Childhood’s Charms and Nature’s Enchantments: Listening to Enescu’s Impressions d’enfance

Abstract

Enescu’s Impressions d’enfance is notable for the ways in which it evokes a childlike fascination with the world. This article considers not only how this experiential mode is constructed, but also how the topic of childhood overlaps with Enescu’s conception of an enchanted dwelling-place, particularly in the context of how humans interact with the natural world. I argue that exploring such ‘strategies of enchantment’ and their musical framing allows not only for a more nuanced understanding of Enescu’s aesthetics and his music, but also of the role that enchantment as an aesthetic category occupies within musical modernity more broadly.

‘There is another world, but it is in this one’

(Paul Éluard) ¹

I.

In the second part of his Sonnets to Orpheus (1923), Rainer Maria Rilke describes how music, apparently by its very nature, has the capacity to enchant a world disenchanted by the advancements of technology. ² While the opening two quartets of the tenth sonnet tell of the machine’s ubiquity and dominance in modern social life, in the closing triplets Rilke offers a solution to this desecration of the human spirit:

Aber noch ist uns das Dasein verzaubert; an hundert	But existence is still enchanted; is at a hundred or more
Stellen ist es noch Ursprung. Ein Spielen von reinen	Points in its origin still. A playing of pure forces
Kräften, die keiner berührt, der nicht kniet und bewundert.	That no one touches who does not marvel and kneel before.
Worte gehen noch zart am Unsäglichen aus …	Words still fail before the unsayable sources …
Und die Musik, immer neu, aus den bebendsten Steinen,	And music, ever new, puts pulsating stones in place
baut im unbrauchbaren Raum ihr vergöttlichtes Haus.	To build her god-like house in unusable space. 3

Rilke’s rich and spiritually inclined verses yield several important points: enchantment is an opening up to a multiplicity of origins, to new worlds in a state of pure becoming; these ‘pure forces’ are characterized by a sense of play, and freedom; and to experience or ‘touch’ these enchanted forces, one needs to accept their marvellousness. For Rilke, music provides just such a means of enchantment, for it offers privileged access to ‘ever new’ and wondrous worlds. Music constructs a ‘god-like’ or enchanted dwelling-place, which is also ‘unusable’ – both in that it resists commodification by technological means (presumably, although Rilke died before the century’s most significant developments in commercial recording) and in the sense that it is somehow ungraspable, or untameable, in a linguistic or representational sense. Indeed, Rilke contends that there is something ‘unsayable’ about the place where music ‘is’ (before which words ‘still fail’), so that his notion of enchantment, and the way he thought about music, seems bound up with something linguistically inexpressible and spatially unquantifiable.

To think of music in these terms is hardly unusual, and Rilke can easily be seen to contribute to a broader movement which from the nineteenth century onwards granted music pre-eminence within the arts. ⁴ This elevation in status (from a relatively lowly position in the eighteenth century) stemmed from the fact that music, through its perceived ineffability and autonomy, was understood as the ideal medium for conveying hidden truths, expressing states of the soul and evoking fictional or alternative (or lost) worlds. The specific, auditory means by which it achieves this (through the ways it constructs or frames states of enchantment, or why musical materials might be said to have enchanting effects) is not Rilke’s concern. Instead, he seems content to claim that music enchants simply by virtue of its inherent unsayability and ‘god-like’ mysteriousness (a view that can also be equated with the nineteenth-century tendency of locating the sublime within musical expression).

While it is still commonplace to think of music in this way, Julian Johnson has warned that ‘music is poorly understood if it is taken to be, “by its very nature”, a form of enchantment’. ⁵ This is not to deny music its genuine capacity to enchant, but to claim that this is contingent on some fundamental ‘unsayability’ places undue emphasis on the historically pertinent yet rhetorically tricky proposition that music is of an irreconcilably different order to language, or somehow superior to it. The ineffable does of course constitute an important and potentially highly relevant topic in scholarly discussions of musical traditions and aesthetic practices, not least because the idea has so clearly shaped the thinking of many writers and artists (from E. T. A. Hoffmann to Vladimir Jankélévitch, and from a variety of Romantic artists of the nineteenth century to more recent figures such as Olivier Messiaen or Jonathan Harvey). Keith Chapin and Andrew Clark demonstrate the extent to which such thinking continues to inform musical debate, by observing that ‘because music does not seem to signify in quite the same way as language – because it does not seem to work with concepts – its meaning and sense seem to eschew designation, even to intimate things about which one cannot speak’. Music not only seems to ‘laugh at language’, ⁶ but also, paradoxically, seems to make a powerful case for its own ‘unusability’, as Rilke puts it.

In a world that is thought and lived through language, however, the relationship between these two modes of sense-making (musical and linguistic) is perhaps closer than is sometimes presumed. Notwithstanding the differences that exist between them, music and discourse naturally find themselves inextricably linked, giving of each other, to each other. ⁷ How, in that case, might one situate the category of enchantment within this more nuanced view of music in relation to language? Or indeed, how does one talk about enchantment when it, too, resists linguistic rationalization? If one thinks of enchantment primarily in terms of experience (specifically of a kind that takes us out of our usual quotidian mode of being), then musical enchantment may be best understood as something that fundamentally takes place in, or is framed by, our experience of listening to music. More accurately, to be enchanted by music is to admit to some intense encounter with its sonic and material presence – or, the loosening of a linguistic mode of comprehension in favour of something more eminently sense-derived. It is on this basis, I suggest, that moments of heightened intensity, or passages exhibiting a charmed sense of play, or which convey a bewildering disruption of musical grammar – the breaking through of something more overtly sensory rather than significatory – make themselves felt. As such, enchantment (or allowing oneself to be enchanted) can also be thought of as epitomizing the kind of sensuous knowing afforded by the experience of listening to music, or which musical listening can facilitate and privilege.

By focusing on enchantment as an aesthetic category of music (and privileging, thereby, the kind of listening through which one might admit to being enchanted) I am also mindful of Johnson’s entreaty to a kind of listening that is ‘much expanded’ and fundamentally open to the ‘material sense and logic of music’. ⁸ Steven Rings has remarked in recent years on the ethical stakes of this sort of naive or ‘blissed-out’ (as he calls it) approach to the professional study of music, referring specifically to the methodological tendencies of music theorists and analysts (whom he describes affectionately as ‘a rather wide-eyed, enthusiastic bunch, eager to get some music in our ears and figure out how it works its magic’ ⁹). Rings draws on the work of political theorist Jane Bennett (as will I) to argue that in spite of the fact that an enchanted listening might be deemed nothing more than a kind of naive escapism at odds with the discursive practices of a disenchanted academy, there are nonetheless persuasive reasons for defending enchantment (and this kind of listening practice) on ethical grounds. Bennett herself claims that ‘to some small but irreducible extent, one must be enamoured with existence and occasionally even enchanted in the face of it in order to be capable of donating some of one’s scarce mortal resources to the care of others’. It is in this sense that the ‘cultivation of an eye for the wonderful becomes something like an academic duty’. ¹⁰ Similarly, I suggest that an intellectual focus on enchantment not only helps us to interrogate more closely our relationship to music as simultaneously discursive and bodied listeners, but that doing so may further help in the cultivation of that relationship. ¹¹

A further theoretical point concerns Rilke’s pronouncement that existence is ‘still’ enchanted, implying that enchantment might have a continued role to play in modernity, despite modernity’s simultaneous propensity for disenchanting the world. Bennett offers just such a view of enchantment, as a ‘counterstory [that] seeks to induce an experience of the contemporary world […] as also enchanted – not a tale of re-enchantment but one that calls attention to magical sites already here’. ¹² Bennett clarifies that these magical sites are not to be understood in a supernatural or Christian cosmological sense, but rather as examples of the numerous unusual or captivating experiences that affect us (and have always affected us) in everyday life. This is in contrast to the claim, articulated by Joshua Landy and Michael Saler, for instance, that the modern world does, in fact, require re-enchantment, which necessitates the invention of new strategies by which the secularized and intellectualized world could once again be made mysterious, wondrous, redemptive, purposeful, epiphanic and a locus for the infinite. ¹³ Recognizing the widespread and far-reaching efforts on the part of modern intellectuals and creators to do just that is, Landy and Saler claim, ‘to reach a new, and more nuanced, understanding of the nature of modernity’. ¹⁴

