Bălan's Soirées

In the first half of the '60s, while I was a student of Automatic Control, George Bălan organized evenings of guided listening at the "Ciprian Porumbescu" Conservatory, filling the hall with students and music lovers from outside the conservatory. He taught musical aesthetics and had transformed his public courses into true initiations: lectures on musical subjects, with an enormous audience, in which his commentary was interwoven with recorded music, especially the Wagnerian cycle.

The Bucharest of those years was a city of silent contrasts. Outside, on the gray sidewalks, the ideological cold was still felt, but in front of the "Ciprian Porumbescu" Conservatory (Fig. 1), there was a different kind of excitement. It was not a dispirited queue for rations, but the stir of a spiritual hunger that the regime could not quench.

Our "Nucleus" of Wagnerians

I no longer know who among us came up with the idea of going to these evenings first; I think it was Corneliu (Luchi) Popeea, my year classmate in Automatic Control, an exceptional student, intelligent, cultured, ironic, and empathetic. He was the head of one of the groups of our year, just as Christiana Roman was the head of my group. The threads of fate made the two group leaders fall in love with each other, a true student love, which would lead toward the end of university to their marriage. In our year of very good students, the three of us were friends, we shared our concerns and desires; that's how the news of Bălan's soirées reached our small "nucleus" of music lovers.

It is hard to say now whether my passion for Wagner predated these listening sessions or grew out of them. I tend to believe that the second possibility is closer to the truth. My break with the piano, about eight years earlier, when I was twelve, had not left me with a rejection of classical music; I went to some special concerts at the Athenaeum, listened to opera music on the radio, having the advantage of an experience with musical scores. About Wagner I knew only "in general": the names of the operas, the librettos translated by St.O.Iosif in the family library, some stories related to old Germanic legends, a mixture of bookish admiration and reservations.

But with Wagner this approach is not enough: either you are an unconditional fan, or you are not a Wagnerian. Corneliu was more advanced than me; Christiana didn't know Wagner at all, but followed Corneliu's lead, whom she admired and loved madly. We decided we couldn't miss them. In our discreet way, it was also a small gesture of protest: in an ideologically rigid Romania, to go every evening to listen to Wagner with Bălan was a form of "inner resistance".

The "George Enescu" Hall of the Conservatory

On Wagner evenings, the Conservatory Hall (Fig. 2) became overcrowded. I still remember the moment I crossed the threshold of the hall. The air suddenly became denser, charged with the expectation of the hundreds of people who occupied every square meter. To listen to Bălan, people sat on the floor, on the steps, or along the balustrades, in an intellectual closeness that made us all equal. They were not only music students, but the entire intellectual elite of Bucharest — writers, doctors, engineers, and students from other faculties, like us. For many, those sessions devoted to the Ring of the Nibelung, Tristan and Isolde, or Parsifal were a substitute for liturgy or a form of resistance through culture.

We went early, we almost always sat on the left, about the middle of the "George Enescu" hall. Two rows in front, we saw Christiana and Corneliu: she with her hands clasped in her lap, a bit reserved, he with eyes alight, somewhere between febrile and solemn, leaning slightly toward her. The hall was full of young people and adults, all with slumped shoulders, with overcoats on their knees and breaths held in the dark.

Wagner and Art Nouveau

The empty stage hosted a huge screen, which gave a note of almost mystical mystery to those evenings. On it, there were no films; instead, static images were projected from a booth at the back of the hall and followed each other with a ritualistic precision, in full synchronization with the music's dynamism. Those images still linger in my mind like abstract, ornamental stained glass windows, sufficient to instill a sensation: the fresh green of water, the redness of fire, a red that, from time to time, went out into maroon and then pitch black, so that then, in scenes of solitude or death, we were enveloped by a deep blue, cold and infinite.

Their central element was a filigree design, with black, snaking or geometric lines, reminiscent of the elegance of the wrought iron lace of a noble residence. These "fer forgé" contours seemed to float, immersed in fields of pure, vibrant color, which dominated the whole hall.

It was no coincidence that George Bălan had chosen that aesthetic of sinuous Art Nouveau lines to accompany the music. There is a secret kinship between wrought-iron tendrils and Wagner's leitmotivic weave. In those projections, the black design, the graphics of the contours, acted as a barrier or as a structure of resistance, while the immersed colors — those vegetal greens, bright scarlets, or oneiric blues — represented the overflowing emotional current. It was a visual representation of the struggle between form and passion.

