The Composer
Silvestri believed that one couldn’t become a truly professional conductor without mastering composition. He composed over 40 orchestral, chamber and vocal works. When a student, he had to be persuaded to take his diploma exams in composition because ‘he did not understand why he needed a piece of paper endorsing the fact that he could compose’.
George Enescu had expressed the hope that ‘in the years to come, Silvestri achieves everything we expect of him – and we expect great things.’ And, when leaving Romania for good in 1946 he said: ‘I am leaving Romania with my mind at peace because I am leaving behind a gifted composer who will bring fame to our country if he is allowed to do so.’
Mihail Jora, Romanian composer, artistic director of the National Radio Symphony Orchestra and Silvestri’s teacher declared: ‘The musical sensitivity of this talented young man doesn’t appeal to everybody. But it is quite unfair to accuse Silvestri of only being able to compose cerebral music. His adagios testify to how erroneous is this view. They are extraordinarily rich in feeling and, as far as Romanian music is concerned, only surpassed by Enescu’s.’
Anatol Vieru: ‘As a composer Silvestri was advanced and alone.’
Michael Berkeley, Baron Berkeley of Knighton: ‘I immediately thought this is a remarkably lively mind; this is a composer who has an extraordinary rhythmic sense, propulsion. But there is also something very elliptical about his music which I like, something you can’t entirely put your finger on. He creates something where the performer has to tell you where you’re going and I think that’s quite a rare quality so I was enormously impressed with the music’.
In Silvestri’s own words
‘Looking for a new formula, I went to a folk source. I took a few Bihor songs from Béla Bartók’s collection. I kept them absolutely in their original form, plaiting over their elements the lace of a new composition with a very intellectual content. I attached to these new compositions the rhythms of the original folk songs and, moreover, I also underlined their phrasing. In such a juxtaposition they blend as if by fate.
Letter to composer Zeno Vancea, 1934
‘In Romania, I was a misunderstood avant-gardist and no one would perform my music.’ ‘Schoenberg, Berg, Webern were just names in a music lexicon. Schoenberg was considered something fantastic that had escaped from a menagerie! In recent years I have forgotten that I was a composer. Even a composer has to have a routine: working with a pencil in his hand. Now, it’s no longer a pencil – it’s a baton.’
Radio interview, Paris 1966
‘I believe only an extremely small numbers of works are perfect and could be considered chefs d’oeuvre of our times: first of all, Bartók’s Quartets Nos. 5 and 6 which nobody has surpassed; Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps; Berg’s Wozzeck and Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta.’
Letter to broadcaster Iosif Sava
Reactions to Silvestri's works
‘It is no wonder that the audience gave him a standing ovation, stamping their feet and eventually carrying the maestro in triumph on their shoulders. And three times they insisted on an encore of his own work Prelude and Fugue (Toccata) – something quite unprecedented in our musical life.’
Verlag, Budapest 1947
‘A brilliant study in insistence and intensity; exceedingly complex; a well-scored composition’; written in ‘a strongly personal, vigorous and distinctively contemporaneous idiom; polytonal and masterfully manipulated.’
Chicago 1960
