Tamás Blum

Itinerary

 

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I knew that St Moritz, at an altitude of more than 1,900 metres, could be cold even in summer, so I bought a pullover in Landeck-a black one with a red pattern on it. The real Austro-Swiss frontier was closed for road repairs, so we had to make a marvellous detour via Nauders and Martina. The Moskvich made a stout job of tackling the mountains, and we halted wherever possible to marvel at the Alps and take photographs. After these fantastic villages, St Moritz would have merely been modern and ugly had it not been for its natural surroundings. We stopped in front of the biggest building, which seemed to us as colossal as the House of Parliament in Budapest, to ask for directions to the Palace Hotel. They just stared at us and spluttered that we happened to be in front of it. Along came Badrutt, whom I was by now on familiar "du" terms with and whom I called Hansjörg. He took the suitcase from me and brought it into Parliament. He said that the voiturier, or parking attendant, would be along right away, so I should leave the key in the ignition. After a glance at the tone of our Hungarian travel clothes he decided (despite the new pullover I was wearing) that we had better not go across the lobby. We went up a small staircase to our room, which was on the same corridor as their own private suite.
It took a while for it to sink in where in fact we were; that Anikó from Balassagyarmat and the kindly Swiss were the proprietors of this twenty-eight-star edifice, as solemn as a cathedral. Our room, though undoubtedly one of the more modest, was a gilded lily compared with the hotel rooms we had been used to, what with a telephone by the bath, bowls of fruit all over the place, heated towel racks, and so on.
For lunch we went across to the Badrutts' suite and ate an equally twentyeight- star meal, served by an Italian waiter and several pretty Italian waitresses, on a huge terrace that overlooked the lake and mountains. Also there were Anikó's mother, whom I had last seen in Balassagyarmat, some German guests and their Chihuahua pooch (all eight inches of it), which was called Montgomery. (After the British field marshal.)
We agreed to a house rule: given our meagre wardrobe, we could move around in the hotel wherever we liked during the day, but in the evenings it would be more seemly for us to remain in our room or the Badrutts' suite, and if we were going out for a stroll, we would use a back entrance.
We did that straight after our first evening meal, walking out into the Alpine night. Apart from elegant motor cars, hardly anything or anybody was to be seen in the streets, just the mountains sparkling all around. All of a sudden, though, we thought we must have gone crazy. Among the elegant hotels emerged a group of about thirty people-caftanned Jews with side-curls, talking or arguing in what seemed to be Yiddish (Flemish it transpired). Their hotel was on that street, too, the kosher Edelweiss, where diamond cutters from Antwerp and wealthy Orthodox Jews from elsewhere came on vacation. They had come to an understanding with the local authorities that they would only go about the streets during the hours of darkness, thereby tacitly endorsing an unspoken presumption that by daylight they would spoil the overall picture. The inhabitants of St Moritz, who for the greater part lived off the hotel residents, were willing to admit the sidecurled willing to be milked, but only if they kept under cover. They, for their part, didn't mind as they had not the slightest wish to ride horses and play tennis, or to ski and bobsled in winter. It made one think.
Anikó just laughed when I recounted this to her the next day, because for her they were just as much a part of the townscape as American millionaires, Arab or Greek nouveaux riches, poules de luxe, the Karajans and Greta Garbos of this world.
We made a number of excursions, which were not only delightful but gave us a bit of a breather from the paradox of feeling like fish out of water inside the hotel. We went out by Rolls Royce supplied with a picnic lunch that we took along at Lake Saoseo, which is not in China but a fabulous tarn in the mountains near the Italian border, of whose existence even the Swiss are not widely aware.
The following day (somewhat apprehensively) we took a cable car up Corvatsch, though not to the very top, just to the restaurant at the midway stop (quite the most upper-crust place I have ever been to all my life). The air had given us a very healthy appetite, and when the waiter brought the bill Hansjörg paid it with a troubled look, commenting that actually he needn't have bothered because he was the owner, or at least part-owner, of the restaurant. They showed us Lake Black and Lake White, which are just a few yards apart, but one flows into the Inn and thus into the Danube and so eventually into the Black Sea, whereas the other drains into the Mediterranean. We also saw Alpine flowers, which are utterly different from lowland plants, and we ate wild strawberries about the size of large raspberries, after which we returned from the marvels of Nature to strait-laced hotel life. There was an Italian contessa who had her wheelchair constantly pulled over by a slave so that she should be half in the sun, half in the shade. In the dining room a rear-admiral was employed purely for his smile, and he kept his blue eyes beaming on us until we said how glorious the weather was, at which point he agreed. Then came the menu card, for which a large French dictionary would have come in handy. On one occasion we had dinner with the Badrutts and a company of others in the spa attached to the hotel. We were introduced to an émigré Hungarian baron, whose lady friend Józsa immediately recognised: one of the very top Party functionaries at the university in Budapest.
The Moskvich was a great success. The first evening we had a call from the parking attendant that there were a few drops of oil under the car, and should we perhaps have it serviced. I said that if it was just a few drops, then it must have been one of its better days as there was usually a fair puddle under it. A Basel banker asked if we would let him drive the strange machine, and he even had himself photographed sitting in it. I secretly hoped that he would write it off and, by way of compensation, buy us a Mercedes, but he came back half an hour later, very contented.
Everything was fine and dandy; we were fond of the Badrutts, the only thing was that we were not used to feeling so out of place. On the evening of August the 1st, the Swiss national day, we went up to the restaurant on the mountain where they were offering endless cold dishes on an endless table and we watched as the traditional beacons were lit on every peak.
In the early days of our subsequent life in Switzerland we had so little money that if we needed some rest, it was only in the Palace Hotel that we could stay because it was free; we would not have been able to afford the price of even a village inn. There was actually one occasion when I held a two-week course in St Moritz. In the spring, the hotel was not open so I had the whole shebang to myself, like a ghost in an abandoned castle.
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April 1964, Helsinki, Stockholm

