Interview Andrei Păunescu, artist: “For me, Cenacle Flacăra also meant a house, and school, and family”

If Adrian Păunescu was the idol of the generation in jeans, his son, Andrei Păunescu (56 years old), manages to gather together, even now, thousands of people who dream, at least for one evening, make a better life.

In an interview for “Weekend Adevărul”, the son of the great poet revealed what he meant for the 10-year-old to live with the country’s eldest artists, but also the reasons why the totalitarian regime forbade the Flacăra Cenacle

“Weekend Adevărul”: What did Andrei Păunescu, the son of Adrian Păunescu, the Cenacle Flacăra mean to Andrei Păunescu?

Andrei Păunescu: It also meant a house, and school, and family and mainly meant the creation of some benchmarks, because there was not to sing, nothing, but things on the one side of great literary value, on the other hand, of great civic attitude, and courage. And, as our regretted colleague Victor Socaciu, from a civic point of view, said, the Cenacle Flacăra meant the preparation of the moment 1989, of change, of social earthquake and the change of times. It meant a way in which my father also made me, his son, and millions of young people and mature people to know our country, history, on the map of the soul things that were unknown or lost or unclear in the consciousness of the people: Țebea, Putna, the problem of Bessarabia, Transylvania. It practically meant an ambulance university.

When did you first climb the Cenacle stage?

I was sitting in the back until I got on stage in 1979 and since then I stayed on stage. I was playing with the band “however” when I was a teenager. I was singing everything, because it was a huge chance to climb a stage with so many people in front and play practically everything you want.

At the Flacăra Cenacle, Adrian Păunescu said for the first time that the National Day of the Romanian People is December 1, 1918 and not August 23, 1944 and remember that poem that the great poet recited at several shows in the country: “What do you want to give you Santa? There were acts of crazy courage, we could say after so many years.

That’s right. He, in all the years after 1973, since the Flacăra Cenacle was set up, supported these things, but concretely, in 1981, when he wrote a song called “Colindul Ardeal”: “You Transylvania, Transylvania, we are the Holy Temple, the Holy Temple/ The Apuseni Mountains” Of course, the cenacle was also said that the true national day of the Romanian people is December 1. Yes, truths have been said that eventually disturbed and led to the prohibition of the Cenacle in 1985, including what you say: we want our identity and tradition back, we do not want Soviet Gerilă and we do not want to live from imports. Imports are good as a spice, but the foundation must be our old Romanian identity.

Too late or too early

By browsing the press of the time after June 15, 1985, I discovered that nothing was written about the tragedy that happened on the Petrol stadium in Ploiești. Instead, I found an interview that Adrian Păunescu gave after 1990 to a journalist from Reșița stating that he wanted to put an end to the Cenacle since 1983.

Things are simple in the sense that he felt like he was like a crazy shooting driver and can’t stop. He felt that an end would come, that this challenge of censorship and dogmas of the regime could not be allowed endlessly and will be forbidden. And he tried in 1983, ten years after the establishment of the Cenac, when the stadiums were full, it was very difficult to get a ticket, to put an end to it. I don’t know if he had succeeded, but he was told “no”. On the one hand, because the cenacle shows were also a huge source of income for the Romanian state. The artists of the Cenacle also earned good money through the efforts of my father, who personally did not win anything. That is not known. Yes, my father has never won in 12 years of cenacle, although there were thousands of shows, no money.

That is, all the funds obtained from the tickets were going to the state?

Then there were no private companies, all the money entered the Romanian state, the annual profit amounts to tens of millions of lei. Dad managed, from those huge receipts, to convince the leaders of the then regime, especially Nicu Ceausescu, with whom he had a good relationship, to pay the artists of the time extraordinarily well, with higher salaries in a month than the Prime Minister Constantin Dăscălescu, who took a few The enemies of the Cenacle of the last few years, who eventually have succeeded in forbid it, forgive God that he has why. They are Elena Ceausescu, Constantin Dăscălescu, who was prime minister, Tudor Postelnicu, the head of the Security, and Emil Bobu, an activist of the regime. Others were more heartbreaking and open and put a good word in Ceausescu: Ștefan Andrei, Cornel Burtică and a few others.

So there were two camps and won the first of them.

They won the dogmatic ones who did not bear the fact that at the Cenacle’s shows were criticized everyday life, with her problems, that Romanian folk music was sung, but also American rock music, that folk from all over the world was played, but poems were said about how hard people are. He disturbed this a lot, and Ceausescu was convinced of an untrue thing: that Adrian Păunescu aimed at him and aims to take power.

Is that what was Ceausescu?

This was explicitly told, with records, with stands chanting the name “Păunescu-Păuunescu”, with some audio assemblies that scared Ceausescu in ’84-’85 and, after that, after that meteorological misfortune, in which they were victims in Ploiești on June 15, the Cenacle was forbidden.

The storm of a summer night

After all, how many victims were that night of June 15 of 1985 on the Ploiești stadium? Some give four, some six, some eight.

Now believe me I don’t know for sure. I know that there were four or five victims on the spot and another human loss later, except that this was a huge diversion: everyone put the equality between Adrian Păunescu and the Flacăra Cenacle. He was just a poet who recited and presented on stage, he had no organizational attribution. Of security, order, access to the stadiums were the City Hall, the local party bodies. It’s like at a football match if some people are beaten in the stands or a grandstand is collapsed, a footballer is removed from the sports life. As a proof, they sought all the ways to make a criminal case and did not succeed, because it was not his attribution to ensure the security of the people in the stands on a storm as he never saw.

I understood that the gates of the stadium were opening inward, another big mistake.

Yes, this was a great question mark: and negligence, but also a criminal bastard. Organizational, when the world began to leave the stadium on a terrible rain, instead of lighting the lights and opening the gates wide, they went out all the light and the world was bullied on a very narrow stairs house as it was at the Petrol Stadium, and so they crushed by a grid that was semi-closed. A bus was created, unfortunately with victims.

“However” love

Let’s go back to the present. In 2022 you organized the first edition of the Flacăra Cenacle on the beach in Corbu in Constanta.

The Cenacle Flacăra never ceased to exist even after my father went in 2010. I had shows, hundreds of shows, only that, having no friends on television and in the press, he did not know about them. Yes, in Corbu, in 2022 it was a full beach, year after year at the Palace Hall we have sold out or shows with the full hall. We have larger or smaller shows in the country and in the diaspora.

How many of the old soloists who were part of the cenacle are part of this project?

All. In the last few years, since I had the Palace Hall full, including the symphonic edition of the Cenacle, they were practically all, from Doru Stănculescu, now he is no longer alive, until Mircea Vintilă, Victor Socaciu, Vasile Sheicaru, Stefan Hrușcă, George Nicolescu, Tatiana Stepa was until 2009 And Marcel Pavel was at our symphonic edition, confessing that his onset was at the Flacăra Cenacle, when he was a high school. Basically, everyone has come in recent years, depending on the distribution. Vali Sterian’s last show, before dating his life, in 2000, was a live show on Tele 7 television, with Adrian Păunescu on stage. I was at the sound mixer and Vali Sterian with his band he sang his last concert with Adrian Păunescu on stage. The young people since then have aged, but there are the children who were brought to the stands by their parents and they grew up with this phenomenon, among the few shows where only ODE were worshiped.