In 1940, as Romania’s fascist Iron Guard tightened its grip, some of its members entered a Bucharest radio archive and destroyed recordings by the singer Maria Tănase.

The official justification was petty: they claimed that Tănase’s interpretations of traditional songs “distorted Romanian folklore”.

The real objection was more revealing. Some of her closest collaborators and friends were Jewish, including the ethnomusicologist Harry Brauner, brother of surrealist painter Victor Brauner, and the journalist Ştefan Roll.

Jewish friends

To the Iron Guard, a Romanian cultural figure whose work was intertwined with Jewish intellectuals represented precisely the kind of society it wanted to eradicate.

They destroyed the recordings. They did not silence the singer.

Born in 1913 in Cărămidarii de Jos, a poor working-class district on the outskirts of Bucharest, Tănase was the daughter of a florist and nurseryman.

The women who worked on her father’s land came from villages across Romania, and from them she absorbed the doinas, ballads and dance tunes that would become central to her distinctive style.

National star

She made her stage debut in 1934 at the Cărăbuş Theatre.

Four years later, radio recordings and an appearance at the Paris International Exposition transformed her into a national star.

Comparisons with Édith Piaf were inevitable: both women emerged from poverty to become defining voices of their countries.

But Tănase’s repertoire crossed boundaries that fascists were increasingly determined to police, combining Romanian folk traditions with tango, chanson and other influences.

By 1940, her fame and her associations had made her a target.

Refusal

It would be misleading to portray Tănase as an underground anti-fascist activist. She was not. Her story is instead one of resistance through refusal.

She did not abandon Jewish friends and collaborators to protect her career, even when the Iron Guard made clear the dangers of such associations. When her recordings were destroyed, she continued to perform.

During the Second World War, while Romania fought alongside Nazi Germany, Tănase toured with composer and violinist George Enescu, performing for wounded conscripts.

Whatever the political circumstances surrounding those performances, she plainly saw them more as a humanitarian obligation beinging music and human dignity to people compelled to fight in a brutal war.

The Iron Guard’s political power collapsed in 1941, after its failed revolt against the regime of Ion Antonescu.

National treasure

Tănase survived it by more than two decades, continuing to perform through the war and the communist period that followed.

She died in 1963, already revered as a national treasure. In 2006, a public poll placed her among the 100 Greatest Romanians in history.

The recordings destroyed by the Iron Guard were never recovered. But while the fascists could destroy shellac and wax, they did not destroy the voice itself.