_elemei/I12408-2000Sep15.jpg)
Hungarian Listens for the Beat of
a New Generation
By Nora Boustany
Friday, October 31, 2003;
Page A20
Will brandishing electric guitars instead of machine guns
save the world and loosen its shackles? It worked for the Hungarian
ambassador, Andras Simonyi, who fervently believes that the
music of the Beatles, rock-and-roll in general, and even bluegrass
revved up a whole generation living under communism to embrace
freedom and will it into reality.
Simonyi, who became ambassador last year, said he
remembered watching columns of Soviet tanks rumbling through his
Budapest neighborhood in 1956 when he was 4 years old. But his
father's job as a trade representative and textile engineer took the
family to Copenhagen, Denmark, for five years, and Simonyi began
hanging out with Americans and other Europeans living outside the
Iron Curtain. He wore his hair long, became hooked on the kind of
music his classmates listened to and had to have a Framus electric
guitar. He ticks off a list of the musicians he grew up listening
to: the Beatles, Van Morrison, Eric Clapton, Jimi
Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Johnny Winter.
But in 1966, the family moved back to Budapest. "I lost my
friends, my daily contact with the West, and I had to start adapting
to a very different world. I had already read [Alexander]
Solzhenitsyn's the "Cancer Ward" in Danish and figured out this was
not the way things ought to be," he said. He soon discovered that
"if I wanted to survive the way I wanted to survive, I had to
maintain my relationship with this music, the records, the songs,
the magazines."
He began listening to Radio Free Europe and Radio
Luxembourg at night. "When we listened over the airwaves, we were
part of the West, even in our homes," he said of his adolescent
years in Hungary. "Rock music had such a huge impact, not only on me
but a whole generation of Hungarians, Poles and Czechs longing for
freedom . . . and finding their own way, their own rules, which is
what these songs were all about."
"He loves his music, and he is absolutely right," said
Nancy Brinker, a former U.S. ambassador to Hungary who knew
Simonyi before he came to Washington with his wife and has worked
closely with him. "Music is a great outreach opportunity in our
culture and a wonderful segue into more understanding and
bridge-building."
In 1968, there was a measured loosening of the government's
grip on culture in Hungary. Bands such as Traffic performed there,
and in 1969 Simonyi met with one of the band's members, Steve
Winwood. He met him again this year, 34 years later, at the 9:30
club in Washington.
Though Simonyi had started his own band in 1970, one of his
mentors cautioned him: "In such a country, you will go crazy with
this music." Simonyi chose economics but remained wedded to his
music and the liberal attitudes it cemented in him.
"You developed the art of doublespeak, not divulging what
you really thought, but we would get together in a trusted home and
have great debates, sharing great ideas and forbidden books," he
said.
Budapest was a drab, shabby, run-down kind of place, and
when Dizzy Gillespie visited, Simonyi managed to ride with
him on a tour bus and proudly asked the American jazz musician how
he liked his city. "It's gray, man. It's gray," Gillespie
said.
Rock music began catching on in socialist countries, and
though the lyrics were sometimes censored, it was the music itself
that was radical, Simonyi argued. This will be the subject of a
lecture he plans to give this weekend in Cleveland at the Rock and
Roll Hall of Fame.
Music groups such as the Locomotive GT, in which he played,
and Wheels of Fire began proliferating, and some defected to the
West. Wheels of Fire was a group of radical Gypsy musicians who
pushed the limit in their lyrics and smashed their instruments at
the end of a concert, or set them on fire, he said.
"These musicians influenced the generation that pushed
communism out," Simonyi said. "These guys were unstoppable."
In the 1980s Simonyi worked with youth exchange programs
between the East and West before becoming involved in foreign
relations and joining the Foreign Ministry in 1989. He became
Hungary's first permanent representative on the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization Council.
Today Simonyi, 51, is still somewhat star-struck. His
office at the chancery at the bottom of Spring of Freedom Street is
adorned with photographs taken of him with Hungarian-American actor
Tony Curtis and television icons Jay Leno and Conan
O'Brien.
Simonyi still has memories of going to the countryside with
his grandparents and learning how to slaughter a pig and process it
into sausage, or savoring a glass of red wine and a slice of country
bread smeared with well-seasoned fat. "We also listened to Gypsy
music," he said. "There was this mixture of gloom and incredible
euphoria. You just knew your culture will never disappear."
© 2003 The Washington Post
Company
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_elemei/I44878-2003Oct30.jpg) _elemei/enlarge_tab.gif)
Ambassador Andras Simonyi of Hungary,
left, and his daughter, Sonja, jam in 1999 with Alexander
Vershbow, then the U.S. ambassador to the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization. (Photo Daniel
Simonyi)
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