The ‘re’ in re-enchantment also prompts a closer consideration of the role of memory and the promises the past holds for our lived experience of the present. Specifically, in re-enchanting the world, artists and creators might be thought of as longingly re-cultivating lost forms of enchantment for a secular age. It is possible to give an alternative reading of Rilke in this way, especially if one observes that his sonnet belongs to a collection of poems directed at the legendary figure of Orpheus, who notably inhabits an ancient world still enchanted by music. The loss of this enchanted world is central to a quintessentially modern condition of longing for a nostalgically idealized past, which (importantly) was understood to be ontologically distinct from the present (it is in this sense that Nicholas Paige regards the ‘re’ in re-enchantment as carrying ‘a powerful hint of estrangement or distancing’). ¹⁵ It is through music, however, that Rilke envisages a means of reclaiming and resituating this lost and enchanted world amid the demystified hierarchies of modern social life. One might, in that sense, regard the poet as orientating himself nostalgically towards a lost Arcadian idyll, and offering Orpheus’s lyric voice as a means of re-enchanting, or ‘re-singing’ (from the French, chanter) the present. ¹⁶

Much of this can be brought to bear on how we hear or experience George Enescu’s (1881–1955) music, a composer who remains both under-researched and under-performed outside his native Romania, yet whose oeuvre poses significant questions for the field of contemporary musicology. Distinguishing between enchantment and re-enchantment, for instance, seems an important task in the context of Enescu’s music, which both looks back nostalgically to reimagine (and thus reclaim) aspects of the past (explicitly so, from an autobiographical perspective, in works such as Impressions d’enfance (1940) and the Third Orchestral Suite, ‘Villageoise’, op. 27 (1938), both of which draw on the composer’s childhood memories), and simultaneously employs strategies of enchantment that have a continuing presence within modern life. My broader aim in this article is to discuss the ways that enchantment constitutes a useful category through which to account for an oeuvre that resists stylistic categorization (the music is obviously not of the same aesthetic persuasion as that espoused by the radical modernism of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, but neither does it fit easily into the category of twentieth-century musical oeuvres which have been marginalized for being tonally conservative or ‘backward-looking’), yet which through the manner of its processes is often remarkably and alluringly captivating. ¹⁷ It is worth noting that a significant proportion of Enescu’s music, but especially those later pieces (or sections of pieces) which incline toward intimate chamber writing, can readily be described as mysterious or entrancing: the first two movements of the Violin Sonata, op. 25, the Piano Quartet, op. 30, and the Piano Quintet, op. 29; the middle movement of the Piano Sonata, op. 24 no. 3; the first and third movements of the Cello Sonata, op. 26 no. 2; and the second movement of the String Quartet, op. 22 no. 2, for instance, are all examples of Enescu’s propensity for writing deeply sensuous, highly captivating, and mystifying music (in that sense, he seems actively to resist what Landy and Saler describe as lying at the root of many intellectuals’ understanding of disenchantment, which is a ‘gradual decline in mystery’ ¹⁸). Partly, this aesthetic stance can be seen to derive from Enescu’s adherence to the spiritualism of Romanian folklore, which is likewise discernible in his fascination with nature and evocations of rural life. ¹⁹ Enescu’s self-professed ‘mysticism’ also seems relevant here in explaining why his music often seems opposed to the conventional narrative of modernity as disenchantment (in a series of interviews for French radio with the journalist Bernard Gavoty, Enescu describes himself as a ‘countryman and mystic’ (campagnard et mystique) ²⁰). Consequently, while enchantment (and the question of its continued role in daily life) can readily be theorized in terms of the impact of modernity more generally, in Enescu’s case one begins to see how this category is also mediated by more localized cultural, spiritual and sociological influences.

The exemplary work in this respect is the Impressions d’enfance Suite for violin and piano, op. 28, in which the composer reimagines scenes from his childhood home in rural Moldavia through a continuous series of motivically linked yet affectively contrasting vignettes: the local fiddler, a babbling brook, a lullaby, a storm in the night and other similar recollections. Each of these ‘impressions’ is conceived as a musical imitation (or translation) of real-life objects and occurrences, recalled (and re-made) through memory. As such, and as was typical of Romantic art in the previous century, music is once again offered as the means by which the real, lived world can be elevated or transcended (the ecstatic sunrise scene which concludes the Suite demonstrates this to great effect). In a broader sense, the Suite’s conception seems to be premised on the idea that aesthetic contemplation of real-life objects and occurrences (even those recalled through memory) can induce a sense of enchantment; our encounters with the everyday are given a renewed focus and intensity. Moreover, if the piece and its composition are to be imagined as an escape from a war-torn world (into the past, or into oneself), then it is still escapism of a kind that transports the listener back into the world – specifically, the rural world – rather than shutting it out, or making us deaf to it. The way the music engages us in this process, by inclining (or attuning) our ears towards the sounds of nature (and helping, thereby, to recalibrate our understanding of the natural world), is a key aspect of the Suite’s capacity to enchant. ²¹ Again, listening (both to music and to the world) is of key importance here, and I am particularly interested in exploring how Enescu’s music might stage a kind of synaesthetic participation with nature, a mode of environmental attunement that at the same time engages the listening, feeling body. ²²

In each of these scenes, then, Enescu employs musical strategies (both technical and programmatic) that help to create a sense of enchantment out of the everyday. As Bennett notes, such strategies may also include giving ‘greater expression to the sense of play’, or ‘[honing] sensory receptivity to the marvellous specificity of things’. ²³ I am particularly interested in examining the sonorous and somatic effects of enchantment, as well as how musical behaviour might articulate a feeling of enchantment (particularly as understood from a phenomenological perspective). To that end, I expound my broadly hermeneutic reading of Enescu’s Impressions by drawing on the philosophical thought of several largely contemporaneous thinkers (particularly Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Vladimir Jankélévitch), whose writings reveal a similar, often phenomenologically driven preoccupation with the nature of ecstatic or enchanting experiences in the everyday. I suggest that exploring ‘strategies of enchantment’ and their musical framing allows not only for a more nuanced understanding of Enescu’s aesthetics and his music, but also of the role that enchantment as an aesthetic category more broadly occupies within musical modernity. In particular, my aim in this article is to show how Enescu’s enchanted evocations of nature, onomatopoeic renderings of animal ‘voices’ (birdsong, a cricket and a cuckoo-clock) and a highly sensuous mode of expression together reflect a childlike way of experiencing the world – a mode of being typically characterized by a condition of naivety and openness (as Debussy put it, ‘I want to sing my interior landscape with the naive candour of a child’ ²⁴) as well as a high level of attentiveness towards the marvellous singularity of everyday objects and occurrences. I consider, too, how the topic of childhood both relates to and overlaps with Enescu’s conception of an enchanted dwelling-place, and how broader notions of belonging or un-belonging (especially in terms of how humans interact with the natural world) might underpin the kind of fleeting wonder brought about when one is confronted by the unfamiliar in the everyday. I conclude by investigating how Enescu evokes a mode of participatory engagement in the world in the Suite’s transfigurative final scene.

II.

Impressions d’enfance was Enescu’s first major composition of the Second World War, the duration of which he spent in Romania. ²⁵ Enescu’s busy touring schedule often kept him away from home for long stretches – a significant proportion of his life was in fact spent in Paris – and it was arguably due to this renewed closeness to his (spiritual and literal) homeland that allowed the memories of a lived past to take fresh hold over the composer. ²⁶ Each of the Suite’s ten scenes has its own programmatic title (Enescu provided further programmatic descriptions of each scene in his interview with Gavoty ²⁷), while the chronology of the scenes charts a broadly circadian trajectory, taking the listener from day to night, and back to day with the final scene, ‘Lever de soleil’; see Table 1.

