Lawrence Foster Interview with Bruce Duffie . . . . . . . . .

Conductor Lawrence Foster

A Conversation with Bruce Duffie

Lawrence Foster (born October 23, 1941) is an American conductor of Romanian ancestry. He was born in Los Angeles, California, to Romanian parents. His father died when Foster was three years old. He was later adopted by his stepfather which is why the last name is not traditionally Romanian.

Foster studied conducting with German conductor Fritz Zweig and piano with Joanna Grauden, both in Los Angeles. His other teachers and mentors have included: Karl Böhm, Bruno Walter, Henry Lewis, and Franz Waxman.

Foster became the conductor of the San Francisco Ballet at the age of 18, and served as assistant conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta. He was awarded the Koussevitzky Conducting Prize at Tanglewood in 1966. In 1969 he was named chief guest conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London. He has held music directorships with the Houston Symphony, the Ojai Music Festival, the Monte-Carlo Philharmonic Orchestra, the Duisburg Philharmonic, the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, and the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra and National Orchestra of Catalonia, among others. In 1990, Foster was appointed music director of the Aspen Music Festival and School.

From 2002 to 2013, Foster was the music director of the Gulbenkian Orchestra of Lisbon, Portugal. He also served as music director of the Orchestre National de Montpellier and the Opéra National de Montpellier from 2009 to 2012. Foster was music director of Opéra de Marseille and the Orchestre philharmonique de Marseille from 2012 to 2023. From 2019 to 2023, Foster was artistic director and chief conductor of the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra (NOSPR).

Foster is particularly noted as an interpreter of the works of George Enescu, and has made a comprehensive survey of commercial recordings of Enescu's music [which are shown at the bottom of this webpage]. He served as artistic director of the George Enescu Festival from 1998 to 2001. In 2003, Foster was decorated by the President for services to Romanian music.

In 2023, Foster was awarded the Romanian National Order of Merit, Commander, for his contribution to Romanian culture and promotion of the music of Enescu. His recording of Enescu's Oedipe was awarded the Grand Prix du Disque from the Académie Charles Cros in France.

== Foster has made many recordings on various labels, and just a few are used as illustrations on this webpage.
== Names which are links in this box and below refer to my interviews elsewhere on my website. BD

Lawrence Foster has conducted the Chicago Symphony Orchestra several times, both downtown and at the Ravinia Festival. On one of those occasions, in the fall of 1994, he returned for a program which included the Beethoven Piano Concerto #3 with Jean-Bernard Pommier, the world premiere of a new work by Scott Lindroth called Big Band, which the CSO had commissioned, and the Symphony #2 of Enescu.

Before one of the rehearsals, Foster graciously took time to sit down with me for a conversation. Portions were aired on WNIB, Classical 97, and now (in 2025), I am pleased to present the entire interview.

As we were setting up to record, my guest was speaking about being invited to conduct all over the world . . . . .

Bruce Duffie:   Don’t you have the final say-so about whether you will accept or decline each individual invitation?

Lawrence Foster:   Yes, of course, but I didn’t bother about declining Chicago Symphony Orchestra. [Both laugh]

BD:   You don’t need to mention names, but are there certain orchestras in addition to Chicago, that you absolutely don’t decline, and are there some that you would never accept?

Foster:   Of course, surely.

BD:   What kind of things enter into your decision about that?

Foster:   It is a combination of whether it’s artistically something I very much would like to do, whether the program proposal is interesting, whether it’s an orchestra for which I feel some affinity and that I find it interesting to go to, and whether it’s properly remunerated. Then, if not, whether the artistic part of it compensates for that.

BD:   There are times when the artistic satisfaction will compensate for a lack of money?

Foster:   Yes, there are a lot of situations like that. For instance, people who conduct in Bayreuth. I imagine Daniel Barenboim certainly doesn’t need the money. Nobody makes much in Bayreuth. Birgit Nilsson never made anything. It’s known that you do it for the honor, but those situations are more to do with festivals and special things, rather than established orchestras.

BD:   In general, is it an honor to be a symphonic and opera conductor?

Foster:   Of course it’s an honor and a privilege to be able to do in life as a profession what you love the most. People who forget that really should count their blessings a second time very carefully. I don’t know if ‘honor’ is the word, but it’s just a joy, and a blessing, and an enormous privilege.

BD:   You conduct both operas and symphonies. How do you divide your career between those two different activities?

Foster:   I just manage to work that out in the year, and make sure that one doesn’t overbalance the other too much. I find that after a while in opera, I long for the solace of the concert podium, so to speak, but after another while, I long for the adventure of the theater. So to be able to do both has always been a necessary part of a conductor’s work. It keeps you on your toes in both ways. People who only do opera tend to lose contact, and perhaps interest in refinements of orchestral playing that are so important to music-making. On the other hand, maybe conductors that don’t have the experience of opera sometimes don’t have the benefit of exposing themselves to the singing line. Bruno Walter used to always say that the Vienna Philharmonic was such a great singing orchestra because it played in the pit. They heard great singers night after night, so it’s important to divide it as much as possible.
foster

BD:   I made an assumption a moment ago that they’re very different kinds of things. Is it very different conducting opera and symphony?

