LDV97

14 CHAUSSON ∙ RAVEL ∙ ENESCU Did he not also embody a form of moral grandeur? When you visit his house in Sinaia, you see that his bedroom was a veritable monastic cell: ten square metres, an iron bed, a desk and a window . . . He sometimes lived as a kind of musical ascetic. Yet in his living room you can see a multitude of objects from every culture in the world. Nothing human, nothing cultural, was foreign to him. Enescu was extremely open to others and to the world. He never made any concessions in his relationship with music and musicians. He invested himself enormously in his activities as a teacher (in addition to Menuhin, his many students also included Ivry Gitlis, Christian Ferras and Arthur Grumiaux), composer, violinist and conductor. Several generations of musicians from all over the world were deeply influenced by his aura and his intensity. Enescu spent his entire life moving between France and Romania. Did French music play a role in his training as a composer? It played an essential role. He went on to advanced study at the Paris Conservatoire at the end of the nineteenth century, when he was not yet fifteen years old. He was in the same counterpoint class as Maurice Ravel – who said of him, ‘The smartest of us all was Enescu’ – and a fellow student of Jacques Thibaud in Martin-Pierre Marsick’s violin class. Having studied composition with Jules Massenet and above all Gabriel Fauré, who was to remain his mentor, he mastered the language of his time to perfection (as is shown by his String Octet composed in 1900).