Table 1 Enescu, Impressions d’enfance, list of scenes with programmatic titles

Scene	Title
I	‘Ménétrier’ (The Village Fiddler)
II	‘Vieux mendiant’ (The Old Beggar)
III	‘Ruisselet au fond du jardin’ (The Brook at the End of the Garden)
IV	‘L’Oiseau en cage et le coucou au mur’ (The Bird in the Cage and the Cuckoo on the Wall)
V	‘Chanson pour bercer’ (Lullaby)
VI	‘Grillon’ (The Cricket)
VII	‘Lune à travers les vitres’ (The Moon Shining through the Windows)
VIII	‘Vent dans la cheminée’ (The Wind in the Chimney)
IX	‘Tempête au dehors, dans la nuit’ (Storm Outside in the Night)
X	‘Lever de soleil’ (Sunrise)

Each of the scenes reflects a fascination with the world, in all its minutiae, as seen through a child’s eye; the Impressions are ‘filled with evocative fantasy’, as the French composer Gustave Samazeuilh wrote in 1955. ²⁸ A childlike ‘freshness of vision’ similarly underpins Bennett’s own understanding of enchantment. ²⁹ For her, the mood of enchantment resembles a kind of surprise state, ‘a pleasurable feeling of being charmed by the novel and as yet unprocessed encounter’, which one readily associates with ‘a fleeting return to childlike excitement about life’. ³⁰ A ‘novel encounter’ is precisely how one might describe the way the Suite announces itself, with a rustic, modally infused violin solo meant to represent the local fiddler (‘Ménétrier’; Example 1). It is a strikingly original opening, from a variety of perspectives. Certainly, within the stylistic conventions of Western art music it is rare that a piece for solo violin and piano should begin with an extended number for the violin alone. ³¹ Likewise, by drawing on an indigenous folk tradition (the music of the Romanian lăutari) the music immediately presents itself as ‘other’, and therefore ‘new’. ³² The scene’s originality also stems more poignantly from the fact that it gives expressive voice and aesthetic form to one of Enescu’s earliest memories, and therefore to his own (or the memory of his own) primordial or originary conception of the world. It is equally in this sense that the music seems to speak of a ‘first time’. The immediacy of the solo violin’s purposeful entry evokes a sudden awakening unto the world: the child’s perspective, as Enescu depicts it, offers little room for reflective thought (it is ‘as yet unprocessed’ for that reason), and is caught up instead in the perceptual immediacy and wondrous novelty of the musical world surrounding him.

Evidently, the conception of the world as ‘new’ fascinated writers, artists and theorists in the early decades of the twentieth century (as well as much of the nineteenth). As Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei observes, ‘the originality or primitive nature of child experience’ was cherished not necessarily for being ‘more important than mature states of mind, but rather for revivifying a stage in which the world, being first constituted as world, is open to constant negotiation’. ³³ The value placed on child experience and on being able to recapture this sense of the world’s ‘worlding’ (a theme which can be traced most obviously in the nineteenth and late eighteenth centuries through the work of literary figures such as Novalis, William Wordsworth and William Blake) ³⁴ stemmed in part from the experience of modernity itself – or rather, as a reaction to it. The same rapid technological and economic advancement that Max Weber claimed precipitated the disenchantment of the world also gave rise to the perception of a new kind of progressive temporality, an inevitable consequence of which was a diminished capacity for retaining and living with the past. ³⁵ Amid this awareness of temporal rupture, the notion of a similarly lost (and ‘magical’) childhood contributed, in Peter Fritzsche’s words, to a feeling of ‘permanent itinerancy’, so that individuals felt strangely unmoored from themselves and their own half-forgotten past identities. ³⁶ The American essayist and naturalist Henry David Thoreau lamented the effects of this permanent itinerancy as early as 1841 when he wrote: ‘we seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language’. ³⁷ As was typical of his Romantic contemporaries, Thoreau bemoans the fact that as an adult he has forgotten the childhood language of enchantment, and of being able to dream the world as a child might (it is exactly in adulthood that theorizations about enchanted childhoods take place, of course: children do not see their lives as enchanted). The nostalgic evocation of a treasured but lost childhood (encountered most frequently in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries within the highly subjective genres of modern autobiography and the private memoir) accordingly became a vital means of re-rooting (or re-worlding) the self, as well as an expressive mode of longing.

While Enescu’s Impressions d’enfance can easily be situated amid a contemporary nostalgia for lost childhood and an autobiographical questing for origins, the Suite is, at the same time, quite distinct from those musical depictions of modern childhood that proliferated among Enescu’s French contemporaries in the period of the Third Republic. Emily Kilpatrick has observed how the rise of the modern child and the emergence of a new child-centred social order (which included categories of child laziness and the spoiled child) gave rise to a characteristically Parisian type of musical enfantine. Works like Georges Bizet’s Jeux d’enfants (1871); Gabriel Fauré’s Dolly Suite (1896); Claude Debussy’s Children’s Corner (1908) and La Boîte à joujoux (1913); Maurice Ravel’s Ma mère l’oye (1910) and L’Enfant et les sortilèges (1925); and André Caplet’s Un tas de petites choses (1925) are all prominent examples of how composers ‘turned from the idealized Romantic childhood of Schumann’s Kinderszenen towards the overflowing nurseries and exuberant family life of their busy, vital Parisian society’. ³⁸ By contrast, Enescu’s evocation of rural childhood seems wholly removed from this world of toys, dolls and the modern family unit. He seems less concerned with capturing a childish or infantile quality, and more with evoking an uninhibited vision of life spent outside the home, experienced in nature, through solitary contemplation of the world, and in music (Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges is perhaps Enescu’s closest point of comparison). ³⁹

Gosetti-Ferencei expands on the nature of this uninhibited experiential mode, describing how theorists and artists (such as Gaston Bachelard, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Marcel Proust and Rilke) came to view childhood not only as a ‘state of freedom from fixed conceptuality and habit that characterizes adult consciousness’, but also as ‘a persistent source, when revivified in adulthood, for the revitalization of quotidian life’. ⁴⁰ Bachelard posits his conception of poetic reverie as an eminently creative means by which this might be achieved, stating that ‘by dreaming on childhood, we return to the lair of Reveries, to the reveries which have opened up the world to us’. ⁴¹ More specifically, to become like the dreaming child (as Thoreau so wished to do) is to invoke a unique mode of understanding that relies less on the ‘conceptual recognition of objects and perspectives’, and rather more on what early twentieth-century French culture perceived as a condition ‘enlightened’ by irrationality. ⁴² Viewing the world as if for the first time, ‘pre-rationally’, suggests the presence of an uninhibited perceptual mode that takes precedence over reflective or rational thought. ⁴³ Childlike perception considers the world in its instantiation (it is freed from the habits which dull and hinder adult vision; it implies a naivety, or suspension of judgement) in large part because the distinction between ‘self and the world’ in childhood is more ‘porous and negotiable’ than in adulthood. Gosetti-Ferencei cites Merleau-Ponty’s observation that the child ‘is apt to recognize himself in everything’: he finds himself more intimately connected with the things around him. ⁴⁴ This self-identification with objects allows for their transformation into something enchanting, precisely as this process precipitates an intense experience that is located outside of the ‘ordinary feeling of the self’s familiarity with the world’. ⁴⁵

A good example of how Enescu uses musical materials to frame this kind of enchanting transformation (specifically from a listening perspective) can be found in the third scene of Impressions d’enfance, titled ‘Ruisselet au fond du jardin’. Here, Enescu seeks to recreate the glistening, reflective quality of the stream at the end of his garden, and does so initially through patterns of imitation and repetition. ⁴⁶ The scene’s opening bars present an imitative dialogue between both instruments as arpeggiated chromatic flourishes are exchanged between the piano and the violin (see Example 2; Enescu’s frequently used dynamic marking bp stands for ben piano). Continuing imitative exchanges (mimicking general contour and gestures) are heard as distorted reflections, and the increasingly chromatic motion (in both parts) conveys a sinuous fluidity as melodic lines and motivic shapes are passed between the violin and piano. Chromaticism is in fact central to Enescu’s reimagining of the babbling stream: chromatically led shifts in harmony take place suddenly every few bars; the melodic movement (especially in the piano writing) is entirely chromatically derived; and polyrhythmic chromatic arpeggiations in the piano eventually give way to ascending and descending chromatic runs (occasionally this motion appears in thirds or fifths, and even at a major seventh). With its energetic flourishes and carefree swerves, the scene’s form could be viewed as paratactic, as if the music were constantly reorientating itself, seeking a new or different direction. To speak of any formal framework or structure would be misleading, however, and Enescu’s fluid design instead recalls Vladimir Jankélévitch’s poetic claim that ‘water in motion drowns form’. ⁴⁷