Foster:   I don’t believe so. You just have to have different antennas out. In opera you have to be more prepared for anything radically to go wrong in any given moment. Generally, in concerts with the high level of orchestral playing which you usually have everywhere, you don’t have quite as much risk of a major catastrophe. On the other hand, when you’re conducting a concert, it’s really up to you and the musicians to sustain the interest from beginning to end, while in opera you can have the distraction of staging, lighting, recitative, and even costumes.

BD:   Is the conductor more important in one or the other?

Foster:   I don’t think so. The conductor is equally important. Opera goes through what they call the age of the singer, the age of the stage director; the age of the conductor...

BD:   Where are we now? Still with the director?

Foster:   Between the director and conductor we are sort of fighting it out! [Laughs] It depends on the production, and who is involved. Very seldom are we in what you might call the age of the singer, unless it’s big stars with very big clout. But the ideal is, as it is with anything, when it works naturally as a team effort.

BD:   Do you get enough time to rehearse the operas, and then do you get enough time to rehearse the symphonies, because I know that schedules are very different?

Foster:   It depends on the company. My main work in opera is with the Los Angeles Opera Company, and there they definitely give plenty of time. They are very generous with orchestral rehearsal time. One never goes into the opening night feeling they should have rehearsed some more, which is wonderful.

BD:   Is there any chance that there, or someplace else, a production could be over-rehearsed?

Foster:   I guess so, though I don’t think that happens very much in opera anymore. There’s not the money for that.

BD:   [With a gentle nudge] You never worked with Walter Felsenstein?

Foster:   [Laughs] Well, Felsenstein! When he had nine months to rehearse Carmen, he came out of the premiere lamenting, “If I just had two more days!” [Both laugh] So, I don’t think that’s much of a risk.

Walter Felsenstein (30 May 1901 – 8 October 1975) was an Austrian theater and opera director. He was one of the most important exponents of textual accuracy, and gave productions in which dramatic and musical values were exquisitely researched and balanced. In 1947 he created the Komische Oper in East Berlin, where he worked as director until his death.

Preparations for each new production could last two months or longer. If singers meticulously coached and trained in their parts fell ill, performances were simply canceled. Since the glamorous superstars of the day could never spare the time Felsenstein required, he worked with his own hand-picked troupe of devoted singers, most from Eastern Europe and virtually unknown in the West. Everything was sung in German, usually in his own translations. Whoever wanted to experience this singular operatic mix had to make the pilgrimage to East Berlin, a trip that became even dicier after the wall went up.

Together with the Komische Oper troupe he visited the USSR a few times. In Moscow it was stated that his way of the opera staging was similar to the principles of Konstantin Stanislavsky. His most famous students were Götz Friedrich and Harry Kupfer, both of whom went on to have important careers developing Felsenstein's work.

BD:   How much of a collaboration is there between the conductor and the stage director?

Foster:   That depends upon who is the conductor and who is the stage director! It should be a very full collaboration. That’s really the only way it works well. Both make contributions in rehearsal to find the best possible meshing of singing, acting, inflection, what movement might help favor the music at a given time, what acoustical factors there are, when people should be able to have a sightline to the conductor, and when it doesn’t matter. Sometimes this sightline to the conductor is exaggerated. Riccardo Muti is known for basically coming in and turning marvelous stagings into basically concert operas, demanding that everybody look at him all the time. It’s a kind of egomania that most conductors don’t have.

BD:   Couldn’t some inventive stage director put television monitors around the stage for that?

Foster:   Oh, we have monitors all over the place now. It’s not for the want of that. I personally like opera the best when I feel the singers hardly have to look at me. If it’s rehearsed enough, and if it’s worked out enough, and if the electricity goes both ways, that’s what makes for the most exciting evenings. It can also be terrible... Once I heard Lulu with Karl Böhm when he did the first performances at the Theater an Der Wien in Vienna. There was this gorgeous Lulu, Evelyn Lear, and the tenor, who sang very well, but musically was extremely insecure. I just was so fascinated by the fact that while he was supposed to be making love to her in the staging, and he certainly was able to put his hands all over her, yet his eyes were glued to Böhm. It took something of the sensuality away from it! [Much laughter]

BD:   Did you want to stand up and scream, “Pay attention to her!!!”?

Foster:   Yes!

BD:   Let me ask the ‘Capriccio’ question. In opera, where is the balance between the music and the drama?

