For composer Leonard Lehrman, a recent trip to Romania was both a return to a place that had influenced his music and an opportunity to hear his work performed by native Romanian singers.
Lehrman, who works as a librarian at the Oyster Bay-East Norwich Public Library, traveled to Bucharest with his wife, vocalist Helene Williams, for a masterclass and two concerts on July 1 and 3. The trip marked Lehrman’s first return to Europe since 2019.
The July 1 program at the Jewish Community Center in Romania’s capital brought together singers from throughout the country for a masterclass led by Lehrman and Williams, followed by a recital featuring Lehrman’s music alongside works from the French and Italian operatic repertoire, as well as Romanian selections.
The July 3 concert featured the first complete performance in Romanian of a five-song cycle Lehrman composed after his previous visit to the country. The cycle includes three settings of poems by Mihai Eminescu, Romania’s national poet, and two poems by Jewish-Romanian poet Zygmund Tauberg.
Lehrman said hearing the songs performed by native Romanian speakers gave him a different perspective on the music. He said translations inevitably change a work, even when they can sometimes produce unexpected results.
“The work is conceived in the original language, and everything done in another language is a translation,” Lehrman said. “A translation is never the same as the original.”
Lehrman said he relied on translations in French, German and Italian to understand Eminescu’s Romanian poetry when he first began setting the poems to music. His interest in the language and poetry grew from his 2019 visit to Romania, when he and Williams traveled through the country and visited Sighet, the hometown of Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel.
During that trip, Lehrman and Williams also visited museums dedicated to Romanian composer George Enescu. Lehrman said he had a personal connection to Enescu dating back to his youth.
“The first piece I ever conducted with an orchestra was in junior high school,” Lehrman reminisced, “I conducted the first Romanian rhapsody of Enesco.”
The couple’s connection to Romanian poetry expanded after, on that trip, a woman approached Lehrman following a concert in Bucharest. She told him her 92-year-old father, Tauberg, was a Jewish poet in Bucharest and asked whether Lehrman would consider setting some of his work to music.
Lehrman accepted and ultimately added two of Tauberg’s poems to the three Eminescu settings, creating the five-song cycle.
The July 3 performance featured soprano Simona Nicoletta Jidveanu, a soloist with the Bucharest Philharmonic Orchestra, performing the cycle with Lehrman at the piano. Tauberg was expected to attend.
The trip was shorter than Lehrman’s 2019 visit. He and Williams arrived in Romania after Lehrman finished a library shift Monday and returned home Saturday night, leaving little time for sightseeing.
“It was very thrilling,” Lehrman said, “but it was also very tight because we didn’t have much time there.”
In addition to the concerts and masterclass, Lehrman and Williams met with the director of Bucharest’s Jewish Theater. Lehrman said the theater is planning a Yiddish festival next May, and he hopes to return to Romania if the couple can develop a program for the event.
Lehrman said he hopes the work will continue to travel across languages and borders, while retaining its connection to the cultures that inspired it.
“I think the Romanian originals are superb,” Lehrman said, “and my translations are simply workable, but they’re not of the caliber of poetry that the originals are.”
Back home, Lehrman is continuing to compose and perform while working at the Oyster Bay-East Norwich Public Library. Among his upcoming projects is a new opera based on Bernard Malamud’s short story “The Magic Barrel.”
Lehrman said he has received permission from the estate of composer Mark Blitzstein to use Blitzstein’s existing libretto, while writing entirely new music. He plans to begin the project next year if a grant application is successful.
To watch the concerts online, visit tinyurl.com/20260701BucharestJCC and tinyurl.com/20260703GaleriaRomana.