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We, Blum, the soprano Gabriella Déry, the tenor Ferenc Szőnyi, and the dancers Gabriella Lakatos and Ferenc Havas, were meant to appear at the opening of a trade show in the Stockmann department store. The Hungarian export companies who were displaying there provided a fabulous buffet, with red-white-and-green beribboned salamis, butter, yellow peppers, masses of grub and drinks in the conference hall where, after walking round (with the Finns looking at the produce), potential buyers were supposed to dig in and even get a bit tiddly so they would place big orders. This is where we were intended to provide a little "light entertainment". However, they had forgotten to open the doors to the exhibition hall, and by the time this occurred to anyone the Finns were already out on the street and had no wish to go back in. That meant that the exporters' salesmen were obliged to wolf down all the remaining food.
We also made an appearance on the radio-without the dancers, of course. This included Szőnyi singing an aria from Erkel's László Hunyadi, and the presenter asked me to announce it because he had too much of an accent. I got an extra 40 markkas for my troubles, which made those the most richly rewarded two words I ever said.
They took us (for tea) to the supermodern district of Tapiola, then to a marvellous fish restaurant, and (for supper) to a restaurant called the Budapest, where Hungarian waiters served us Hungarian dishes. Szőnyi and I were the only two still sitting there, drinking apricot brandy, when the waiter came over to ask if we would care to go back with two ladies in pretty good nick who were sitting at the next table-back to their place, that is. When we turned down the offer (the husbands are drunk and asleep, the waiter said), he informed us in a mournful tone that in that case he and the chef would have to fill in today as well.
I wanted to visit Stockholm too, so once again I managed to make sure I was left behind. Before we set off back home, I went to the Swedish Embassy to ask for a visa. They told me that they were sorry, but they were closed for a national holiday; if it was urgent, however, I should call on the consul at his home. Which is what I did. At the address I was given I managed to calm down the guard dog and, with the aid of sign language, I explained to the cleaning woman what it was all about. She took away my passport to return ten minutes later with the visa. Whether it was she or the consul who stamped it in I had no way of knowing.
I called up the Kleins ¹, and Éva met me at the airport where I managed to be late for the connecting flight. I immediately got on to the Malév office, who proceeded to inform me that the earliest I would be able to travel onwards would be in three days' time. Exactly as I had thought. I had a bed for the night in the guest room of the Karolinska Institute's Institute for Oncology-as Gyuri himself pointed out, as a next-door neighbour to several thousand experimental mice. As I had done in Helsinki, I went to the opera in Stockholm, too, and saw a good Falstaff, a good Lady Macbeth of Mtensk and a dreadful La Boheme. The Kleins of course worked all day, but even so we were able to spend some time together in the evenings, once at their place and once at a larger gathering where we had roast reindeer for dinner. One afternoon I watched a London production of Uncle Vanya on TV, with John Gielgud. After that, to my greatest surprise, Gyuri spoke on the box (I was sitting in his professorial room at the time) haranguing viewers to give money for cancer research.
Gyuri and Éva were the two of my earlier friends who managed to advance furthest in their profession. For me the very atmosphere that they breathed, their temperament, was like the Vienna Festival Weeks-two degrees higher in intensity than I had been used to in Hungary. All the same, they took their success very humbly, without any fuss, and to this day I don't understand precisely what area of medical science they were concerned with.
There was a flight that left early in the morning, going via Copenhagen and Berlin. Unfortunately, in Berlin it was established that one of the crew had been drinking alcohol, so the flight was held back for a whole eight hours. My one and only stay in East Germany was spent in a sort of reception room where, for eight hours on end, not even a glass of water to drink was offered, and the most profusely freckled of three armed female guards provided an escort to the toilet.