Foster:   Yes, Das Wort und Der Musik [the word and the music]! When you have a good stage director and a good conductor, they find the solutions, and that depends on the opera. Obviously, in a Mozart opera you need the most careful fusion of both, and many Verdi operas in the early and middle period certainly can give full vent to the music and its propulsion. Sometimes, there will need to be a certain sacrifice to the text, but I like to hear the text, and I love great performances of Italian opera where you hear singers really relishing every word of their text. My favorite singer for so long in my youth was Giuseppe de Stefano, where you just hear the love of every word he’s singing in the inflections. It’s not a kind of a homogenized Italian that you so often get today.

BD:   Plus, the beautiful lyric voice.

Foster:   That incredible voice, yes.

* * * * *

BD:   In the opera world you collaborate with the stage director. In the symphonic world, are you collaborating with anyone besides the composer?

Foster:   You’re collaborating with the orchestra! There are more or less three kinds of conductors... those who come and do their performance and impose what they have to do; those that work really hand-in-hand with the orchestra; and those who will more or less follow the orchestra. The ideal is for working hand-in-hand, especially when you’re dealing with a great orchestra. The musicians can often have as much to tell you as you have to tell them. In a great solo, say, of Ein Heldenleben [Strauss], just because I’m in Chicago, everybody knows that you have one of the great horn players of the world. So if Dale Clevenger needs some extra time to round his phrase, it would be very far from my wish to interfere in any way. It’s going to have its own breadth, and its own sense of direction with the talent of a musician that undoubtedly will know how to frame it in the overall sense of what the conductor’s doing. That’s chamber music, really. That’s the great joy of music-making.

BD:   When you go around the world, you’re working generally with top-flight orchestras, but some are perhaps a little better than others...

Foster:   No, not always, and you don’t even always get your greatest pleasure from so-called top-flight orchestras. There’s an enormous satisfaction in being able to take an orchestra that needs a lot of work. You almost take time to get down to basics, and if the goodwill is there, and the excitement is there, you see if you can make such an ensemble really play at its very best, or even above its head. That can be a very exciting thing.

BD:   Then you have succeeded and they have succeeded?

Foster:   Yes. There’s that wonderful communal success story. Then you have the other feeling when you work with young orchestras. I’m music director of the Aspen Music Festival, so we have incredibly gifted young musicians there. When you can work with these young people, or when I go to the New World Symphony Orchestra in Miami, which is also terrific, the only thing missing is experience. But the goodwill is there, as is the love of the music and the technical know-how. When you can bring that to fruition, it’s another different level of satisfaction, and a different way of working.

BD:   You’ve been observing musicians, young and old, all of your career. Has the technical ability of the ordinary orchestral musician gotten better in the last ten, twenty, thirty years?

Foster:   Yes. There’s no question about that, just because of the fierce competitiveness of it all, and the difficulty of getting into orchestras. The problem that always remains is what we do with these orchestras. How do we keep the musicians motivated, and how do we keep our public? These are long subjects that I don’t think we have time for now.

BD:   Let us touch on just one. How do you keep the motivation?

Foster: Maybe in the past we had a more individualistic approach with each orchestra. When you would hear the pre-War Philadelphia Orchestra, or the New York Philharmonic, or the Berlin Philharmonic, or the Vienna Philharmonic, there were more definitive styles of each orchestra, because they drew from a major educational institution, or a tradition. They had a hand-me-down tradition way of playing.

BD:   How much of that is the player, and how much of that is the music director who stays there much of the season?

Foster:   A lot of it is the music director, but much more of it is the teaching feeding into the orchestras. The Curtis Institute of Music could basically feed into the Philadelphia Orchestra. The Vienna Academy would feed into the Vienna Philharmonic. There was a tradition in the Berlin Philharmonic from the time of Arthur Nikisch (1855-1922), and players were chosen for feeding into that tradition. Now we have to be so careful and so democratic with auditions behind the screen, that we have a more generalized way of choosing players. They are not so much based necessarily upon personality and style, so you have many orchestras with mixtures of styles. Twenty years ago that started happening, and by now what you have is a basic general international way of playing, with few exceptions.

BD:   Should Beethoven sound the same in Berlin, as in Philadelphia, as in Chicago?

Foster:   I would prefer not! Life was much more interesting before that, but I dare say it sounds much more the same now. Even a French orchestra, a Parisian orchestra, will not sound that far away from a German orchestra. Maybe the woodwinds will sound a bit different, but the strings will probably be rounder than they used to be, which is good in a way, but not for certain kinds of pieces. When you listen, for instance, to an old recording of Ravel doing his Bolero, you hear those marvelous subtle stylistic inflections that could only come from a French orchestra. Or you can imagine how The Rite of Spring would have sounded with those French instruments. I’m not necessarily into original instruments or anything like that, but I certainly love the flavor of individual orchestras, even sometimes when it bothers me. The big Russian brass vibrato and the blaring trumpet playing is really something I didn’t like, but I was always comforted to know that it was there.

