Eugen Doga has gone into eternity. And with the composer’s departure, a heavy silence fell over a fragment of the soul of Romanian music. Few composers have known how to transform the tears, longing and hope of a people into sound. Fewer still have managed to climb beyond borders and political systems to the universal stage without forgetting their roots. Eugen Doga was one of them. Yet his death was not just a cultural event. It was also a revelation of the tensions of identity in our space, but also of an imperial practice, which does not cease, continuing to manifest itself through the symbolic confiscation of Romanianness.
From Chisinau to the Kremlin: who claims Doga?
After the composer’s death, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zaharova did not miss the opportunity to call Eugen Doga a “Soviet composer” and a “representative of Russian culture”. Nothing new under the sun. It is the old imperial reflex, when what lived in the USSR must necessarily belong to “the great Russian people”.
Maria Zaharova’s gesture is not just a diplomatic blunder or an unfortunate wording: it is an expression of the old imperial practice of cultural confiscation. Just as Russia claims the history of Kiev, Byzantine Orthodoxy or even the Soviet heritage of conquered peoples, Doga’s claim is part of the same rhetorical arsenal, designed to maintain the fiction of cultural domination.
Eugen Doga was not a Russian composer. He lived in an empire that censored his language, falsified his history and amputated his national identity. To speak of him as an exponent of “Russian culture” is to deny his own spiritual biography. Doga recognized the value of authentic Russian culture, but he did not compose in Russian, he did not identify with Russian values, he did not live within their symbolic horizon. He was born in Transnistria, in the village of Mocra – a Romanian space wounded by history and carrying the longing and the language of this country. His music is not just beautiful, it is identity. It speaks to you about Bessarabia even when he doesn’t say the word.
Confusions from home: “Moldovan” or “Romanian”?
Perhaps worse than the claims from the Kremlin are the confusions at home. After I wrote a text in which I called Doga a “Romanian composer”, a well-known Moldovan artist ironically corrected me: “Didn’t you know that there is Moldovan, Oltenian, Ardelene music…?”
This “joke” is not innocent. It echoes an entire decade of Soviet identity politics, which invented a “Moldovan language” to justify the denationalization of Bessarabia. To say today that Doga’s music is ‘Moldovan, not Romanian’ is to perpetuate exactly this logic. It means believing, or accepting, that Moldovans are a separate nation with a parallel culture. In reality, Doga’s music is just as ‘Moldovan’ as Enescu’s is ‘Moldavian’ or Ciprian Porumbescu’s is ‘Bucovinian’. All these terms define a geographical and regional space, but not a separate cultural identity.
“Romanian” and “universal” are not antonyms
It is often said that Doga is a “universal composer”. True. But universality does not contradict national belonging – it presupposes it. You cannot be universal unless you are first deeply national, authentic. Doga’s music has been understood in Japan, in France, in Latin America – but it was born from the Romanian folk melody, from the rhythms of a language that has survived empires, from the sensitivity of a nation that often sang of its suffering rather than its joy.
Doga was not “Romanianized” post-mortem. He was Romanian by conviction, by language, by culture. He said it himself on several occasions, when he was not afraid to say that Romanian is his language and that the values of Romanian culture define him. Those who now deny this belonging to him do so either out of ignorance or out of self-interest.
When death becomes an ideological battlefield
The sad fact is that the death of an artist becomes, in our space, not a moment of silence and silence, but a new front of identity war. In Russia, in Transnistria, in some political circles in Chisinau, Doga’s legacy is already being reinterpreted, redesigned, wrapped in Soviet ribbons and foreign flags. The simple truth that Doga was a Romanian from Bessarabia seems too much for an ideology that has constructed artificial identities precisely in order to weaken real nations.
A debt to memory
We today have a duty not only to Doga, but to historical and cultural truth. In the face of attempts to confiscate or mystify him, it is the duty of intellectuals, artists and opinion leaders to tell the unequivocal truth: Eugen Doga belongs to Romanian culture. Not because he was ‘more Romanian than others’, but because his identity – assumed, lived, expressed in notes and words – is Romanian. The rest are distortions, manipulations or complicit silence.
Eugen Doga was Moldovan by geography, but Romanian by language, by spirit and by work. We cannot allow his legacy to be confiscated by empires, Soviet nostalgia or provincial confusions.
At a time when great values seem to be fading, Doga’s music gives us a point of support and the conviction that beauty is never stateless. It comes from a specific place, a specific people. And in Doga’s case, that place is called Romania – in a cultural sense, not an administrative one. In a profound, not bureaucratic sense.
Eugen Doga is not dead. He became part of the eternal heritage of Romania. Let’s keep him there. With respect. And with truth.