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The hotel in which we took a room was so dingy that we couldn't sleep or breathe in it due to the racket and the stench. Of course, the heat wave was back with us, and the pullovers we wore in Paris were needed for just a day. I had an upset stomach, so I was not really in the mood for going out to dine with Cesare and the others, but I had phoned him only that morning and there was no way of getting out of it. He picked us up in his car at the hotel. He couldn't get over how the maestro could stay in such a dive. He took us up to his apartment in a splendid villa on top of the hill. He was only a member of an amateur chorus because the opera season at Genoa only ran for a few months; the rest of the time he was a dental technician, he explained. But he was proud of his glorious bass voice and without further ado he launched into Fiesco's aria from Simon Boccanegra, to my piano accompaniment. [...]
For all Cesare's protestations, proud Genovese as he was, that there is nothing at all worth seeing in Florence (and no sea either, he added maliciously), we went all the same. There we wore our feet out going round churches and museums and went to the camping site on the hill at Fiesole, which has the most magnificent view. Cesare was clearly wrong. On the cloister wall of the little church in Fiesole is an inscription that runs (in Italian): If you're a believer, say your prayers; if you aren't, be astounded; and if you're a dolt, scrawl on the wall. On the next day we apprehended the profound truth that this articulates when, on a wall of the Uffizi, we saw an inscription (in Hungarian): Tiny and the pricks were here.
It was with heavy hearts that we moved on from the city, but we still had Venice ahead. I knew that it was going to be difficult to get a cheap room. I went into the CIT travel agency office in Florence and spelled out what we were looking for. They trotted out the prices of a few hotels, at which I could only splutter. I explained that I was a poor Hungarian conductor. Oh, maestro, the young lady burst out, in that case you must know how Tosca opens. I growled it out for her, which backed up my claim as far as she was concerned. She immediately telephoned to reserve a room on the Lido at a luxurious hotel called the Villa Roma, which was not yet quite ready, and so it was possible to stay there for a fraction of the usual rate. We weren't bothered by the fact that there were not yet any chandeliers in the dining room and our telephone did not work. We went sightseeing and bathed, and we were sad when we had to set off back to Vienna. Because we wanted to eat something memorable for a last supper with our remaining liras, at the waiter's suggestion we ordered a big Venetian speciality: fegato alla veneziana. The only difference from a chewy fried liver as served up back home at the cheap railway restaurant in Miskolc was that here the cat that came round to scrounge even jumped onto the table, which it would never dare to do in Miskolc. Józsa swatted it on the chops with the menu.
Early in the morning in Vienna we paid a fifty-schilling fine because we crossed a completely empty square against a red light.
It was on this trip that I started taking photographs, which, in my own amateurish but somehow adroit way, I have enthusiastically done ever since. The picture that came off best is one I took on our return to Budapest: the pigsty all over the floor once we unpacked our luggage.

September 1963, Warsaw Autumn Festival

I was invited by the Poles to attend their contemporary music festival. It was a little tricky to get out of the country because, due to a case of suspected smallpox at the Hotel Royal in Budapest, Hungary was under quarantine, and the only people allowed to leave the country were those who had recently been inoculated. The first shot I was given did not take properly, so the second time they whacked in a shot big enough for a horse, which left me with a fever and covered in red spots-even after I got to Warsaw. Still, it was a good experience, even if I had to share a room with the musicologist Dr László Eösze, and he snored. I remember Cathy Berberian's recital and Severino Gazzelloni's flute-playing. I was very impressed by Lutoslawski's Trois poemes d'Henri Michaux for mixed chorus. I congratulated him too, saying with due respect that the choir's voices were set as sonorously as in a Verdi opera. That was not to his liking, and it was then that I noted that modern music is often offended if found only as good as yesterday's.
I sat at the same table at lunch with a Soviet nuclear physicist, who was here for a conference. We were able to converse in English, and he told me how the Soviet Union is now delivering nuclear reactors to an African country where they don't yet have any sockets to plug into. I was somewhat taken aback by the flippant tone, especially when he asked whether it was compulsory to play brass band music as in his country, seeing as how that was the only music that Khrushchev liked.
I met up again with the music critic Dankowski, and he even invited me to his home. He damned everything and everyone, except that he was full of praise for the reptile collection at the Budapest Zoo. That meant, sad to say, that when he next visited Budapest two years later, I had to tag along with him on a snake trek. The avant-garde spirit that reigned in Poland was very moving, even if most of the works that were performed were ugly. I was again surprised that it was possible to read English newspapers anywhere one went and that no one gave a fig for the official line of culture. At this time in Hungary there were still bags of restrictions that needed to be relaxed, though even the state machinery itself no longer knew what it should ban or tolerate or actively tout in its efforts to dress up the whole eyewash in a neat impressive-sounding package.

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¹ George Klein (1925-). A Hungarian-born biologist. Headed the Department of Tumor Biology at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm for more than three decades. His collections of essays range from scientific topics to the autobiographical and the discussion of ethical problems. See HQ 160 for his "Mother". His wife, Eva Klein is also a biologist, currently working at the Microbiology & Tumorbiology Center of the Karolinska Institute.

 

Tamás Blum (1927-1992)
conductor, translator of libretti. 1945-53 répétiteur at the Hungarian State Opera House, Budapest; 1953-59 music director at the Csokonai Theatre, Debrecen; 1959-72 conductor at the Hungarian State Opera House, Budapest; 1972-77 conductor at the Zurich Opera House; 1977-92 music director at the International Opera Studio, Zurich.