BD:   It’s a trait that you like. Would it be wrong for you to try and bring some other trait that you admire here to the Chicago Symphony?

Foster:   I don’t think so. Again, now we’re in a new day. Because of the interest in old instruments, there’s been an offshoot of that with an interest in trying to get more authentic sounds. I don’t know about Chicago specifically, but in America, I’ve been told that even some bassoonists, for instance, have decided to play the French bassoon for certain kinds of works, at least to see what it feels like.

BD:   It’s a different fingering system!

Foster:   Yes, and the French bassoon certainly has certain very horrific intonation problems on a number of the notes. I would definitely try to get cornets, for instance, when I do Berlioz. I’ve done Faust of Gounod in Los Angeles, and I begged for cornets. But when you do those things, you also have to watch that you don’t get musicians playing like fish out of water. It doesn’t make any sense for a trumpet player to play a cornet if he isn’t used to it, and doesn’t really like it.

BD:   In this age of specialization, can’t they branch out a little bit from their specialty?

Foster:   You would hope so, but it just depends on the tradition on the orchestra. In Germany they have the rotary trumpets, and they use those in some orchestras for almost everything, even if it doesn’t always work so well. It just depends on the individual character. I was music director in Monte Carlo for fifteen years, and when I went there, the first thing the bassoonist did was come to me and ask if I was going to have them change from their Buffets (French) to Heckel (German) instruments. I asked him what he wanted to do, and he said he’d like me to hear them for a year. I did listen to them, and I dare say when I travel now, very often I miss their French sound, certainly in a lot of pieces such as the Fauré Masques et Bergamasques or the Roussel Bacchus et Ariane, or I dare say certainly in Bolero. When I first went to France for the Concerts de Colonne, before they started changing what was a very distinctive sound, at the beginning of the Brahms Second Symphony, in all innocence I asked why the horn parts were being played by bassoons [both laugh]. The sound that the horns were making was so similar to the bassoon that I truly didn’t recognize it! I wasn’t even being sarcastic or trying to be funny. It was a dark room, and I couldn’t see who was doing what I just heard what, to me, was a very weird sound.

BD:   Can any of this homogeneity be laid at the doorstep of the recording industry?

Foster:   Of course! [Smiles] You took the words out of mouth. People expect a certain way, or a certain standard. It would be unthinkable now for a recording company to release a full cycle of Beethoven symphonies, or a Wagner opera with the National Orchestra of France, or the Orchestra of Paris. But I can tell you, when I heard Daniel Barenboim do Das Rheingold with the Orchestra of Paris, I personally preferred it to everything I heard out of Bayreuth. [Barenboim was music director of the Orchestra of Paris 1975-89.]

BD:   Why?

Foster:   It had more spark. It was brighter. It didn’t have a kind of exhibitionistic German heavy playing. It was more to the point. It was more transparent, sparkling, and I loved it. It was just one of those experiences. They played with the necessary roundness of sound and largesse of phrase, but it just had that certain special enthusiasm, that special edge to the sound that I found very welcome. I don’t think they played it in the nineteenth century anything like they do now, but in Wagner’s letters, he often refers to the joy it was to him to hear the French orchestras.

BD:   How much of your enthusiasm was you being in sync with Wagner, or you being in sync with the Orchestra of Paris, or you being in sync with Barenboim?

Foster:   It was a combination of the three! That’s why it was so satisfactory.

* * * * *

BD: You have this huge amount of repertoire from which to choose. How do you decide which pieces you will learn and spend time on, and then present in your various orchestras and opera houses around the world?

Foster: In opera it’s fairly easy. I know what I feel my strong points are, and what I love. I also know things that have become specialty pieces, so I don’t go near them. I’ve tried some of the bel canto, for instance, and I don’t think I do it well at all. So I no longer accept those. I just won’t do any Rossini, Bellini, or Donizetti. Maybe I would do Lucia di Lammermoor... I love a lot of these pieces, but I just don’t feel I can get the knack of really conveying them and doing them well. You have to have a special feel for it, or maybe do a lot of work with the singers. So now I try to stick mainly to Mozart and Beethoven, but that’s obviously just Fidelio, which is perhaps my favorite of everything.
foster

BD:   Would you ever do the earlier version, Leonora?

Foster:   No! Fidelio is just fine for me. I don’t see any reason to do the earlier one. I have studied it, and it’s interesting. It’s a study venture, but I don’t see any point to do it. I tend to like a lot of Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev operas, so I do many of those, and sometimes you discover something that means a lot. There are certain great twentieth century operas, and I’d like to do them all. I’ve done many, except Die Soldaten by Zimmermann (1918-1970). I don’t think I’d ever have the time to learn that. It’s almost a lifetime work. One of the other great operas I have taken the time to learn, and have recorded, is Oedipe by George Enescu.