I felt that those images were not just "decorative"; they were part of a universal symbolic language. While the official art of the time (socialist realism) asked us for concrete, realistic figures, with workers and factories, George Bălan proposed abstraction and the symbol. Those colored wrought iron "fences" were, in fact, the gates through which we passed to another world. They invoked the spirit of Europe around 1900, a world of refinement and dream, which we, in the hall of the Conservatory, recovered with an almost desperate thirst.

I didn't look at them only as some drawings; I looked at the very architecture of sound transformed into light. I remember how, as a musical theme returned in the orchestra's song, the screen relit in the same configuration of "fer forgé" lines and immersed colors. It was a total sensory immersion that made us forget the hard wooden chairs and the cold outside, carrying us into a world where iron gained the abstract of the spirit and color became destiny.

A Free Interpretation

Please look at Fig. 3. The black lines that catch in nets the light from the background, those "fer forgé" contours I spoke about, don't seem just decorative. They resemble some neuronal ramifications or the spider web of fate woven by the Norns' threads in Twilight of the Gods.

The shades of blue and turquoise, immersed between those dark lines, emanate a mystical coldness. It is the color of deep water; they make me think of the opening of Das Rheingold, with the three Rhinemaidens playing in their father's waters, or of Tristan's solitude in the last act of Tristan und Isolde.

Finally, there is a tension between the rigor of the black lines, almost geometric, and the fluidity of the color that seems to "flow" among them. It is exactly what Wagner does: he superimposes a mathematical structure (the leitmotif) over an overwhelming emotional flow.

I don't know how Bălan would have interpreted such a "stained glass", but I am sure he would have described a combination of design and color superimposed over music and philosophy, as I tried.

The Voice from the Shadows

In that booth at the back of the hall, I imagined, there must also have been a reel-to-reel tape recorder, operated by Bălan with stop and restart controls, and reels labeled "Rheingold", "Walküre", "Siegfried", "Götterdämmerung". Or, more probably, considering Bălan's rigor, they were vinyl records in colored sleeves bearing names familiar to Wagner devotees: Georg Solti, Birgit Nilsson, Christa Ludwig, Kirsten Flagstad, Wolfgang Windgassen, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau or George London. Bălan remained unseen; if I hadn't seen him a few times on television, after all these listening sessions he could have remained for me a person without a face. Moreover, even seeing him on television, the George Bălan of the listening sessions in the Conservatory hall was another man. When he began to speak from his "cage", in complete darkness, the hall went silent.

His voice, with its magnetic elegance, always warm and steady even in fast or violent musical passages, did not speak to us about notation, but about destinies, will, sin, and redemption. He took Richard Wagner out of the dusty textbooks and presented him to us as a titan who had demolished the walls of convention. From there, from that voluntary exile, his voice came toward us as a commentary from another world. We heard him explaining, guiding us through the labyrinth of leitmotifs, while his hands — which we only imagined — handled with a clockmaker's precision the buttons of the tape recorder or the vinyl records. He was a host of the absolute. There was something almost mystical in this setup: the master was hidden, but his presence was everywhere, manifested through the perfect synchronization of the Art Nouveau images and through the immaculate sound that filled the hall.

The moment the pick-up needle touched the vinyl record had something sacred. That small start-up crackle was heard, a background noise that, for us, was the signal that immediate reality ceased to exist. When the first chords of Das Rheingold stole into the hall, the walls of the Conservatory seemed to widen, dissolving somewhere in the ether. We were no longer in the socialist Bucharest of 1964; we were on a large raft rocked by the Rhine, as on an ocean of desire and metaphysics.

Bălan's Method: Story → Music → Return

When the tape or the record started, we were no longer listening to "sounds", but to sonic events announced by leitmotifs.

Over time I understood his method: story → music → return. Leit-motifs functioned as a feedback system for those who followed closely: signals that confirmed you are on track.

• The Destiny theme could have an angular, severe design, drowned in a scarlet red that pulsed like an open wound.

• The Love theme materialized in smooth, organic curves, specific to the Art Nouveau style, bathed in shades of celestial blue or emerald green.

The presenter drew our attention beforehand: "When you hear a certain quiet interval here, remember it; you will find it again, deformed, in Walküre, where law and desire argue." When the motif appeared, he stopped the tape: "Did you recognize it? It doesn't repeat — it metamorphoses." This sentence, said with his warm voice, remained for me the most exact definition of Wagner. In the thicket of leit-motifs, they evolve along with the drama.

