Johann Sebastian Bach – National Composer or “Earthly Orpheus”?
Johann Sebastian Bach – National Composer or “Earthly Orpheus”?

Summary/Abstract: A study of Romanian musicology during the communist regime in Romania is an undertaking that still requires re-evaluation. Apparently, the main flaw of the period for writing about music would be the political entrenchment, the discourse becoming a tool of narrow interests, directed by several forces in power. But it can also reveal other coordinates – not only those subject to the totalitarian mentality, but also those that indicate the relationship with the national theme, with the place of a culture often understood through the filter of binomials such as national-universal, center-periphery, formalism-realism, etc. Even at the level of a punctual analysis around the texts written or translated in Romanian on J. S. Bach, from which the present study starts and will be largely based, some of the tendencies of Romanian musicology, with their hidden aspirations, complexes and intentions, are quite clearly visible, in close relation to the evolution of historical events on the scale of the whole society: the contradictory relation with the tradition of the interwar period, the submission to the Soviet model, the awakening of the national problem and, last but not least, the glorification of a national and ethnic specificity through the Protochronistic attitude.

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