BD:   You’ve made a specialty of Enescu, and I want to come back to that a little bit later, so we’ll table that momentarily. Let me ask about the symphonic repertoire. Because you have several pieces in each program, and perhaps a wider genre to select from, are you doing more of the selecting, rather than just a production?

Foster:   Yes, I really don’t know how that works out. I don’t travel with a given program like a number of conductors do. I developed a very wide repertoire when I was young, and I like combining opera and symphony. Even in concerts, I like to do a reasonable mix of enough contemporary music, including sometimes not necessarily music that I have the great love for. But if it’s really challenging, I like music that’s extremely difficult just to clear my brain, and to keep all the musical machines working and oiled, so to speak. I love to conduct the Boulez Ensemble [Ensemble Intercontemporain] in Paris every other year, but otherwise, like every conductor, my main joy comes from the great classics.

BD:   Do you feel that each new piece should have its chance?

Foster:   Not each one, certainly not! But if I find a good new piece, then yes.

BD:   When you get a piece, what do you look for to decide yes or no?

Foster:   Whether I think that it sounds; whether I think it’s well written for the orchestra; whether I think it occupies its space in a consequential manner. I was going to say thematic development, but not necessarily even that. This even includes some electronic music. I’m thinking of a piece of Barbara Kolb I did recently. As long as it has what the Germans call Spannung [tension]. As long as I feel there’s a reason for it to start and a reason for it to end, and it’s easy enough not to make me necessarily perform it, but at least to examine further whether I would like to perform it.

BD:   Do you know where music is going these days?

Foster:   I certainly don’t... probably no place especially good, but nothing else is going anywhere good anyway...

BD:   [Mildly shocked] Are you not optimistic about the future of music???

Foster:   No, I’m not at all optimistic about the future of music or anything. No! Especially as we’re speaking on election eve [November 7,1994] where we’re predicting a major takeover by the most radical kind of right-wing republicanism. It’s just not the time to ask me to feel optimistic about anything. I feel it a little bit like educated democratic Germans must have felt on the eve of 1933.

BD:   Are you anticipating a catastrophe?

Foster:   It’s catastrophic. It’s very extreme. The maxims of church and state in this country are about to be destroyed. I’m very fearful for the future, and I always felt this would happen because there was a long effort to uneducate Americans. This is another subject I don’t want to get into, but it feeds into optimism, and all of that ties into the whole social fabric, and into the cultural future.

BD:   [Being optimistic] Can’t you take any hope in the fact that even through the 1930s, music survived even if the rest of the world collapsed?

Foster:   Music survived, yes, out of the incredible adversity and the passions of the time. But we’ve become too beaten down now by media, by television. The senses have been too dulled. People are not willing to expend the effort to appreciate great music in depth. Even modern compositions now, new pieces, the ones that are successful are usually the ones that are facile. I find so much contemporary music now that is successful basically is contemporary music for people who don’t like contemporary music. I’m not saying I don’t think new works have to be unattractive. It’s not a question of that, but I don’t think it’s realistic to ask in this day and age, that a new work not demand more intellectual and emotional engagement on the part of the listener. I just hate the idea of just bombarding the listener with sounds that he’s familiar with, and that he can sit there being terribly happy that he’s appreciating something that’s new, that doesn’t really sound new, or that’s not challenging. A composer that I admire for all his toughness is Ralph Shapey. He is never going to write just to make people smile and be happy.

BD:   His is tough stuff, but it’s very worth it.

Foster:   It’s worth it when you get into it. It really is.
foster

BD:   Are there some pieces still being written in that older tradition, which use that forward momentum?

Foster:   Shapey is an example, but he’s a much older man now. I haven’t found too much in the younger composers. It’s all very accessible, and I mean that in a derogatory way.

BD:   [Sighs] I’m just so optimistic about things... Is there no hope that we could perhaps take a step or two back, but then grow even farther because of that?

Foster:   I don’t know. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. Boulez was saying that music becomes just a museum, and I don’t find that a bad thing. If it finds its place in that form, maybe that’s its best way to survive. That doesn’t mean I don’t like and cannot find new contemporary works that I appreciate. Just this summer in Aspen, I heard the most beautiful music of Bernard Rands, for instance. I can always find something, but as far as the overall direction, it’s hard to say. Maybe in the end there’s only so much that can be done with these combinations of twelve tones.

BD:   [Again, finding something positive to include] They’ve even experimented with microtones.

Foster:   Yes, but if I were, for instance, a curator of the Uffizi Gallery [Florence], or the Rijksmuseum [Amsterdam], I wouldn’t find that to be a bad thing. I don’t mind being a musical curator. There’s so much music, there really is! With some very great music of the recent past, and even further past that we’ve let fall by the wayside, or explored enough, there’s still plenty of room for interesting performances.

* * * * *

BD:   Let’s come back to your favorite composer. You are of Romanian descent, so you have adopted George Enescu?