Here was Bălan's secret: he didn't "explain" the music, but tuned your instruments of perception. And, suddenly, the weight of understanding became meaning.

Christiana, who at first "didn't love Wagner", whispered during the break: "Now I know what I'm listening to. It's like I have subtitles — but in music."

Bălan never started directly with the music. First he told a story. "Today, we are on the Rhine. Three sisters guard the gold hidden at the bottom of the Rhine. A god wants it. A dwarf steals it. From here everything starts." That's what he did: put the thread of the story in the palm before the sound. Then, George Bălan operated with frequent stops to isolate and highlight the leit-motifs, but these pauses didn't seem like interruptions, but moments of necessary suspension. The music stopped abruptly to let the explanation penetrate into our minds, and when it restarted, it did so with a surgical precision. Although I suspected that the sound came to life from vinyl records, I never heard the needle's scratch disturbingly; everything flowed with an unreal purity, as if the music was born directly from the darkness of the hall.

In that total darkness, our only bearings were the images on the screen and the discreet presence of those next to me. I felt close to Christiane and Corneliu, whose love story seemed to find in Wagner's music an echo of an unexpected intensity.

Because Wagner's drama, sustained so powerfully by symphonic means, takes precedence over pure musical beauty, we had to learn to follow it almost as spectators at a play or a film.

Rheingold: The Rising Water

The prelude from Rheingold – that long, monochrome wave like a veil curtain – was no longer a simple harmonic lengthening, but the water rising slowly, finding its own language and saying: "Here I am." The presenter stopped after a minute and a half: "Remember this color. It will return – but differently."

The music followed the text faithfully, and the text, clearly spoken before, made room in that density of musical rock. "Without libretto, Wagner is hard to digest," he said. "Here the music doesn't ornament the story – it carries it on its shoulders, step by step." With him, literature and the duty to understand it prevail sovereignly; music enveloped the words, gave them more brilliance, but you must first have caught the characters' words well, thus what determined the dramatic unfolding.

Walküre: Law, Desire, Light

In the evening with Walküre, the projected images seemed stained glass windows of a dim red, with a streak of gold, something like a wing. The image suddenly became light blue with red berries when Siegmund began the "Spring Song": "No one has left –/but someone has entered:/Look, the smile/of May is in this room!", then bright red at the extraction of the sword Notung from the tree.

"Listen to the phrase, not the note. Listen to who utters it," the presenter said. Then Brünnhilde entered as a column of light. Noble timbre, round, like an old gold — Corneliu decreed almost solemnly: "Flagstad." Christiana touched his arm, reconciled: "That is the voice of destiny, isn't it?"

In that evening not only the opera advanced, but also their love, with another half-tone. The Wagner "intoxication" began in the hall, but continued long after we went out; on the Conservatory stairs I still heard in my own step a motif that returned like a fixed thought.

The evenings never covered an entire opera, but episodes: an Act I with two large stops and countless small stops; in another evening, Wotan's dispute with Fricka and the "Annunciation of Siegmund's death". Bălan cut exactly after a breath of the voice; the hall remained a second in darkness and expectation. "There is no heroism here," he said. "We are in court: power and law. Listen to how the strings don't sing – they argue."

Special attention was given by Bălan in the last evening to the presentation of the final duet between Wotan and Brünnhilde: a dense weave of leitmotifs, charged with masculine sentiment.

Siegfried: Forging as Syntax

The presenter warned us: "The opera gets off to a slow start. Wagner has to recapitulate the previous evenings." That's what Mime's long monologue served for.

In Siegfried, the forging of the sword was more than the noise of hammers: "It's not noise, it's the syntax of the opera," repeated Bălan, and suddenly the rhythm became grammar of destiny. And, for me, who came from the world of grammatical forms and mathematical rules of composition, that phrase made the revealing connection: yes, and music has its own grammar, only it's alive, and manifests in real time, in front of you.

The atmosphere is charged in this opera: apart from Siegfried, the other characters are negative; the screen colors have a lot of gray, although the drawings continue to be geometric, like some "fer forgé" railings. Only the appearance of the all-knowing little bird lights up the screen for a few minutes. Then it returns to red, the fire surrounding the rock on which Brünnhilde sleeps. Bălan's interruptions highlighted the orchestral leit-motifs that wove an infrastructure of knowledge parallel to that of the two characters' dialogue.

