Refusing to become a member of the Romanian Communist Party in 1948, he was not favoured by the Romanian communist regime, who treated the composer as a "non-person". Biographer Hartmut Gagelmann attributes Bretan's lack of wider recognition to censorship by the Communist Party of Romania,Gagelmann, p. 1-2: "After his daughter married an American diplomat and emigrated to the United States, and after Bretan had refused to join the Communist Party, he was expelled from the Compusers' Union. That mean above all that his works would no longer be performed. … The Communists had sentenced him to a life without music, to a life that precluded any further success." though this claim has been disputed by contemporary scholars.