Gradually, however, the unsettled curiosity brought about by the music’s polyrhythmic and chromatic busyness succumbs to a more luxuriant and delectable contentment. Part of this change in mood has to do with the establishing of a more stable tonality: an implied E major appears like some sought-after and idyllic harmony after a chromatically deviating and rhythmically restless initial section. ⁴⁸ Likewise, both violin and piano parts become more rhythmically regular, the piano glossing (by means of diminished and half-diminished arpeggiated flourishes) the violin’s drawn-out articulation of an E major broken-chord and a gently rocking pattern between e′ and d♮/♯ (see Example 3). In the fourth bar before the end of the scene, an ascending E-major-scale run (in fifths) in the piano gives way to a drawn-out portamento in the violin, from g♯ to a, and back down again to the g♯. This is the first time a musical device of this sort has been encountered in this scene, and it is, in part, its uniqueness that makes it so captivating. The slide’s singularity causes us to become ‘delayed’ in its presence, as Philip Fisher might put it. ⁴⁹ This is highlighted musically with a sudden shift to a slower metronome marking, and a subsequent suspension of metre: the sustained g♯ in the violin is punctuated by lontano clusters in the upper ranges of the piano, then everything fades to silence. This is an enchanting moment, not just because it has the power fleetingly (yet completely) to transfix and absorb a listener’s attention, but it does so because it is easily interpreted as a poetic exaggeration of water’s liquidity – a fluid and extravagant re-filling of the gap between rationally tempered intervals. The exaggerated motion between the third scale degree and locally dissonant fourth is experienced somatically as a kind of tightening and subsequent uncoiling – a pleasurable release. The way Enescu foregrounds the sensuous intensity of this enlarged and suspended moment prompts us to consider enchantment, in this instance, as the transformation of something linear (a process) into something like Bergsonian durée, which implies a shift in focus from a rational mode of sense-making to a more corporeal (or what Bergson would call ‘intuitive’) mode of being. ⁵⁰ This enchanting moment effectively brings us ‘closer’ (in a physical, visceral sense) to the watery world of Enescu’s vision, and as such our experience of the music likewise reflects a childlike self-identification with the world. The temporal dimension of Enescu’s rendering (and our perception of the stream’s transformation) also evokes what Merleau-Ponty discerned in Paul Cézanne’s painted landscapes as ‘a world in which being is not given but rather emerges over time’. ⁵¹ The way Enescu shapes this scene evidently reflects a preoccupation in modern art of attending to how things themselves are perceived, or how they ‘emerge in living vision’. ⁵² With Enescu we are similarly made to consider how musical materials emerge and are transformed within a span of lived time, and how processes of perception are evoked through a constructed phenomenology of listening.

III.

The most obvious topical marker for childhood in the Suite is the Lullaby (‘Chanson pour bercer’) of the fifth scene. Enescu’s own description of the scene involves a nurse reciting her predictions to the child as he falls asleep: ‘you will be big, you will be strong …’. ⁵³ The Lullaby’s cantabile semplice theme appears in unison in the violin and piano (in bold contrast to the ‘Ruisselet’ scene), and consists of two extended phrases, each built around the circular repetition of familiar melodic contours and rhythmic patterns (Example 4). ⁵⁴ The whole sequence is then repeated, with the piano providing a gradually more imitative and elaborate accompaniment. By design, the Lullaby is supposed to induce slumber, and the theme’s gently undulating and repetitive simplicity does indeed prompt a sense of restful inactivity, or quiescence. ⁵⁵ The only thing of perceptual interest to the listener is the movement of the melody itself, with its irregular stresses (compounded by frequent changes in metre) and familiar contours, each brought to the fore by a significantly pared down texture and accompanying sense of ideality and intimacy. The perceptual state that Enescu evokes here recalls the plenitude of being that Bergson claimed was central to his conception of durée, and which he often equated with how one hears or perceives a melody: pure duration ‘forms both the past and the present states into an organic whole, as happens when we recall the notes of a tune, melting […] into one another’. ⁵⁶ This focused or sharpened attentive state is partly what makes the Lullaby enchanting, but that same ‘plenitude of being’ also articulates a contradiction. The Lullaby is transfixing (and in that sense immobilizing, or arresting), but its melody is also transportive, in that it lulls the listener into different states of attentiveness (or consciousness). Complete absorption in the melody’s movement is akin to being simultaneously gripped and carried along by it, echoing Bennett’s claim that ‘to be both caught up and carried away – enchantment is marked by this odd combination of somatic effects’. ⁵⁷

We might expand on this perceptually (or kinaesthetically) derived account of the ‘Chanson pour bercer’ through a more sustained consideration of the captivating power of sound itself, or more accurately, the self-sufficiency of the sonorous space. Indeed, sonority (and sonorous repetition especially) is at the heart of what makes the Lullaby scene a site of enchantment. This idea is readily explored from a number of different perspectives. For instance, for Bennett and others, a theorization of enchantment can be finessed by considering the word’s etymological roots. Thus, to ‘en-chant’ means ‘to surround with song or incantation; hence, to cast a spell with sounds, to make fall under the sway of a magical refrain, to carry away on a sonorous stream’. ⁵⁸ Repeated word sounds have a noticeably spell-binding or hypnotic quality about them: they can quickly become meaningless or nonsensical (‘pure’ sound), or else they can reveal new sounds and new perspectives of meaning. This process of repetition masks a gradual shift, in other words, from what might be understood as the signifying aspect of language to its musicality; from signification to the self-sufficiency of sonority. Herein lies the creative potential of language. Jessica Wiskus explores this potent aesthetic notion incisively in her book The Rhythm of Thought, observing that ‘in language there is always more than a mapping of thought to expression: there is something latent, something unaccounted for, that springs to life in the performance of language’ (Wiskus is building here on what the poet Stéphane Mallarmé recognized as the songfulness of speech – the allusive ‘not-said’ of creative thought). ⁵⁹ By drawing on an instinctual sense of play, children are well-versed in the sensuous and pleasurable repetition of words and sounds; their inherent creativity is demonstrated through their realization of the enchanting melodism of language – something Enescu seeks to emulate through his purely sonorous rendering of the Lullaby. It is worth noting, too, that the chant-like repetition of words or phrases was once viewed in sacred terms as a passage towards enlightenment, via the stripping away of worldly distraction or sinful thought. Enescu’s own description of the Lullaby scene suggests a similar attempt to draw on the mesmerizing effects of such repetition, with the nurse’s litany of predictions taking on an incantatory quality, encapsulated by the Lullaby’s wordless and enchanting repetitions.

Examining the transformative effects of chant-like or sonorous repetition inevitably calls to mind the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s conception of the refrain, which ‘turns back on itself, opens onto itself, revealing until then unheard-of potentialities’. ⁶⁰ Being drawn into the Lullaby’s quiescent circularity likewise opens up new, perceptually revealing ways of hearing its thematic substance. Enescu plays with a similar idea at the start of the theme’s second iteration, introducing a rocking quaver accompaniment in the left hand of the piano part, while the right hand shadows the theme in the violin through close imitation at the octave (see Example 5). The imitative commentary creates a displacing effect, as well as a further layer of audible ‘mirroring’, which itself is emblematic of an innate kind of wonder. The melodic imitation (and further subsequent elaboration in the piano accompaniment) not only provides a different way of hearing a familiar theme by poeticizing aspects of its grammar; it also provokes a sharpening of sensory activity. In effect, Enescu maps an increasing sensory restlessness onto our experience of the restful Lullaby theme. The somatic pulling apart this produces serves as a further indicator of the kind of bodily disruption that characterizes moments of enchantment.

IV.

In referring to the Lullaby scene as a ‘site’ of enchantment, I am suggesting that it could also be viewed as a contained space which, moreover, takes the form of an enchanted dwelling. This is an idea that is readily explored from the perspective of literally having (or not having) a home, but also in the broader metaphysical sense of belonging (or unbelonging). The feeling of ‘being at home’ evoked by the Lullaby is exemplified by its positioning right at the heart of the Suite, and through the way it draws together the motivic content of all the surrounding scenes. Enescu’s middle movements often serve a similar purpose, appearing as islands of restfulness and calm, and marked as special or private. A similar concept of dwelling might be traced in the work of Martin Heidegger, whose later philosophical writings elicit a sustained and quite varied preoccupation with how humans dwell in the world. Not long after Enescu finished working on his Impressions d’enfance, Heidegger delivered a lecture course in Freiburg entitled ‘Hölderlin’s Hymn, Der Ister’, ⁶¹ in which he characterized dwelling as a kind of ‘rest’. In the later essays, Heidegger identifies a feeling of ‘safety’ as the essence of dwelling; ultimately, dwelling means ‘to be at peace […] to be protected from harm and threat, safeguarded […] that is, cared for and protected’. ⁶² Through its internal repetitions, the Lullaby melody conveys a similar feeling of peace, intimacy, and protection (much like the repetition of a mantra can help stave off fear, or build confidence). For Deleuze and Guattari, one of the effects produced by the musical refrain is exactly this sense of a protected ‘shelter’, which sets up a border between an organized ‘limited space’ and the external ‘forces of chaos’. Importantly, this home ‘does not pre-exist’ but needs to be organized spatially through acts of ‘selection, elimination, and extraction’. ⁶³ Most notably, and as Bennett reminds us, for Deleuze and Guattari the ‘experience of “having a place” is not simply spatial but is also sonorous’: sound itself (and especially repeated sound) has a foundational role in the organizing and delimiting of sheltered space. ⁶⁴