Like other opera composers, Wagner also offers, from time to time and in his way, a few islands of melodic beauty, like Siegfried's monologue tempering the sword Notung. But they will probably seem insufficient to those who expect more lyrical generosity from the composer. You don't get to love Wagner except by adopting his aesthetics without reservation, which can mean for the music lover to go against his own musical instincts, formed through a certain experience of listening, very individual.

"Forget Verdi and Donizetti, Bizet and Tchaikovsky, if you want to understand me!" Wagner seemed to tell us from beyond the grave. Which I was to succeed only partially and occasionally.

Admiring Wagner, I remained at the same time an impenitent lover of the music he despised and whose authors still seemed to whisper their quiet reply, from beyond death. It was not easy for me to get used to a music in which the literary content played a determining role. Pure sonic beauty had set from the beginning its seal on my musical sensitivity.

Götterdämmerung: Burning the Chain of Consequences

Götterdämmerung was the peak and the finale. Before starting the tape, Bălan made a recapitulation like for a radio serial: "Last evening, Siegfried managed..." – and in two sentences he placed us back inside the story. Then he asked us to be attentive to a few words: memory, betrayal, burning. On the screen, the red of the stained glass windows closed again toward black. The Norns' story in the first scene only recapitulated, in another manner, what happened in the preceding operas of the "Ring".

"The metaphor of the potion that makes Siegfried forget his past must not escape you," the presenter warned us. "It happens to any man away from home," he joked in the hall's speakers, to lighten the atmosphere charged after the hero's Rhine Journey.

This metaphor was not returned to, not even when the hero is punished with a spear driven in his back. "Funeral March", once explained, was offered to us without interruptions.

When Brünnhilde reached "Starke Scheite...", Bălan stopped the tape briefly. "What is burned here is not just a body," he said calmly. "A chain of consequences of long-ago deeds that weigh upon innocent descendants is burned." The resumption of these phrases in music, with the curse motif on the strings, was like a seal. After an explosion of red on the screen to symbolize the burning of Valhalla, the projector went out. We stayed for a moment in the dark, with the impression that not music had passed through us, but we through it.

After the Listening Sessions

When the last vibration of the brass died out and the darkness remained, for a few moments, master over our silent breath, I felt the magic start to unravel. The lights didn't come on suddenly; it was a slow return, almost painful, to the reality of the hard chairs and gray walls of the Conservatory. We stepped out onto the dark corridors, seemingly avoiding looking at each other directly, as if we carried with us a secret too fragile for the dim light bulbs on the corridor. We then stepped into the night outside, on Știrbei Vodă street, where the cold air of Bucharest hit us with an unexpected brutality. Christiane, Corneliu, and I walked a while in silence. Behind us, the Conservatory building remained submerged in sleep, hiding in its belly George Bălan's magic "cage" and the wrought iron stained glass windows that had illuminated our spirit.

After the listening sessions, Bucharest seemed like another city. The lamp posts became pale leitmotifs; the asphalt had turned shadows. We talked little. Corneliu murmured diagnoses: "That was certainly Furtwängler; maybe Flagstad and London." Christiana laughed: "Fine, then, from today Wagner is mine too."

We returned home with the music stuck to the skin like a heavy perfume. In the evening, while I was studying, the outline of a motif came to my mind instead of a sentence. When I fell asleep late, I had the sensation that the tape continued to turn somewhere, invisible.

After 1947, Wagner was viewed with suspicion in Romania because of the association of his music with Nazi ideology. George Bălan was the one who "rehabilitated" the composer's image, presenting him not through the prism of politics, but as a visionary of the human spirit.

The listening sessions held between 1963 and 1965 coincided with a brief cultural "thaw", allowing Bălan to explore deep metaphysical and philosophical themes, which otherwise would have been censored.

High-quality tape recorders and vinyl records were used (often brought through personal channels from the West), offering the public access to legendary interpretations (like those from Bayreuth).

George Bălan's listening sessions in the early 1960s were considered turning points in the cultural life of Bucharest then. In a period when ideological dogmatism still tightened its ranks, Bălan managed to transform the "Ciprian Porumbescu" Conservatory hall into a true oasis of spiritual freedom.

George Bălan and Musicosophia

Gradually, in the '70s, ideological pressures intensified in Romania. "Active musicology", with its metaphysical and elitist accents, did not correspond to the new rigors of the "cultural revolution" that was prefigured. Years later, I learned that George Bălan, by then famous for his free manner of speaking and for publicly expressing his dissatisfaction with official censorship and self-censorship, chose exile in 1977 while visiting the Wagner festival at Bayreuth in Germany.