Foster:   Yes, but these are two facts that are much less related than you would think. I’m from Romanian descent, and I’ve adopted Enescu, but I’ve not adopted Enescu because I’m of Romanian descent.

BD:   Isn’t there a chance that it’s in your blood, and you have come to him because of that?

Foster:   Maybe somewhere, but not very much. I might add that my wife is Romanian, and was born in Romania, but I’m not a professional Romanian.

BD:   Let me clarify one thing. Is it Enescu or Enesco?

Foster:   I really don’t know. He was mainly French, so there it’s Enesco. Various Romanians have given me so many different explanations that I really don’t know. In England, they always say Enescu. I don’t know what they do in Germany. I don’t know what he would have wanted. He usually referred to himself as Enesco, as far as I know. But perhaps there’ll be some very smart specialist listening to this broadcast. I understand there are a lot of Romanians in Chicago, and they might give me an answer I haven’t found yet.

BD:   I assume he probably wouldn’t care as long as he’s performed!

Foster:   That would be the main point, but it’s interesting with composers. I love the music of Paul Dukas, and I was told by Marius Constant [see box below], who knew him, that he insisted to be called ‘doo-KASS’ [with the s pronounced], and not ‘doo-KAH’. He also hated his first name! He never wanted to be called Paul. I don’t really know what it would be in the case of Enescu.

Marius Constant (February 7, 1925 – May 15, 2004) was a Romanian-born French composer and conductor. Although known in the classical world primarily for his ballet scores, his most widely known music was the iconic theme for The Twilight Zone American television series.

Constant was born in Bucharest, Romania, and studied piano and composition at the Bucharest Conservatory, receiving the George Enescu Award in 1944. In 1946, he moved to Paris, studying at the Conservatoire de Paris with Olivier Messiaen, Tony Aubin, Arthur Honegger and Nadia Boulanger. His compositions earned several prizes, including the Prix Italia in 1952 for Le joueur de flûte. From 1950 on, he was increasingly involved with electronic music, and joined Pierre Schaeffer's Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète.

For the 1957 Aix-en-Provence Festival, he wrote a piano concerto, but won wider recognition for the premiere, conducted by Leonard Bernstein, of 24 Préludes pour Orchestre (1958). In the late 1950s, Constant was commissioned by Lud Gluskin of CBS to create a number of short pieces for the CBS stock music library that could be used in CBS radio and TV shows. The unusual, sometimes discordant nature of Constant's work meant that the pieces were seldom heard or used. In 1960, Gluskin was asked to find a new theme for the main title and end credits of the CBS television series The Twilight Zone, then entering its second season, to replace the original one by Bernard Herrmann. New pieces submitted by Herrmann, Jerry Goldsmith, Leith Stevens, and others, were considered unsuitable. In desperation, Gluskin edited together two pieces by Constant ("Étrange No. 3", a series of repeated four-note phrases on electric guitar, and "Milieu No. 2", an odd pattern of guitar notes, bongo drums, brass and flutes). The resulting theme quickly became iconic, and is easily Constant's most well-known work. Constant himself was apparently unaware for some years that his music was being used as The Twilight Zone theme. Because the music was part of a "work made for hire" agreement with CBS, Constant derived no ongoing income from it.

In 1970, he took over the musical direction of the ORTF [French National Radio and Television]. From 1973 to 1978 he directed at the Paris Opera, and in 1988 and 1989 was Professor of Orchestration at the Paris Conservatory. Besides these appointments, he taught at Stanford University and in Hilversum. La tragédie de Carmen (1981), his adaptation of Bizet's opera for director Peter Brook, was an international success.

* * * * *

Interestingly, in my interview with the great French vocal and diction coach Janine Reiss, the name Dukas came up, and I received a brief lesson...

BD:    Is there a line from Lully through half a dozen other composers, to Massenet, to Charpentier, to Boulez?

Janine Reiss:    I’m afraid I don’t think there is a line from Lully. That’s very strange. For the others, yes. There is a line, not a direct line but there is something in common between Massenet, Charpentier, Rousseau, Bizet, Saint-Saëns, Roussel, Pierne, more or less.

BD:    Ducasse? [At this point I got a lesson in exact pronunciation. I had said doo-KASS, but meant Paul Dukas.]

JR:    Ducasse, more or less. Roger Ducasse [doo-KASS] and Paul Dukas [doo-KAH].

BD:    [Very grateful for this instruction] I see... Pourquoi? [Why?]

JR:    C’est la question que n'est jamais fait. [This is a question which is never asked!] [Both burst out laughing] If you say ‘pourquoi’ to a French, ‘le pays de la logique’ [the country of logic], he will reply, ‘Il est pêchu!’ [It’s peachy!] [More laughter] Generally when an ‘s’ comes after an ‘a’, it darkens the ‘a’. I’ll give an example. In the old French, an hôtel was an ‘hostelerie’ [hostelry], and it has become hôtel.

BD:    [Since we were speaking and not writing] With a circumflex?

