A Song For Romania (and Britain)

We held a learning and development week at the British Embassy last month. Alongside training courses ranging from performance management to social media I decided to put together a slightly more light-hearted finale. We would attempt to identify the pieces of music which, in the view of Embassy staff, best represent Romania and Britain. I asked all staff to let me have three suggestions for the best song or tune to represent Romania, and another three for Britain; whether classical, folk, pop, rock or jazz – even advertising jingles. We ran a Facebook competition to get views from a wider audience. I then collated the results, determined the five most frequently nominated pieces for each country, and sought volunteer advocates to present the case for each. We held a debate, and a vote.

An exercise to establish the music which best represents a country can I think tell us more about that country than much ordinary diplomatic activity, so here’s a little more about the five Romanian choices.

• Ciuleandra. This is a popular folk dance from the Muntenia region of southern Romania: known as a hora, the format involves a circle dance of accelerating rhythm. It starts ponderously and gradually accelerates until, in Dionysian fashion, all participants are engulfed by the frenzy of the music. Its most famous musical incarnation saw the dance accompanied by the voice of Maria Tanase, Romania’s greatest diva, who died in 1963, the same year as Edith Piaf, with whom she shares much in common. The lyrics have a decidedly violent edge: “Give Ciuleandra a thrashing!” urges Maria. Though it is fortunately not quite clear who, or what, Ciuleandra actually is. Possibly the tumbleweed of Muntenia, suggested Luiza, our advocate for the song, which makes the thrashing OK, then.

• Cine Iubeste si Lasa. Another song by Maria Tanase. This one is unremittingly downbeat. “Who loves and lets go, may God punish him”. A curse then, or possibly the sad tale of the Christian who loses his faith. Ants keep their promises but baptised human beings do not, complains Maria. There was, incidentally, a 2013 cover version of this song by a Greek “experimental death metal” band named Rotting Christ.
• Zaraza. Taking its tune from a Uruguayan tango, and sung by Cristian Vasile with Romanian lyrics by Ion Pribeagu, this one transports the listener back to the days of inter-war Bucharest, the setting for Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy, when the city was known as the Paris of the East. If Maria Tanase has something in common with Edith Piaf, Vasile is more Maurice Chevalier, as he croons about the beautiful gypsy Zaraza. Romanian author Mircea Cartarescu wrote an elaborate back story about the song, revealing that Zaraza was in fact Vasile’s lover, cruelly murdered by a Roma thug named Borila on the orders of a jealous rival singer, Zavaidoc, as she stepped out to purchase some tobacco. See, cigarettes kill. The distraught Vasile stole Zaraza’s ashes from the crematorium and ate them with a spoon. Except that Cartarescu made the whole thing up. It’s just a pretty song. The word “Zaraza” is in the original title of the tango and is, boringly, Spanish for “chintz”. Vasile paid the price of failing to lend his support to the communist regime and died in obscurity. Zaraza, incidentally, is also the name of an “industrial doom metal” band from Canada, fronted by Polish immigrants Jacek (The Doom Hammer) and Grzegore Haus Ov Doom, and drawing its name from the Polish word for pestilence.

