Abstract

By integrating and contextualizing information taken from the local press of Timişoara and Lugoj of the time, this paper recalls several significant moments of the dramatic exile of two major art institutions of Cluj in Banat, after the Vienna Diktat: the Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and the Romanian Opera House. In Timişoara, as well as in other places in the Banat region, the representatives of the two institutions were engaged, under the grim spectre of the Second World War, in an extensive concert activity, which contributed to the maintenance of an elevated cultural climate in a multicultural and multilingual space, marked by the arabesques of obvious Baroque inflections. The interferences with the academic music institutions of Timişoara (the George Enescu Philharmonic Society, under the patronage of the Music Friends Society, and the Municipal Conservatory of Music, placed under the professional and administrative tutelage of Sabin Drăgoi – who later took over the directorship of the Cluj institutions) created a strong spirit of emulation with memorable performances. These performances gave a decisive boost, through the exceptional contribution of the musicians from Cluj, to the efforts for the foundation, in 1946 and 1947, of two institutions of major importance for Timişoara’s cultural destiny: the State Opera House and the Banatul Philharmonic.

This period of unprecedented cultural "transhumance" was represented by an entire pleiad of lyrical artists (Marius Nicolescu, Jean Rânzescu, Augustin Almăşan, Maria Stroescu-Eviţch etc.), musicians (Ana Voileanu-Nicoară, George Ciolac, Titi Fotino-Negru, Robert Cionca, Sigismund Toduţă) and conductors from Cluj (George Pavel, Mircea Popa, Eugen Lazăr, Maximilian Săveanu), who were joined, in different forms and artistic projects, by their fellows from Banat, brilliant graduates of the Cluj Conservatory, an elite of the Romanian higher education (Vasile Ijac – the father of symphonism in Banat –, Zeno Vancea – multiple winner of the George Enescu National Composition Award –, Alma Cornea-Ionescu), future teachers of the Transylvanian institution (Magda Kardos, member of a prominent chamber ensemble from Timişoara, Collegium Musicum and Max Eisikovits, György Kurtág’s first professor of composition) or conductors who performed on the lyrical stages of Cluj (Ernő Földvári from Lugoj, who had a highly acclaimed presence on the podium of the Hungarian Opera of Cluj).

The personality around whom I have woven the account of the trials and tribulations of the artists from Cluj is conductor George Pavel from Lugoj – first conductor of the Romanian Opera House of Cluj since 1940, after a teaching practice period at the Transylvanian Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. George Pavel, a charismatic figure with a complex musical personality (dedicated to both composition and violin teaching, after brilliant studies completed in the capital of the waltz, at the Akademie für Musik und darstellende Kunst) enhanced the axiological dimension of the odyssey of the artists from Cluj.

Keywords: George Pavel, Cluj, Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, Romanian Opera House, Vienna Diktat, Banat

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