The
grande dame of
Croatian pop music, whose age is now left carefully
indeterminate. We know that she won a prize for young singers in
Ljubljana in
1958, and began to appear in
Yugoslavian music festivals from
1961 onwards, but otherwise, it's one of those
sweet mysteries of life.
A cross between
Edith Piaf and
Petula Clark, with alarmingly increasing quantities of
Dolly Parton, Tereza comes from
Dubrovnik, and she won't let you forget it. While many of her songs from the 1960s have more to do with
Split, further up the coast and the venue for most of the festivals she sang in, some of her hits from the 1970s could almost be a Dubrovnik
travelogue.
In fact, she's probably at her best in her 1970s recordings (collected on her
1999 compilation
Gdje ima srca, tu ima i ja (
Where There's A Heart, I'm There Too)), before she started adding quite so much
melodrama to her
mandolin. Instead, the theme's
nostalgia, not least in
Na Stradunu (
On Stradun, the main street of old Dubrovnik):
Šetala sam kao sada i tad kad sam bila mlada
šetala sam još i onda kad mi nisi bio znan
(
When I was young, I also walked like I do now; I still walked back then, when I didn't know you. It's a good thing she sings about hanging around the fountain and not the old harbour, or people might start to think rather different things.)
Tereza then made several cameo appearances in Actual History during the
war in Croatia, even cropping up in
Marcus Tanner's history of the country for her stint among the Croatian great and good on a large yacht, the
Slavija I, commandeered by the future president
Stipe Mesic to draw attention to the siege of Dubrovnik by
Serbian and
Montenegrin forces, who had swept up the coast from Montenegro sacking villages as they went along. 700 houses were burned down in
Konavle alone, a figure which, ill-advisedly for anyone who didn't want to hear about it for the rest of the next decade, included hers.
It's also said that the Montenegrins took her
lingerie home with them and paraded it around, but that's the kind of allegation of which one would rather like to see proof. Or, to rephrase that, one
wouldn't. No no
no.
Her musical output since then can be conveniently paraphrased as: '
I will survive, God save Croatia,
I'm ready for my close-up now Signor
Puccini, and did I ever mention that I come from Dubrovnik?'
She likes her
cover versions too, does Tereza. In fact, if she's two tracks short of an album one would be forgiven for wondering if she takes her remaining inspiration from hitting the Shuffle button on a
karaoke machine. Her last few CDs have seen her have a go at Croatian versions, very loosely translated indeed, of
I Will Always Love You,
The Winner Takes It All,
I Have A Dream,
Fernando,
Don't Cry For Me, Argentina and
Time To Say Goodbye. Not to mention adding a vocal, on the standard Tereza theme of watching the
Adriatic sunset, to the theme from
Chariots of Fire.
Still going strong at what must be a minimum age of sixty-
cough, Tereza has remained a fixture on the
Dalmatian-festival circuit, although threw something of a
hissy fit in
2001 when the Croatian public failed to realise that her soaring ode to a
Golden Key of Destiny, whatever that might be, wasn't the foregone conclusion to represent them at the
Eurovision Song Contest, a competition she'd previously entered for
Yugoslavia and even for
Monaco, winning the principality the infamous
nul points in
1966.
Her successors clearly have some way in the Diva Stakes to go.