• Dragostea din Tei. The only post-Second World War piece in the Romania short list (as against all five of those in the British one), “Love from the Linden Trees” was the work of a clean-cut pop trio named O-Zone and topped charts around the world in 2004. It spawned numerous cover versions, including one by Hank Azaria as blonde-mopped puffin The Mighty Sven, who teaches the song to the penguins in Happy Feet 2. Sven claims the lyrics are sung in ‘Svenish’, but as most of them consist of “ma-ia hii, ma-ia huu, ma-ia hoo, ma-ia haha” his inability to detect a real language is perhaps understandable. The Spanish comedy duo Los Morancos did a cover entitled Marica Tu (Queer You) whose chorus of “fiesta, fiesta, y pluma, pluma gay” became a gay anthem across Latin America. Only one slight issue with all of this: O-Zone are not actually from Romania, although they did record here. They hail from the neighbouring Republic of Moldova. The fact that a song from a different country could make the Romanian top five reflects a widely held sense here that the ethnic Romanian community of Moldova is very much part of the same cultural space. Moldovan acts compete in (and sometimes win) the Romania’s Got Talent TV show.
• Ciocarlia, the Skylark. This was a tune reportedly composed in the late nineteenth century by a Roma pan flute player named Anghelus Dinicu. The music is associated with the lautari, a professional clan of Roma musicians. The tune was later popularised by Dinicu’s violinist grandson Grigoras. It remains a pan flute standard of one of Romania’s most enduringly popular musical exports, Gheorghe Zamfir (who, incidentally, had an unexpected UK top 10 hit in 1976 with a mournful piece, Doina De Jale – the title roughly translates as “Sad Tune of Grief” – which was chosen as the theme for the BBC religious programme The Light of Experience). But it is also one of the elements of lautareasca music employed by Romania’s most famous composer, George Enescu, in his most famous piece, Romanian Rhapsody No 1. The latter also takes inspiration from a folk song called “I’ve got a coin and I want to drink it”. And in this paired form of lautari tune Ciocarlia and Romanian Rhapsody No 1, our fifth candidate represented a powerful contestant.

The result? A tie, with Ciuleandra and Ciocarlia/Romanian Rhapsody  No 1 sharing the top spot as the piece of music voted to be most representative of Romania.

And what of the pieces of music which best represent Britain? The respondents, the large majority of whom were Romanian, chose a shortlist with two Beatles tracks (Let it Be and Yellow Submarine), one John Lennon (Imagine), one Elton John (Candle in the Wind) and one Queen (Bohemian Rhapsody). The Beatles vote was split, and we opted for the Queen. Bohemian Rhapsody emerged as our choice as the piece of music which best represents the UK.

Can we draw from this any wider conclusions about Romania, or indeed Britain? I was struck, not for the first time, by the apparent contradiction between the problems of social exclusion of Roma communities within Romania and the centrality of the Roma to several of the pieces of music which best represent the country, whether through a Roma composer (Ciocarlia) or Roma subject matter (Zaraza). This is nothing unique to Romania though: anti-Roma discrimination in more westerly countries sits oddly with the musical romanticisation of the Roma in tracks such as Cher’s Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves and a sub-genre of songs praising Roma body parts, from Gypsy Eyes (Jimi Hendrix) to Gypsy Feet (Jim Reeves).

And the presence of the downbeat Cine Iubeste si Lasa in the Romanian list hints perhaps at a degree of fatalism in the Romanian culture best exemplified by the tale of Miorita: the story of a shepherd who, warned by his talking lamb (bear with me) that two other shepherds were plotting to murder him, decided to do nothing with the information other than to accept his fate.

The depth of knowledge of our Romanian local staff about British music was truly impressive. The five songs shortlisted were all great songs, but they covered a strikingly short period of British musical history: all were recorded between 1968 and 1975. No Elgar, and, more worryingly, nothing under the age of forty. Votes there were for Radiohead, Coldplay, Amy Winehouse, Robbie Williams and Adele. But scattered, giving a sense of a British music scene which offers much which is great, but has not captured the global cultural Zeitgeist in the way it managed for a few remarkable years from the late 1960s. There were no shortlisted songs from Romania at all from this period, the culturally deadening time of communist rule when groups like the Beatles and Queen (evidently hugely popular in Romania, judging from the phalanx of Queen songs sitting just outside the top five in our list), offered not just great music, but also the promise of something better.

One Romanian song which reached a higher spot (number 2) in the UK charts than either Dragostea din Tei (3) or Doina De Jale (4), was, incidentally, not nominated or otherwise mentioned by anyone. At all. Thus the unanimous conclusion of the British Embassy in Bucharest is that one song that does not represent Romania is the Cheeky Girls’ hit Cheeky Song (Touch My Bum). Phew.