JR:    With a circumflex, which means that the ‘o’ is darkened. Instead of ‘hôtel’ [pronounced like hot] it’s ‘hôtel’ [pronounced like note], and the ‘s’ disappeared. So for Paul Dukas, it’s not Dukas [pronounced like cat] but Dukas [pronounced like car] because of the ‘s’ which remains, but it’s the old spelling of the name. For a name it’s rare that the spelling changes.

BD:   What is it about the music of Enescu that touches you?

Foster:   I came to it largely because I was a fanatical lover of the music of Bartók when I was young, and in getting into Bartók, I was aware of Bartók’s love of Enescu. As I began listening to the music of Enescu, I started thinking something a little related to what we spoke about earlier. I thought this music is very difficult. I’m not talking about the Rhapsodies, but the other music which is so beautiful. But it only spoke to me when I got to know it, and some of it is very difficult to get to know. But when I got into it, it’s a whole universe, and a whole world that is unlike any other music. He was influenced, like every composer was at that time. He was influenced by Strauss, and I think he was influenced by Brahms. His first symphony has a theme that is exactly out of Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony, except that he wrote it before Rachmaninoff wrote his. [Both laugh] But the end result, somehow, may be Romanian music dressed in French clothes, because he really was Parisian. Most of his early works, including his most Romanian works, were premiered by Édouard Colonne at the Concerts Colonne in Paris. This combination just started appealing to me — the beauty of the harmonies and the nobility of the music. He never, or seldom, really submitted to the savagery of Bartók. He could never write as carnal a work as The Miraculous Mandarin. He was much more of an idealist. I hope you will like his music since you’re such an optimist, because Enescu was an incorrigible optimist, even to the extent that he had to use the Corinthian ending for Oedipe. He didn’t want to end with the Sophoclean tragedy. He had to end with the return of Oedipe, and with his optimistic walking off into the sunset. This is true in all of his works, really. His works represent sometimes enormous turmoil and enormous struggle. The polyphony is endless. There’s a moment in the Second Symphony where I can honestly say I’m not really quite sure what’s going on. It’s just like this at the end of Oedipe. I was so pleased to hear someone else say this, a great Romanian composer named Pascal Bentoiu (1927-2006), who corroborated my reaction. [Bentoiu edited the sketches of the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies of Enescu, which were then performed.] I asked Bentoiu if Enescu knew Charles Ives, and he said apparently not at all. Yet, the end of Oedipe could almost be exchanged with those sublime final pages of the Fourth Symphony of Ives.

BD:   That lends a little truth to the idea that maybe music is music, and everyone is coming to the same idea whether they know it or not.

Foster:   I think so, yes. It’s almost mystical. It’s all these qualities. Maybe what I love about Enescu is how hard I have to work to understand the pieces.

BD:   Does the audience have to work hard to understand them?

Foster:   Less so, but it’s certainly not easy, and it’s not necessarily a guaranteed public success. I’ve done these symphonies in a number of places. The second one I haven’t done in America yet. I’ve done it in Paris, and in Monte Carlo, and the best way of describing that the horn player at the Orchestra of Paris, came to me and said, “I’m so glad you’re leaving tomorrow.” I replied with a snort, “Well, thanks a lot!” But he continued, “Yes, if you’d be staying another two days, I’m afraid I would really start to love this!” [Both laugh] He was so put off by it at first because it’s very difficult music. We know Enescu from his Romanian Rhapsodies, and the First Romanian Rhapsody is unquestionably a work of total genius. It’s a great piece. It’s a short showpiece which is beautiful, and everyone loves it.

BD:   It makes an immediate impact.

Foster:   An immediate, no problem. The Second Rhapsody also makes an immediate impact in its lyrical sense and its quiet sense. But his symphonic works are the most difficult. Sometimes he used very elaborate thematic and harmonic development, and employed a very widely varied harmonic use. He wouldn’t shy away from using twelve-tone when he wanted to. It happened very seldom, just some elements in his Chamber Symphony, and in Oedipe. His opera has everything. He wrote that opera in a span of close to twenty years. The Second Symphony is the one piece that is faulty in a way, but it’s my favorite. It’s like the odd duck. It’s like a stepchild almost. It’s a piece that would have needed revision. I’ve thought of revising it, but I just don’t trust myself to do it. I just don’t have the talent for that.

BD:   [Gently protesting] But you have the experience with it.

Foster:   Yes, so maybe I still will try. Some of it is just too thick. I tried to see it, but I haven’t found any solutions as to what to do. I think Enescu would have found the solutions. For some of it, the ideas are so clear on the page, but you just can’t make it work. It’s just those constant contrapuntal decisions which are very polyphonic, deciding whether it’s going to be vertical or horizontal. One can usually make those decisions, even in Wagner sometimes. Certainly, in Strauss you have those decisions. In Enescu I really don’t know, and I just have to let it happen as best I can. There it becomes almost Ives-ian. You will react to the Second Symphony in a way depending on where you’re sitting. That’ll determine what instruments you might hear more than others at some of its most dense moments in the finale, for instance.

