Robert Milders on music and literature

In our series, diplomats give their personal account of the experiences of their “excursions” to Hungarian culture, art, gastronomy and landscape. This time, the Dutch ambassador shares his thoughts with our readers.

One can look back with some nostalgia to Christmas time, when there was such an abundance of music on offer. While most tourists in Budapest were flocking to Vörösmarty Square for their Christmas shopping, choirs and orchestras were producing the most beautiful music one can imagine in churches in and outside Budapest (some of my family members attended Laszlo Halmos’ Christmas Mass in theMatthias Church).

The Ferenc Liszt Year looks equally promising; the Hungarian Presidency of the EU has already presented a flavour of his oeuvre to foreign guests. I am thrilled by the prospect of new and lesser known compositions beyond “Liebestraume” and “Les Preludes”.

As for reading: the book presently on my bedside table is “My Happy Days in Hell” (1962) from the Hungarian poet and writer György Faludy. A fascinating autobiography about the author’s odyssey after he fled Hungary in 1938 and returned in 1946, only to fall into the hands of the state police AVO who sent him to a forced labor camp in Recsk, northeast Hungary on trumped-up charges for three years.

He lived the last 18 years of his life in Budapest where he died in 2006. For a better understanding of the communist era, the misery and individual suffering it caused I find well-written books like these indispensable.