Politicizing Music in Communist Romania: The Personal Memories of a Witness

THE POLITICIZATION OF MUSIC IN FORMER COMMUNIST COUNTRIES as part of the general cultural policy of the regimes had some general features which applied all over the world.1 The most prominent of these was that the "party and state"2 took culture over as a very important tool to manipulate the nation (which is much more than censorship). Another important main feature was that control had three dimensions: the cultural thesaurus of the past, the contemporary creation itself, and - related to the latter the "bourgeois" influence coming from the free Western World.

There were some very specific features, too. For example, in Europe, Beethoven was hailed as the artist revolutionary …