Tamás Blum and His Journeys
...
Interrupting his studies in 1945, immediately after the war, as a young man of just eighteen years, he started working as a répétiteur at the Hungarian State Opera House in Budapest, prompted no doubt by the need to earn money. All the directors of the Opera of his time, Aladár Tóth, Imre Palló, Kálmán Nádasdy and Miklós Lukács, marvelled at him and lent their support, acting on the opinion of Otto Klemperer, the Opera House's Generalmusikdirektor from 1947 to 1950, who idolised him. Many a time did Klemperer enter the Opera House and shout at the porter's lodge, "Wo ist der Blum?", and even after they were forced to leave Budapest he and his daughter Lotte remained friends with him for the rest of their lives. Tamás's nickname in the Opera House at the time was in fact "Blumperer", and many a tale went around about the close professional and friendly relations between the two. I only understood what those initial eight years as a répétiteur at the State Opera House meant because I too worked in opera houses for many years, in all sorts of capacities right up to the present. In my experience, one can sometimes find people working in minor jobs, with others in charge, who have a major role in the running of the theatre as a whole. That was the case during my years at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice, and before that, during the early Seventies, at the Teatro Communale in Bologna and at La Scala, in the Sixties at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin, then again not so long ago at Barcelona's marvellous Liceu opera house. In Bologna that person was a prompter. (He had originally been a conductor, but a grenade lying around from the war exploded in his hand. His right arm had been amputated at the shoulder and he was left with only the thumb of his left hand, which was not enough for conducting purposes but perfectly satisfactory for guiding singers on stage from the prompt box). In La Scala it was two of the management's enchanting secretaries and in La Fenice another "duo", this time comprising a half-crazy assistant director and the person in charge of on-stage music; in Berlin it was the theatre's artistic secretary; in Barcelona the lady chief supervisor, and so on. The role that such people play is comparable to that of a sound-post-a small stick of spruce, invisible from the outside, which stands inside the instruments of the violin family, wedged between the top and back plates and held roughly under the treble edge of the bridge, thereby transmitting the vibrations produced by the strings to the whole instrument and amplifying the sound. Without a sound-post, instruments would not have a voice of true fullness and warmth, but one that is hollow and roughsounding, "dead", lacking in "anima", or soul, as the Italians say, which chimes in poetically with Carl Jung's language.
Right from the start of his work as a young répétiteur, Tamás Blum held that sort of position: he had a highly significant and tangible influence not only on his immediate colleagues but on the management as well. Not only did Aladár Tóth, the director, listen to him, so too did even the fearsome Mrs István Barna, the allpowerful Party secretary at the Opera House and the conductor András Kórodi, whose word also carried a lot of weight in the Party. All three of them accepted Tamás's judgement. Although Tamás himself remained a Party member only till the Revolution in 1956, when he was 29, and did not rejoin subsequently, there was complete political trust in him right up to his abrupt departure for Switzerland-a trust to which he certainly owed his appointment to the post in Debrecen.
Beyond any kind of politics, though, what counted was his quite staggering musical gifts. In the course of my career I have come across few musicians blessed with similar talents. Owing to Klemperer's confidence in him, when he was around 20 or 21 he too was spoken of by others as being a genius-something that in itself was extraordinarily helpful in the early years of his career. He also showed brilliance in associated areas that strictly speaking have no direct bearing on the day-to-day work of a practising conductor, such as translating opera librettos. (To mention but a few of his translations: the complete Ring, Die Meistersingers, Tristan, Rigoletto, Otello, Berg's Wozzeck, Britten's Albert Herring.)
...
Arriving at Zurich Central Railway Station on January 8th, 1992, I had to queue for a taxi and was almost late for a rehearsal that was set for three o'clock that afternoon, which is something approaching a crime in a theatre of any pretensions in a German-speaking country (though elsewhere too, of course), even if Alban Berg insists to the contrary in Lulu, as if he were citing a proverb: "Er lässt auf sich warten wie ein Kapellmeister" ("He keeps people hanging around for him like a conductor"). I arrived just in time at the Opera House entrance to take the solo singers through a first run through Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre. All I had in mind was getting to the rehearsal room on time, but before I had reached the upper floor, Jóska Dene, one of the Opera House's distinguished soloists (we had been in the same year at the Music Academy in Budapest, in this opera he was cast in the role of the astronomer Astradamor) happened to be coming down towards me on the stairs. It must have been thirty years since I had last seen him. I have no idea why, but the moment I looked at him, Tamás sprang to mind. Maybe it was because, as he himself notes toward the end of his memoir, before he set off for Switzerland and exile, an official from the Institute for Cultural Relations (in reality a security man who organised undercover agents) had tried to persuade him to keep an eye on the political behaviour in Zurich of someone who had defected there from the Hungarian State Opera House-a certain József Dene. I hurriedly greeted him as I raced to avoid being late and asked him, "Look here, Jóska! Your turn only comes in an hour and a half, at the beginning of the second act, so you'll be free until the interval. Do me a favour and call the Blums and tell them that I'd love to see them. Let's take a bottle of wine round this evening, after the rehearsal, and drop in on them." During the first half of the rehearsal, despite the excruciating difficulties of the conducting, all I could think of, oddly enough, was Tamás, and then most surprisingly the baritone who was taking the leading role of Nekrotzar started rambling on about him, quite out of the blue, perhaps prompted by my Hungarian accent in German. (In the libretto Nekrotzar personifies death and comes over as something of a swindler, though in the very last words of the opera he declares that the day will come when he pays a visit, and in earnest.) During the interval Jóska was very agitated when he called me out of the rehearsal room, "You know, Zoli, Józsa was very odd when I called, dismissive. She said that we should talk about it later, and before she put the receiver down she laughed out, or maybe it was not laughing but sobbing... I don't know what it was..."
As I found out that evening, what had actually happened was one of those things of which there are more in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy. Tamás had died by the telephone just before Jóska made that call (he had leant on the back of his wife who tried to lessen his pain)-at just the time when I had been hurrying up the Opera House stairs.
On June 19th of 2007 he would have turned eighty. 
Zoltán Peskó
is Music Director of the Lisbon Opera and leading conductor of the Portuguese Symphony Orchestra. He studied at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music in Budapest and left Hungary in 1964 to attend master classes with Petrassi. Following his 1970 debut at La Scala (where he has been a regular guest ever since), he has travelled far and wide, making opera and concert appearances with, among others, the Berliner Philharmoniker, the French National Radio Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Amsterdam. In 1973 Zoltán Peskó was named Chief Conductor of the Teatro Communale, Bologna, in 1976 the Teatro La Fenice, Venice. From 1978 to 1983 he was Music Director of the RAI Orchestra in Milan and working as the Music Director of the Deutsche Oper am Rhein Düsseldorf/Duisburg. His repertoire extends from the Renaissance to the avant-garde and is documented by numerous recordings.