The assertion that ‘home’ does not simply pre-exist, and that it requires acts of organization, selection and extraction is evoked through the technical manner by which Enescu anticipates the Lullaby’s melodic material. In Impressions Enescu embeds motivic segments and contours within the texture before the start of the Lullaby, and consequently before they are perceived as thematically significant. ⁶⁵ For instance, the piano part of the preceding scene (‘L’Oiseau en cage et le coucou au mur’) is replete with motivic variants of the Lullaby’s opening seven-note figure, and that same motivic figure is also ‘quoted’ near the start of the ‘Vieux mendiant’ scene. As is so often the case elsewhere in Enescu’s oeuvre, the motivic construction in Impressions is self-generating to the point that it is possible to trace the origins of several of the Lullaby’s more characteristic melodic contours right back to the opening scene (the $ \hat{5}\hbox{--} \hat{4}\hbox{--} \hat{3}\hbox{--} \hat{1} $ melodic figure is a notable example; see Example 1). This process of motivic embedding is primarily one of familiarization: of making melodic segments memorable, so that by the time the Lullaby melody is heard, it already seems familiar – it already sounds like home.

Once the comforting sense of home is secured, however, the refrain simultaneously begins to look beyond its own delimited space: ‘one opens the circle not on the side where the old forces of chaos press against it but in another region, one created by the circle itself […] in order to join with the forces of the future’. It is this final effect of the refrain which Deleuze and Guattari famously describe as when ‘one ventures from home on the thread of a tune’. ⁶⁶ This is exactly what Enescu does in the second iteration of the Lullaby theme (and in subsequent scenes, of course), when the piano begins its imitative flights, probing the cracks of its sonorous walls through ulterior drifts, twists, vibrations and movements (see Example 5). These minor disruptions – the superimposition of new types or modes of experience, a conjoining of the familiar and the unfamiliar – contribute further to the Lullaby’s enchanting quality. (Eventually, the child’s refrain will make overtures toward the non-human world, and vibrate with the insect refrain of the next scene, ‘Grillon’.)

In stark contrast to the ‘at-homeness’ of the ‘Chanson pour bercer’, the ‘Vieux mendiant’ (‘Old Beggar’) scene presents a musical exploration of homelessness. Whereas a sense of dwelling in the Lullaby is created through the sonorous re-collecting of melodic material, the Suite’s second scene is marked instead by an apparent failure of memory. The opening fourteen bars of the piano part seem to re-enact a process of trying to remember, by introducing a series of statements which expand upon the scene’s initial motivic idea of a falling semitone. The statements gradually coalesce (at rehearsal mark 2; compare bars 1–4 and 11–14 in Example 6) into a motivic anticipation of the Lullaby theme’s opening melodic contour (even using the same pitches, a′–b′–d′′–c′′–b′–g′–f♯′; compare Example 4). However, like every statement so far, the phrase simply seems to give up with the effort of attempting to recall some as yet unrecognizable idea of home. The melodic line slumps dismally down a semitone, and fades away. This sighing or sagging figure comprises the most fundamental aspect of the intervallic writing in this scene (frequently accompanied by expressive markings such as patetico, lamentoso, mesto, malinconico), and is exemplified both by the violin’s raucamente (‘hoarse’) vocality and the mancando (‘dying away’) slide from a sustained a′ down a whole octave, and then further still by two more semitones, in the fourth bar before the scene’s end. It is a pathetic conclusion to a scene steeped in melancholy, marked by its inability to construct (and retain) a memorable refrain, or shelter (one is reminded here of Freud’s reading of melancholy: as the inability to perceive or recall what has been lost, so that an abstracted sense of loss becomes endemic to the ego’s own subjective identification). ⁶⁷

Homelessness can be thought of in conceptually broader terms, beyond the definition of literally lacking a home. The somatic ‘pulling apart’ to which I referred above could be heard as articulating a metaphysical restlessness, of the kind that underpins a yearning to belong and to find comfort in a dwelling-place – an idea that is central to the experience of modernity. Enescu’s own itinerancy (and that of other modern, touring performer–composers, such as the young Gustav Mahler, or Béla Bartók) is of course emblematic of this need to find a dwelling, both in the literal sense of longing to dwell in a specific place, but also in the more abstract sense of identifying a lost homeland that needs to be remade through music. As Julian Young observes, a metaphysical kind of homelessness underpins Heidegger’s early conception of Dasein (‘being-as-human’). Accordingly, the pervading mood of Being and Time (1927) – along with Heidegger’s conception of Dasein’s ‘being-in-the-world’ – is homelessness, or alienation. The source of this homelessness, Young goes on to explain, is an anxiety, or ‘ontological insecurity’ in the face of death, or the ‘abyss’. ⁶⁸ In his later writings, Heidegger becomes increasingly concerned with the duality of homelessness and dwelling, so that the former only characterizes what Young helpfully distinguishes as ‘ordinary dwelling’ (which differs from ‘essential dwelling’). ⁶⁹ Dwelling in the ordinary sense refers to how we experience ourselves in the world, or how we might (or might not) feel at home; in modernity, the feeling is almost always one of alienation. Conversely, essential dwelling does not rely on feeling or experience at all. In a move that highlights the fundamental transposition of his thinking, late Heidegger maintains that human beings dwell essentially because this is ontologically the case, regardless of whether one feels at home or not in the ordinary sense. Essential dwelling can be thought of as a transcendent mode, which repositions Heidegger’s former conception of the abyss within a broader plenitude of being that he calls ‘ek-sistence’. ⁷⁰

I will return to this idea in my discussion of the Suite’s final scene below; for now, I wish to focus on the duality of homelessness and dwelling that Heidegger clearly imagined to be the modern subject’s existential plight. While Impressions does point to some more explicit renderings of homelessness (the Old Beggar; the Caged Bird; the itinerant Fiddler), it is also concerned with the subtler ways in which homelessness runs as a dialectical counterpart to dwelling, specifically in terms of how humans interact with nature. In this context, I am interested primarily in the degree of permissible or realizable contact between the human and non-human world, and the types of fascination and creative responses this engenders (in the world of opera, Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges springs to mind, as does Leoš Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen). The extent to which one might come to know nature, or experience it, especially in a bodily sense, similarly frames my thinking about how an earthly living-space might impinge upon or attempt to incorporate aspects of nature. As Andrea Nightingale suggests, this hinges on the idea that the modern subject’s apprehension of the natural world in experiential (non-scientific) terms is always partial or broken off, and collapsing into fascination. ⁷¹ This ‘broken knowledge’, as Francis Bacon described it, provokes a feeling of simultaneous belonging and unbelonging in the face of something known yet unknown: a blurred duality which for Nightingale ‘masks a unique mode of wonder’. ⁷²

The wondrous contemplation of nature as a familiar yet alien Other underpins Enescu’s conception of not only Impressions d’enfance but also several other pieces (the ‘Villageoise’ Suite most obviously, and the Vox Maris, op. 31, of 1954). A broader recourse to pastoral topics is also noticeably frequent throughout Enescu’s oeuvre, from his first published work (the Poème Roumain, op. 1) through to his last (the Chamber Symphony, op. 33). Such pastoral evocations could easily be read as a historically minded attempt to reinvoke the kind of harmonious unity with nature that was perceived as lost under modernity, and thereby counteract (or perhaps dramatize) the composer’s own sense of dépaysement. However, to the extent that Enescu might be seen to evoke a mythic or essentialized idea of nature in these works, there also seems to be an awareness on his part (of a different kind, though, to the self-reflective irony one finds in Mahler, for instance) that the closer one gets to nature, the more distant or estranged it begins to seem (witness the rather more abstracted renderings of the childhood home or the bizarre bleating sheep in the ‘Villageoise’ Suite, for instance). ⁷³ It is tempting, of course, to interpret the Impressions Suite along similar lines, given the rationalized and culturally processed means by which the piece is constructed (the virtuosic techniques called for in Enescu’s onomatopoeic transcriptions of the wind and storm in scenes VIII and IX are an excellent case in point), ⁷⁴ and the fact that it is conceived as a restaging of events existing only in memory. From that perspective, the Suite could, perhaps, be interpreted as an instance of modernist dis-enchantment, with its realistic representations of absent or ultimately unattainable objects (the sense of melancholy that pervades so much of Enescu’s writing, already alluded to above, would support such an interpretation). However, one cannot ignore the specifically musical means by which the Suite also attempts to frame a more participatory (even synaesthetic) engagement with the natural world, as evidenced by its evocation of an uninhibited perceptual mode and by the sensuous immediacy afforded by the experience of listening to Enescu’s music.