There, in the silence of the Black Forest Mountains, at Sankt Peter, he founded the school of Musicosophia, carrying further the seeds planted in those Bucharest evenings.

Musicosophia carried out projects throughout Europe, helping people of all ages become informed listeners of classical music, including amateurs without formal musical training. Pursued with passion and competence, the concept enjoyed great success first in Germany and then throughout Europe.

"The way we usually view high-quality classical music is largely very superficial. We use it as entertainment, when, in reality, it is a call to interiorization, self-knowledge, and the search for the meaning of life... Musicosophia is the method of conscious listening to music to focus attention on the fact that the music of the great masters hides a philosophical content and a wisdom accessible to all those who are willing and able to exercise their perception in this sense."

I am now convinced that the listening sessions in the Bucharest Conservatory hall anticipated the concept of "synesthesia" (joining sight with hearing) that George Bălan promoted ardently in the second part of his life, that of an exile.

Musicosophia associations have been created in many European countries, allowing true dilettantes, that is, those who listened to music "per diletto", for pleasure, to consciously perceive musical structures, the architecture of works, meanings, stylistic categories, deep philosophical meanings of the creation of the great composers.

An incurable enthusiast, George Bălan remained until the end of his life the man I had encountered without seeing him in the Conservatory hall. He believed that, in music, the key for every person at any age lay in discovering and developing one's own creative abilities, while bypassing technical aspects that often become obstacles to entering the profound language hidden within music.

Why Wagner Captivates (or Repels)

Wagner is not music to be "ticked off a list." He demands time, patience, and a particular openness: an acceptance that a phrase can last minutes, that the tension doesn't discharge quickly, but accumulates like a geological pressure. If you approach him with the ear alone, he can be exhausting; if you bring your imagination as well, he can take hold of you.

There is, perhaps, the threshold: in Wagner, the orchestra doesn't "accompany" you, but makes you think; it doesn't just paint the setting, but changes your perspective. Above all, it introduces a time of its own — a time in which return is not repetition, but transformation. His leitmotifs – those recurrent musical themes, linked to characters, ideas or emotions – weave an invisible network that links the opera acts into a continuous flow, without interrupting the illusion. They evolve, distort or amplify, mirroring the psychological interiority of the heroes, as in the "Ring of the Nibelung" Tetralogy, where everything seems predestined, but always surprising.

Siegfried's Rhine Journey from "The Valkyrie", for example, is a symphonic piece where the orchestra becomes an autonomous character, prefiguring the descriptive music of modern film. Or the prelude from "Tristan und Isolde" built on the "Tristan" chord, an unresolved dissonance, which for ten minutes floats in suspense between erotic and metaphysical.

Wagner's influence extends far beyond his lifetime: he revolutionized opera through "Gesamtkunstwerk", the total art that unites music, poetry, theater and visual spectacle in an overwhelming ritual. Critics sometimes reject him for excess – epic durations, unstable harmony, bombastic pathos –, but fans worship him precisely for that: he forces you to give up the superficial and dive into the human abyss.

Wagner anticipates the 20th century: expressionism, epic film, even metallic symphonism. He is not for all ears, but once you let him in, you never forget him — he becomes part of you.

Epilogue

The professor passed away from COVID at 92.

For those of us who remained, his listening sessions long ago ceased to be mere dates on a calendar, yet continued to exist as part of the supporting structure of our character. When I think today about my student years, I realize that in those evenings I learned more than Wagner. I learned that, in the face of a system that wants to reduce you to a number, culture — even through symbols such as Art Nouveau or the rigor of the leitmotif — is what can preserve your humanity.

I could say that the wrought iron of George Bălan's projections remained, symbolically, the reinforcement on which I built my own freedom.

My representation of George Bălan remains, however, that of a man who, in a dark hall of the Conservatory, taught me not only to listen to Wagner, but to recognize in our encounter with music a form of inner metamorphosis.

For Christiana and Corneliu, those evenings were, I believe, the soundtrack of a love that kindled slowly, like the fire promised to Brünnhilde at the end of Walküre, and never went out. Both became professors at Politehnica, raising not only their two children but also many generations of students.

Left alone after Christiana's premature death, Corneliu had the joy of attending Wagner performances at Bayreuth, invited by their daughter, who lived in Germany. He later told me about the experience with great enthusiasm.