1993-1997).
In the early years of the new millennium, having retired from the National “George Enescu” Museum (after a stroke that initially seemed a tragedy, but which became the great turning point in his artistic trajectory), George Draga withdrew from the world to his own ivory tower. He rediscovered with renewed enthusiasm the warmth of family life in Râşnov (Braşov county), hometown of his wife, Ana Ducaru-Draga, which for him became an oasis of peace and inspiration, and where he is now buried. He embarked on a path governed by his own artistic choices, where composing from dawn till dusk was the only thing that mattered. He learned to use the musical score-writing programme Sibelius and, further, advanced digital technology to process his scores into audio files. This gave him a much-desired independence in the act of music-making: his music, whether performed or not, would not gather dust on shelves in printed form. Even though he knew that “there is no digital equivalent to the human voice” – as soprano Alina Bottez, arguably the most dedicated performer of his music since his death, put it on more than one occasion – George Draga found in computer-assisted technologies an accessible way to make his music available to a wide music-loving audience. Many of his compositions, in a digitally-generated format, were included in programmes of recordings of Romanian music and poetry presented by Loredana Baltazar at the National “George Enescu” Museum between 2006 and 2008. Some of them can also be found online on various sites, of which the most complete to this day is http://audio.cimec.ro/Default.asp?q=f&f=%2FGeorge-Draga.
It was, paradoxically, not until the composer’s death on 3 October 2008 that the music he wrote in the second part of his career (2001-2008) started being performed in concert. For that we must thank Laura Manolache, general director of the National “George Enescu” Museum, who hosted two “George Draga” musical portraits (28 October 2008 and 28 April 2010), while also including some pieces by George Draga in other concerts, and poet Monica Pillat Saulescu, who organized several afternoons of music and poetry within the Pillat Collection of the Museum of Romanian Literature, which also included pieces by George Draga (19 November and 11 December, 2009 and 12 March 2010).[1]
The concert that took place at the National “George Enescu” Museum on the 28 April 2010 was preceded by the launching of George Draga’s Concert Mass score (Bucureşti: Editura Muzicală, 2010) and was introduced by friends and colleagues from different generations. Gheorghe Firca warmly evoked Draga’s personality as a friend and fellow composer, musicologist and editor working on the “Muzica” journal team. Musicologist Valentina Sandu-Dediu pointed out the importance of making known the second part of the composer’s creation, which includes the Concert Mass and which might recommend George Draga as a kind of Romanian Arvo Pärt. The comparison with the world-famous Estonian composer, who also uses minimalist techniques of religious inspiration to promote a personal composition style, suggests that George Draga’s turn towards a more classical tone in composition matches a general tendency in world music. While noticing that George Draga was a composer who wrote simply out of a genuine pleasure for writing, even though his works were not performed, Valentina Sandu-Dediu suggested that the publishing initiative which started with the Concert Mass should probably continue with George Draga’s fourteen symphonies (of which only the first was composed and published before 1989). She expressed hope that George Draga’s Concert Mass – published at roughly the same time as Paul Constantinescu’s rediscovered Christmas Oratorium – would not have to wait as long as Constantinescu’s piece to be performed. Composer and musicologist Liviu Dănceanu (the author of one of the most thorough studies of George Draga’s creation published before 1989[2]) ended the evoking part of the evening by emphasizing the ethical dimension of Draga’s personality. Dănceanu portrayed Draga as a dignified follower of the principles he believed in, who made no compromises.
Even though, as Despina Petecel points out in her study, George Draga’s main choice was the symphonic genre,[3] the concert on 28 April 2010 drew attention to the fact that chamber music had also become a major preoccupation in the second part of his artistic trajectory. The Lied form is one that the composer had hesitated to approach in the earlier years of his career, yet he became increasingly interested in its subtleties later on and would certainly have continued if he had had more time. Thanks should be given to soprano Alina Bottez for her remarkable performance of a generous programme of Lieder with lyrics by the Catalan poet Carles Duarte (translated into Romanian by Jana Matei) and by Romanian poet Monica Pillat, as well as a series of seven Lieder inspired from Transylvanian folk music, which was very close to the composer’s heart throughout his career.[4]
The two instrumental pieces which featured in the concert – Sonatina for violin and orchestra performed by Ioan Marius Lăcraru (violin) and Rodica Dănceanu (piano) and Concertino for flute and orchestra¸ piano reduction, performed by Teodora Ducariu (flute) and Cătălin Dima (piano) – were actually meant for orchestra (the sonatina was later developed into a Concertino for violin and orchestra, whereas the flute piece we listened to had always been a concerto, the chamber version being a reduction for piano), but functioned perfectly well in this version, revealing the composer’s increasing interest in experimenting with chamber forms. While the audience had had the chance to listen to Ioan Marius Lăcraru and Rodica Dănceanu’s beautiful rendering of the Sonatina for Violin and Piano in the previous George Draga portrait (28 October 2008), this being a renewed opportunity to be enchanted by this show of professional virtuosity, the Concertino for flute and orchestra in piano reduction was now performed for the first time.
A very relevant part of the programme – considering George Draga’s lifelong interest in composing vocal and vocal-symphonic pieces – was represented by the three songs (a carol and “O mare de ecouri”/”A Sea of Echoes” with lyrics by Monica Pillat and Psalm 22, “God Is My Shepherd”) performed by the Euterpe choir, conducted by Prof. Georgeta Aldea.
We can only hope that the publication of the Concert Mass, as well as events such as the George Draga musical portrait at the “George Enescu” Museum on 28 April 2010 (which has already had echoes in the Romanian music press[5]) will mark a new beginning in making George Draga’s creation better known to music-loving audiences.
Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru
Here you can listen to the 3rd movement of the Sonatina for Violin and Piano by George Draga
Abstract:
The celebration of 75 years since composer George Draga’s birth at the National “George Enescu” Museum was an occasion for launching his recently published Concert Mass, as well as for a selection of the composer’s most representative chamber music. The event, accompanied by speeches by some of the composer’s former colleagues and friends (Gheorghe Firca, Laura Manolache, Valentina Sandu-Dediu and Liviu Dănceanu) brought George Draga – the man and the composer – back among us and celebrated the start of what we hope will be a new phase in the promotion of George Draga’s music.
[1] For fuller details of recent live performances of George Draga’s music, as well as a thorough description of the less known second part of George Draga’s creation (2001-2008), with a special focus on his 2005 Concert Mass, see Despina Petecel’s study “Missa de concert: În căutarea timpului pierdut” (“Concert Mass: In Search of Lost Time”) published in Romanian and English as an Introduction to George Draga’s Concert Mass, Bucureşti: Editura Muzicală, 2010, pp. iii-viii.
[2] Liviu Dănceanu, “George Draga: Portrait”, Muzica, No. 7, July 1986, pp. 43-48.
[3] Despina Petecel, “Concert Mass: In Search of Lost Time”, Introduction to George Draga’s Concert Mass, Bucureşti: Editura Muzicală, 2010, p. vii.
[4] See an excerpt of Alina Bottez’s performance at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=he-KETVir6o.
[5] See Andreea Chiselev’s chronicle, Radio Romania Muzical, Thursday, 29 April 2010 , 15:22, http://www.romania-muzical.ro/articole/art.shtml?g=2&c=16&a=68314.
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