The precise nature of this participatory engagement is worth considering in historiographical terms. Whereas Romantic attitudes towards nature were underscored by a sense of distance (epitomized by the notion of the sublime, but also witnessed in a contemporary enthusiasm for enchanted fairy worlds, both of which situated nature beyond the reach of comprehension), ⁷⁵ the artistic perception of nature as ‘far-off’ gradually became inverted in the later decades of the nineteenth century, mirroring advancements in the empirical understanding of the natural world. Consequently, by the time of the twentieth century, composers like Enescu (and Ravel, Bartók, Janáček) had become increasingly concerned with how music might allow for unprecedentedly ‘objectivist’ (or ‘inexpressive’, as Jankélévitch also writes) ⁷⁶ representations of nature, drawing attention as much as possible to the microscopic details inherent to things-in-themselves (it is notable that the scientific rationalization of the natural world did little to neutralize its magical or otherworldly status). A striking consequence of such objectivism, and the reason why such music can purport to being non-musical, Jankélévitch further claims, is an implied effacement of the human subject. More accurately, perhaps, such objectivism points to a merging of the human subject with the objects it perceives, a tendency which parallels what I have been referring to as a childlike perceptual mode: a closer and more intimate self-identification with objects and the surrounding world.

It is precisely this idea that underpins Enescu’s onomatopoeic renderings of animal ‘voices’ in the Impressions Suite. The song of the Caged Bird in the fourth scene (‘L’Oiseau en cage et le coucou au mur’) is a good case in point: muted, high in its register, and quiet, the violin’s chirruping (notated as staccatos and tremolos, leaps and slides) comes across as a startlingly vivid and tantalizingly realistic mimicry (see Example 7). ⁷⁷ The rhythmic precision and highly detailed articulation also suggest a minute attentiveness to nature’s uniqueness, as does Enescu’s extensive use of portamento between pairs of notes, which lends an indeterminacy to the violin’s non-musical song. Sound itself, at the most microscopic level, becomes approximated, drawing us closer to the marvellously specific voice of nature – a ‘space of virtuosic detail’, to use Francesca Brittan’s apt phrase – and away from the rationally mediated world of notated music. ⁷⁸ With the complete dissolution of any sense of metre (at least until the piano re-enters at the eighth bar), these fascinating and infinitesimal details of the birdsong are further thrown into sharp relief, so that this everyday occurrence is transformed into an entirely novel and captivating experience (one might equally say that the memory of this occurrence is reimagined with renewed focus and intensity).

Something similar happens in the sixth scene (‘Grillon’), in which a chirping cricket’s inexpressive ‘voice’ is faithfully recreated in the violin’s extremely energetic and rapid staccato oscillations (Example 8). Both the gettando l’arco and saltando markings (demanding a throwing action and a bouncing motion, respectively) suggest an abrasive physicality evocative of a cricket’s stridulation. There is a feeling of unpredictability or waywardness accompanying these techniques, stemming from the relative lack of control as the bow hits the string and ricochets off. This is not musically expressive writing, in other words: instead, Enescu extracts a non-musical song out of the friction between two planes, as they collide and grate. ⁷⁹ What the listener experiences here is not merely a sonorous imitation, but an attempt to mimic an animal’s physical habits through purportedly inexpressive, essentially mobile gestures – akin to what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as ‘becoming-animal’. ⁸⁰ This process is contingent on a desire to fulfil or overcome the lure of the Other (or new, or different) through some exhilarating and magical transformation. That desire probably finds its most unashamed manifestation in children’s games of make-believe, and in the carefree wish to become something else (such as an animal, or an aeroplane, or a giant) by pretending. More accurately, the pretence is derived from what it might feel like to be that something, or someone else. As such, the desire for metamorphosis is also mingled with a pleasurable sense of freedom – the freedom to do, or be, as well as to think, or move otherwise. The capacity of cross-species encounters to provoke fascination and to enchant comes as a result of this promised sense of freedom, be it imaginative, subjective, or somatic. The enchantment to be found in hybrid forms such as becoming-animal (or merely becoming-different) stems in part from the continual sense of flux, or free play, which is also conveyed by states of becoming. Indeed, inherent to Deleuze’s account is what Cliff Stagoll describes as ‘the pure movement evident in changes between particular events […] [becoming] is the very dynamism of change’. ⁸¹ Bennett also argues that motion is at the heart of what makes such inter-species ‘crossings’ enchant: ‘to live among or as a crossing is to have motion called to mind, and this reminding is also a somatic event […] hybrids enchant for the same reason that moving one’s body in space can carry one away’. ⁸²

V.

To the extent that Enescu’s depictions of nature articulate a simultaneous belonging and unbelonging in the world, they also suggest a distinction between a sensory or uninhibited means of coming to know nature, and a reflective, discursive means of apprehension (a distinction that has always been at or near the heart of phenomenological enquiry). The implication more broadly is that embodied knowledge allows for a ‘closeness’ that is ultimately impeded, or negated by intellectual curiosity; in its poeticism of the thing-in-itself, cognition comes after (and at the same time stifles) sensuous involvement. This Husserlian notion is also picked up by Andrea Nightingale in her study of Thoreau: she too observes that ‘while our bodies ally us with nonhuman beings’, the ‘very activity of human cognition and self-consciousness pulls us away from nature, and precludes us from being fully at home on earth’. ⁸³ By way of further elucidation, Nightingale cites a beautiful passage from Robert Harrison’s meditative study on forests:

We humans do not speak the language of nature’s self-inclusion, but one of extraneous excess. Our logos is the outside of things – a boundary of finitude at which we are lost but which, in return, enables us to utter words at all. The words ‘tree’ and ‘rock’ are utterable because logos, in its longing, projects us beyond the containment of trees, rocks, wind and forests. In excess of the earth, we dwell in longing as in a house turned inside out. ⁸⁴

Nightingale concludes that by dwelling ‘in excess of the earth’, our being is consequently one of extravagance – or, as Thoreau himself puts it, extra-vagant, which deliberately emphasizes the Latin roots of ‘wandering’ (vagare) ‘beyond’ (extra). ⁸⁵

What the above tells us is that it is the mental awareness of our own bodily finitude that separates us from a purely sensuous, temporally immediate experience of the natural world. In our ability to name the things of nature, we place ourselves at a remove, and even beyond those things (hence why our experience of nature collapses into fascination). This is precisely what the Impressions Suite looks to dramatize and (arguably) overcome. For while dwelling in longing (or dwelling ‘extra-vagantly’) can rightly be considered a central theme of Enescu’s Impressions d’enfance (especially programmatically), it is also apparent that the music’s sensuous immediacy and its ‘emergent’ quality (the way it is often framed as ‘appearing’ in lived time) points towards something phenomenologically distinct from the mediation of verbal naming.

Nowhere in the Suite is this dialectic of (un)belonging, which can readily be reframed in terms of the relationship between music and language (considered at the outset of this article), made more explicit than in the final scene. To begin with, it is worth noting that in its conception and overall effect, the ‘Lever de soleil’ bears striking similarities to Harrison’s poignant image of a ‘house turned inside out’. Having survived the tempestuous night, Enescu’s child protagonist is greeted by the dawn and by a marvellous infiltration of the outside world, which is mixed with memories of the Lullaby and other musical ideas (Example 9 illustrates how the scene begins). Familiar birdsong interjections are prevalent, and appear in nearly every bar between rehearsal marks 32 and 36; we are reminded of the Cricket at 35 in the left hand of the piano; varied and fragmentary reminders of the Fiddler’s music and the Lullaby theme in particular appear intermittently throughout (for instance: in the violin in the second bar after rehearsal mark 34 and at 35; in the right hand of the piano half a bar before 35; in all three bars after 36; in the violin again two bars before 38; and so on). In fact, nearly every aspect of the melodic writing (in the violin especially) is in some way derivative of previous thematic material, and therefore richly allusive. The piano part, meanwhile, is replete with rhapsodic arpeggiation, glissandos, and trilled chords. Enescu describes the scene to Gavoty: ‘It’s day! Shafts of light penetrate all through the room. The birds sing. All the themes return, this time in the major. The child breathes, he is happy.’ ⁸⁶ Amid the piano’s increasingly lavish depiction of a dawn chorus and the rapturous soaring of the violin, the child seems to reach out beyond the limits of his physical dwelling, and re-situate himself as part of the world outside, effectively inverting the boundaries of his own home. In its virtuosity, the music is likewise extravagantly rendered, and I am interested especially in the rhapsodic and, ultimately, ‘ek-static’ (literally, ‘standing outside oneself’) means by which Enescu conceives of his outward-facing dwelling.