BD:   Then we come to the idea of a recording, because there you can make that kind of adjustment.
foster

Foster:   I have recorded it, and I had to make some decisions. I don’t listen to it very often, but when I occasionally hear my recording, or another one, I wish that the decision might have been different at certain moments. He has a fantastic piano part in the Symphony, and yet he insists that this piano part not in any way be used as a solo part, but be part of the orchestra, and there’s no way to really hear it most of the time. It comes in and out like a collage, again like Ives, and you make it too evident, as I dare say as I did on my recording. I wanted to be so sure you hear the piano, so I thought, okay, there it is. The fact that I knew I’d be hearing it started to bother me, and the ambiguity of not being sure whether it was there or not, is somehow more enticing.

BD:   We’re now coming into the age of electronics where there can be a little bit of manipulation and even a lot of manipulation at home. Should we, perhaps, put a little guide to the recording, and say you may do this and that, and allow people, or even encourage people, to change the balance?

Foster:   Yes, it would be interesting. I would have to re-record it on a CD-ROM for that purpose. It certainly would be a fascinating idea.

BD:   Do you trust the people to be able to come up with something?

Foster:   No! [Both laugh] I’d have to be in every hall. It certainly would be a possibility for some of his music, and a lot of other music, of course.

BD:   Are you saying that you would make different decisions in each hall?

Foster:   Probably, or depending on how I felt! [Laughs] Even with many standard classical works, the interpretation and tempo will vary and change depending on what kind of hall you’re in. In his book, Furtwängler writes how important it is to be able to change your conception of tempo depending upon the acoustic. There’s no such thing as a definite tempo. There’s only such a thing as definite tempo relationships. That acoustical factor is something that cannot be neglected.

BD:   Does the tempo change because of what dinner you had, or how you’re feeling, or if you stub your way to the podium?

Foster:   No! I would hope not. I would hope for any changes to be on a different level than that.

BD:   When you prepare each set of concerts, they really wouldn’t change over two, or three, or five performances, but they might change next week, or next year, in that hall or in other halls?

Foster:   Yes. Especially when you go on tour, you should be able to adapt to some extent your tempos to what kind of hall you get. It’s almost obvious that you’re not going to be able to play the same tempo in an extremely dry hall. You can’t sustain the kind of sound that you could sustain in halls like the Concertgebouw, or any very resonant hall. In a hall that favors brass, you have to approach it in a different way from one that favors your strings, although that seldom happens.

BD:   Then you, as the conductor, have to be smart enough to make those adjustments almost immediately?

Foster:   You have to encourage the orchestra to make them, yes.

BD:   One last question. Is conducting fun?

Foster:   [Thinks a moment] That is an excellent question! Yes. We shouldn’t shy away from the word ‘fun’ and become so snobbish or highfalutin’ to think that it can’t be fun! Sure, it’s fun, but not always. It depends! It’s very important to make it that, and certainly to make it fun in the most wonderful sense for the people you’re working with, and the people who are listening. But, of course, as you know, ‘fun’ is a relative term. The kind of fun you’re going to have with Petrushka might be very different from this kind of fun you’ll have with the Beethoven Missa Solemnis, or the Verdi Requiem. That’s where everyone’s individual tastes become so important. For instance, I dare say for me there’s no element of fun in having to sit through Götterdämmerung, while I used to an absolute Wagner fanatic!

BD:   It’s you that has changed?

Foster:   That’s me, yes. Therefore it would be maybe possible for the person performing Götterdämmerung to be having a lot of fun, but it might be very difficult for him to convey that to me. On the other hand, I am hoping that the public will have what we might call ‘fun’ when I do the Enescu Second Symphony this week, but I wouldn’t bet on it for every single person in that audience, because it’s very difficult. Sometimes there needs a little bit of education before it becomes ‘fun’.

BD:   Thank you for being a conductor!

Foster:   Thank you very much for having me here. I enjoyed so much talking to you.

foster

See my interviews with Brigitte Fassbaender, and John Aler

This conversation was recorded in Chicago on November 7, 1994. Portions were broadcast on WNIB five days later, and again in 1996. This transcription was made in 2025, and posted on this website at that time. My thanks to British soprano Una Barry for her help in preparing this website presentation.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed and posted on this website, click here. To read my thoughts on editing these interviews for print, as well as a few other interesting observations, click here.

* * * * *

Award - winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001. His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he continued his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.

You are invited to visit his website for more information about his work, including selected transcripts of other interviews, plus a full list of his guests. He would also like to call your attention to the photos and information about his grandfather, who was a pioneer in the automotive field more than a century ago. You may also send him E-Mail with comments, questions and suggestions.