1970 A Conversation with Laszlo Heltay

 

In the autumn of 1970 I moved to Brighton to take up my first full-time job and found accommodation in the basement at 8 Pelham Square at the bottom of Trafalgar Street, on the right if you are short-walking down from Brighton station.

Number 8 is a semi-detached Georgian house in the far left corner of the square. The ground floor is shared; upstairs, Rod Snell has the first floor, and Laszlo Heltay the top. Rod is an electronics engineer, currently inventing a needle arm which will float right to left across a record disc rather than pivoting from the usual fixed point which has the built-in defect that it wears away the sides of record grooves.

Laszlo is a choirmaster and recently founded the Brighton Festival Chorus. He invites me to his room and, answering my curiosity, explains how he prepares for rehearsals by listening to recordings of the relevant music on the very basic gramophone to which he points. Simple and maybe obvious, but not to me.

He talks about Hungary. At the end of the Second World War - he would have been fourteen or fifteen - he was enlisted into a team clearing roadside ditches of the dead, heaving bodies onto a cart, an experience which still haunts him. (He is fastidious in his habits and maybe this is by way of explanation). 

A dozen years later, at the time of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, he’s working as a producer for Radio Budapest, selecting records to be played live on air. He is on duty the final evening of the revolt. A message comes through that Soviet troops are entering the city and will, of course, seek to take immediate control of the radio station. All those in the building should now evacuate. It falls to Laszlo to select the final recording by which Radio Free Budapest might be remembered. He isn’t a religious man, but chooses Schubert’s Ave Maria. Then he sets out to escape, across the Austrian border.

 Laszlo Heltay died in 2019.