A rhapsodic expressive mode offers a particularly useful generic context through which to consider the nature of Enescu’s virtuosic writing. Both historically and etymologically, the poetic rhapsody implies a specifically musical or sung quality (Rhapsōidia was the name the Greeks gave to the practice of reciting epic poetry; from rhaptein, meaning to sew or stitch together, and aidein, meaning to sing – from which we also have the words ‘ode’ (ōidē) and ‘voice’ (audē)). The extent to which Enescu seems eager to communicate a ‘sung’ quality in this final scene is evidenced by the sheer number of cantabile markings (predominantly for the violin) which litter the score: 11 appearances in just over six pages of music. Taking into account additional markings of sonoro, con suono, and con espansione e una grande sonorità, Enescu once again seems to foreground the self-sufficiency of the sonorous space, which exerts a presence above that of the music’s formal or grammatical ‘patterning’ (quite aptly, Pascal Bentoiu describes the final four pages of the work as a ‘sonorous explosion’). ⁸⁷ For while rhapsodizing may suggest a ‘sung’ quality on the one hand, it also implies a way of speaking, writing, or thinking that does not follow semantic norms. The rhapsody carries connotations of improvised spontaneity; it proceeds by moving sideways, it drifts, it follows unpredictable paths.

Rhapsodic writing of this kind paves the way for an increasing sense of excess and extravagance in the ‘Lever de soleil’, which amounts to a further defamiliarizing of what one might call the ‘figures’ of musical speech, or musical grammar. Already this process of rhapsodic defamiliarization is evident at the start of the ‘Lever de soleil’ scene. The birdsong recollections in the piano, captured through crystalline cheeps and tweets, are manifestly of a different kind compared with the objectively ‘real’ rendering heard in the Caged Bird scene, for instance. The gestures are similar – quickly repeated staccato high notes, and tremolando broken chords, or alternating pairs of chords – but the context has been transformed. ‘Inexpressive’ writing has demonstrably given way to abstraction and poetic excess.

This same process of abstraction continues as the scene unfolds, with ethereality and gentle decoration giving way to melodic and gestural writing that is bolder, looser and more effusive. The piano’s misurato (‘measured’) oscillations give way to a host of markings urging a rhapsodic and impassioned mode of expressivity: con anima, con fuoco, (molto) espressivo, con calore, appassionato, ardente. On three occasions, the piano part collapses impulsively into sweeping black-note glissandi (at rehearsal marks 35, 37 and 38, and as illustrated in Example 10). Similarly, the violin’s melodic content is characterized increasingly by extreme heights and dizzying leaps – a ‘dis-located’ and precarious kind of melodic writing that conveys not only an exciting sense of risk, but also a rapid and nervous changeability of expressive intent (see Examples 10 and 11). The impetuousness implied by the con slancio (‘with enthusiasm’ or ‘with abandon’) marking accompanying one of the violin’s virtuosic embellishments on the penultimate page (see the first bar of Example 11) is likewise highly suggestive of this linguistically fragmented expressive mode: it is as if reflective thought is being bypassed in favour of a more physicalized expression.

This expressive capriciousness can also be observed in the frequently shifting tempo and metronome markings, and in the broad range of dynamics Enescu employs. Again, the specificity is notable here, with the use of less common markings such as poco forte, ben sforzando, poco rinforzando, and ben piano, alongside a profusion of subitos and crescendos. The music’s spontaneous changeability, together with the way it draws so constantly on the memory of earlier events and materials, while also using physicalized gestures to foreground an intense corporeality suggests a creative desire to evoke an experiential plenitude, similar to what the philosopher William James described as the ‘much-at-onceness’, or fulsomeness of the world. ⁸⁸ For James, the much-at-once implied an immeasurable potentiality of experience, and an ultimately unknowable world of ever-enlarging possibility. The effect, as Bruce Wilshire observes, of ‘finding ourselves intensely alert to and caught up in the much-at-once’ is such that ‘we can become ecstatic, transported out of our dulled and dulling habitual behaviours, moved into a state of heightened feeling, into exaltation, into rapture, into an intensified awareness of being subsumed into the All’. ⁸⁹ Much the same effect can be observed in the way Enescu constructs his ardent (and occasionally even violent) ⁹⁰ finale to the Impressions Suite. His rhapsodic and extravagant rendering could be understood in terms of a breaking up of language or of the linguistic mode in the listener to allow something more immediate – something more ‘sensational’, or indeed enchanting – to break through.

Already, it might be clear as to how the ‘Lever de soleil’ scene could be interpreted as simultaneously framing a more participatory engagement with the world. The overall mood of this final scene is undoubtedly one of unbridled joy and rapture, which could easily be interpreted as a transcending of the familiar and the everyday, or an openness to what Jankélévitch describes as the ‘paradoxical depth of appearance’ (a similar metaphor of surface and depth might also be used to interpret the quote by the poet Paul Éluard which prefaces this article: ‘there is another world, but it is in this one’). ⁹¹ This is precisely how Heidegger characterizes dwelling ‘essentially’, which he refers to as ‘ek-sistence’. Indeed, it is tempting to regard the ‘Lever de soleil’ as an overcoming of the ‘blindness’ towards (essential) dwelling which characterizes the modern experience of being-in-the-world, and as a dawning realization of the true, ‘ek-static’ nature of being, which is also an overcoming of homelessness (both existential and, in Enescu’s case, as a response to his literal dépaysement). Such an overcoming, Heidegger also claims, will precipitate the ‘re-enchantment’ of the world. ⁹² As is well known, the thing that Heidegger believes allows us to dwell (or to experience our ‘ek-sistence’) is poetry. He writes: ‘the phrase “poetically man dwells” [which Heidegger extracts from a late poem (‘In Lovely Blueness’) by Friedrich Hölderlin] says: poetry first causes dwelling to be dwelling. Poetry is really what lets us dwell.’ ⁹³ He describes poetic creation as a ‘kind of building’, implying that our dwelling is not only made but also constantly re-made through language: ‘man is capable of dwelling only if he has already built, is building, and remains disposed to build, in another way’. ⁹⁴ Dwelling is not merely a given, or a reversion, but something that requires a fundamentally creative act, one which disposes us to be in the world ‘in another way’. Ultimately, poetic dwelling enables individuals to ‘grasp […] what is ungraspable’ (here Heidegger echoes Mallarmé’s description of poetry as a form of songful speech that gives expressive voice to the allusive ‘not-said’). ⁹⁵

The claims that Heidegger makes for poetry can obviously be seen to resonate with those made by Jankélévitch, Mallarmé, Bachelard and others besides. What is striking about his descriptions of poetic dwelling is the way he imagines it not just in terms of an inherent songfulness, but also as a kind of illumination, or enlightenment: ‘the poet calls all the brightness of the sights of the sky and every sound of its courses and breezes into the singing word and there makes them shine and ring’. ⁹⁶ Heidegger offers a rather neat context through which to interpret Enescu’s ‘Lever de soleil’ as a similarly ecstatic ‘lighting up’ of the world: the child awakes to ‘shafts of light [which] penetrate all through the room’; note also the expressive markings of chiaro and luminoso. Moreover, the highly emotive nature of this multi-sensory and ‘dazzling’ vision makes it tempting to regard the scene as resembling a synaesthetic experience. ⁹⁷ As such, it also prompts a consideration of how synaesthesia (and what I referred to earlier as synaesthetic participation) may serve as a marker of transcendence, as well as of a more sensuous kind of belonging in the world.

