Wieniawski’s “Legende” and Enescu’s “The Undead”: a Romantic-Neoclassical Dyad

Abstract

The present paper examines stylistic change in musical history by comparing the treatment of the same motif, the ill-starred lovers, in a romantic piece, Wieniawski’s Legende, Op. 17, and a post-Wagnerian composition by George Enescu: Strigoii (The Undead) Oratory, setting to music Eminescu’s homonymous legend, which in its turn, draws on Bidu’s Tower legend. Whereas Wieniawski was writing a grieving soul’s complaint in the manner of romantic self-expressionism, Enescu was attached to the national poet, to his people’s ancient past and to folk legends in the spirit of the neoclassical aesthetics of a part, the most prolific one of musical modernism.