20 CIOCÂRLIA George Enescu, our leading composer, was drawn to the traditional Ciocârlia dance at a very early age. As he was also a violinist, he arranged and performed it himself – there’s a recording of him playing the piece – but above all, he included it in his Romanian Rhapsody no.1 for orchestra, which he wrote at the age of nineteen. It became one of his most famous works and, half a century later, he made a transcription of it for solo piano, which poses formidable technical challenges, just as formidable as, if not more than, one of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies. In the Romanian Rhapsody, Ciocârlia is quoted among a number of other pieces that were very popular in the early 1900s, such as Am un leu și vreau să-l beu or Hora lui Dobrică, which were played on every street corner. The rhapsody begins slowly, with waltzes, round dances and slow horas, and continues with faster and faster dances like Brâul and Călușarii. Enescu stitched them together, following the principle of acceleration, and obtained a patchwork of at least thirty melodies, which was at once a piecemeal portrait of Romanian music and a kind of apotheosis of the dance. What’s more, I see it as a fine way to illustrate the transition between the skylark of the fields and the skylark of the cities, between oral tradition and written music. It’s no coincidence that Enescu’s first teacher was a lăutar, a fiddler who, in all likelihood, was already playing Ciocârlia at village celebrations.
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