The Forgotten Sounds of a Century. Romanian Music and Lithographies From the 19th Century: Reflections on Half a Century of Censorship

Towards 1850, a fully developed industry of editors, lithographers, instrument-manufacturers from UK, Germany, France, and Austria arrived with its 400 years old legacy to a region deeply steeped in folklore and Byzantine traditions: the Romanian Principalities. At this point we see arguably one of the fastest cultural transformations of a nation, the process of assimilation of occidental standards being greatly catalyzed by the instauration of a new constitutional monarchy in Romania with King Carol I (1866-1914) and the innovative Queen Elisabeth (1869-1916). As my research revealed, she has been the only queen-musician in modern history (a good pianist herself) to personally encourage and support the development of international cultural exchanges and local music styles with tireless effort. The European music industry profited greatly from this opening, as my study will show, but the following half a century under the communist regime and censorship unfortunately erased a great amount of archives. My recent discovery of the first music scores produced in Bucharest in the 19th century has motivated this study to define an important missing puzzle in European music history. With information from the cover of the scores and the archives of the national libraries in Bucharest, London, Vienna, Weimar, and Leipzig I reconstructed the image of an unprecedented international collaboration between art-patrons, society, editors, musicians, and manufacturers alike from a time when electricity and railway systems had not been in place yet.