Wiskus observes that the experience of synaesthesia can be thought of as transcendent due to its overwhelming emotive power and because it seems to open ‘an entirely new dimension’. ⁹⁸ It can be thought of as a fundamentally transformative perceptual phenomenon: synaesthesia does not merely constitute the merging of sensory impressions; rather, it implies the sensed appearance of something beyond our everyday experience of the world, something that is in essence unseen (‘there is another world …’). In such moments, Wiskus claims, ‘what shines forth is an evocation through sensible appearance of what could never serve as an object of vision in the ordinary sense’. ⁹⁹ Similarly, the ‘Lever de soleil’ can readily be interpreted as more than just a dazzling transformation that confounds the child’s perception (and likewise the listener’s) – though the fact that the scene is experienced in terms of a sensory and cognitive overload is of course significant. It is framed, perhaps more specifically, as a sensed manifestation of the external, unknowable world within the inner world of the subject (or the interior of the child’s bedroom, as the scene depicts it). For Merleau-Ponty, this kind of transformative merging (or intertwining) of the inside and the outside is understood to give rise to a new realm (or depth) of experience, whereby the reclamation of the sensorial dimension of how we are in the world allows for a ‘recuperation of the living landscape in which we are corporeally embedded’. ¹⁰⁰ As David Abram has explored, for Merleau-Ponty (as for many indigenous, oral cultures) the pre-conceptual mode of experience is inherently synaesthetic; in Phénoménologie de la perception (1945) Merleau-Ponty himself writes that ‘Synaesthetic perception is the rule, and we are unaware of it only because scientific knowledge shifts the center of gravity of experience, so that we have unlearned how to see, hear, and generally speaking, feel’. ¹⁰¹ Just as Merleau-Ponty and Edmund Husserl before him were both interested in exploring a structure or depth of experience where synaesthetic participation takes precedence, so too does Enescu conceive of a reciprocity between subject and object in his musical rendering of a child’s interaction with the surrounding world.

Interpreting the programmatic elements of the ‘Lever de soleil’ in this way is one thing, but showing how this transcendent experiential mode is evoked musically, and how it may affect a close listening experience is another. One of the most striking aspects of this scene concerns the way the past is brought to bear on the present, thereby shaping listeners’ perception of the scene’s unfolding in time. I suggest that the predominantly spontaneous and allusive means by which Enescu recycles the work’s earlier themes and motifs allows for a comparable intertwining of the past and the present, which parallels the spatial intertwining of the external and the internal implied by the scene’s programmatic content (one might go so far as to suggest that this musical process represents a temporalization of the scene’s programmatic ‘space’). The way this temporal intertwining is achieved relies on the degree to which the past is made to seem co-immanent with present experience (as opposed to seeming ontologically separate from it). ¹⁰² By allowing varied and fragmentary reminders of earlier scenes to emerge spontaneously out of the violin’s melodic line, for instance, or by controlling how more-or-less familiar musical gestures are made to appear seemingly at random in an increasingly rhythmically complex piano part, Enescu draws on the capacity of memory to affect us unpredictably (remembering is something that can happen to us), so that the past is brought suddenly and unexpectedly into our perception of the present. As such, the scene’s rhapsodic stream of memories corresponds rather closely to Bergson’s conception of durée as a ‘confused multiplicity’, wherein our perceptions, emotions, and conscious states remain impervious to quantitative measurement. Instead, they penetrate each other in an ‘ever changing and inexpressible’ way, resulting in a qualitative experience of time that is ‘confused’ primarily because, as Bergson puts it, ‘language cannot get hold of it without arresting its mobility’. ¹⁰³ The interpenetration of individual recollections as witnessed in the ‘Lever de soleil’ achieves a similar, quite disorientating effect, such that (as Michael Puri has likewise observed in his analysis of Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales) quantity itself expresses quality. ¹⁰⁴

Moreover, by challenging or playing with our perceptual faculties in this way, the music engages us in a kind of embodied listening. In other words, regardless of the extent to which a listener can recognize a fragmented motif’s origins in a cognitive or mentally representational sense, this arguably becomes secondary to a mode of perception where familiarity is discerned through an attendant mood, intensity, mobility, timbral quality, relative height – qualities and attributes of the music that we make sense of with our listening, feeling bodies. ¹⁰⁵ The ‘Lever de soleil’ could thus be regarded as a revelation ‘through sensible appearance’ in that it exposes a sonic, material, and visceral presence. I have already alluded to the physicality evoked by this scene (and to the privileging of a sensuous logic over a grammatical logic), but witness too, for instance, how the birdsong recollections in the piano at the start of the ‘Lever de soleil’ employ exactly the same pitches that were originally heard in the violin in the Caged Bird scene. One might speak of a sensed association here between height and gestural movement that suggests an encompassing revival of the past within the present: more than a mere mental re-presentation, the past becomes graspable in sensible terms; it becomes in-corporated within present experience. ¹⁰⁶

Listening to Enescu’s Impressions d’enfance it becomes apparent that the Suite is highly attentive to how humans might retain or develop a participatory engagement with the world (and particularly the natural world). The way this is achieved has much to do with how Enescu evokes a childlike and uninhibited way of perceiving the world: the inside and outside intertwine because the distinction between ‘self and the world’ in childhood is more ‘porous and negotiable’ than in adulthood. ¹⁰⁷ This vivid and co-constitutive perceptual mode that the music evokes is at the same time indicative of a broader aesthetic concern with perceptual processes: how things are perceived to emerge in lived time, and how the thinking, feeling body is engaged (and embedded) in the perception of artworks and of the surrounding world. Such aesthetic concerns parallel key aspects of phenomenological enquiry, of course: the interrogation of a structure or depth of experience that transcends the division between subject and object, self and the world, past and present is exemplified by artworks like Impressions d’enfance. Listening, both to music and to the world, is a fundamental part of this intersubjective mode, and the close listening experience that is occasioned by Enescu’s music could itself be regarded as an invitation to listen more closely (to become attuned) to the world. It is by encouraging and facilitating such listening that music can be said to enchant. Specifically, music’s capacity to evoke and to frame the kind of somatic ‘pulling apart’ that characterizes moments of enchantment, or the way it so easily defamiliarizes and re-presents the world as new, or how it reconfigures an inevitably discursive means of perception or apprehension by privileging a more immediate ‘logic of sensation’, as Deleuze called it; ¹⁰⁸ music’s long understood capacity to engage listeners in this way is central to how it might also help to cultivate an ear for the wonderful, and thereby recalibrate listeners’ perception of the world. Our experience of Impressions might be regarded as a poignant and timely reminder, then, of the Orphic power of music, especially in terms of how it brings itself to bear (sensuously, sonorously, bewilderingly, and aesthetically) on our inevitably discursive mode of being in the world. Such an expansion of our mode of knowing the world underlies Julian Johnson’s claim that only ‘by allowing the musical object to stand over and against us, by being open to its particularity rather than occluding it by the projection of ourselves, we are able to receive its gift’. ¹⁰⁹ Or, as the Suite itself seems to imply: one must be enamoured of the musical object to be able to hear the world as enchanted.

Example 1 Enescu, Impressions d’enfance, ‘Ménétrier’, opening bars (© Éditions Salabert).

Example 2 Enescu, Impressions d’enfance, ‘Ruisselet au fond du jardin’, opening bars (© Éditions Salabert).

Example 3 Enescu, Impressions d’enfance, ‘Ruisselet au fond du jardin’, concluding bars (© Éditions Salabert).

Example 4 Enescu, Impressions d’enfance, ‘Chanson pour bercer’, bars 1–4 (© Éditions Salabert).

Example 5 Enescu, Impressions d’enfance, ‘Chanson pour bercer’, bars 20–21 (© Éditions Salabert).

Example 6 Enescu, Impressions d’enfance, ‘Vieux mendiant’, bars 1–4 and 11–14 (© Éditions Salabert).

Example 7 Enescu, Impressions d’enfance, ‘L’Oiseau en cage et le coucou au mur’, opening bars (© Éditions Salabert).

Example 8 Enescu, Impressions d’enfance, ‘Grillon’, violin part (© Éditions Salabert).

Example 9 Enescu, Impressions d’enfance, ‘Lever de soleil’, opening bars (© Éditions Salabert).

Example 10 Enescu, Impressions d’enfance, ‘Lever de soleil’, rehearsal mark 37 (© Éditions Salabert).

Example 11 Enescu, Impressions d’enfance, ‘Lever de soleil’, from one bar before rehearsal mark 41 (© Éditions Salabert).