COURAGE

gyűjtemények hálózata

This tape recorder is the instrument with whose help over 1,000 hours of interviews were recorded in the course of Zoltán Rostás’s oral history project. It is a professional tape recorder, of West German manufacture, weighing approximately 7 kg, and is still in good working order, more than four decades after it was used for the first time. The UHER tape recorder has four recording speeds. Zoltán Rostás mentions that, in order not to have to manoeuvre the microphone attached to the tape recorder very often, and thus to avoid deterioration in the quality of the sound recorded, he used the instrument at the lowest speed. In this way, the recording capacity was considerably extended, and could be as much as five hours for a narrow magnetic tape.

Initially, this tape recorder belonged to the editorial office of the Hungarian-language publication A Hét (The week), where Zoltán Rostás worked before 1989. Identical audio instruments were also in the possession of the national radio and the Institute of Folklore, as they were very sturdy, durable pieces of equipment with an excellent recording capacity. “At the national television there were even better ones, Nagra. But I think I managed very well with my UHER. Which in fact, initially wasn’t actually mine. It was only after 1989, when the instrument was discarded, that it came into my possession,” mentions Zoltán Rostás. The UHER instrument is now in Zoltán Rostás’s home, close to the hundreds of tapes recorded with oral history testimonies. The great majority of the tapes used and now in the Zoltán Rostás private collection were Munplast, of Romanian manufacture.

The underground periodical Dzimtene (The Motherland) was published in 1950 and 1951 by Vilis Toms, a member of the Association of Latvian National Partisans (as editor), and Broņislava Martuževa. The periodical was written and copied by hand, because there were no possibilities for printing it. Each of the 11 issues was copied out by Martuževa by hand, up to ten copies. One problem was the distribution of the periodical. Martuževa thought of putting it in the letter boxes of local people. However, some copies were instantly obtained by state security organs. The May 1950 issue of the periodical consists of 16 pages. The cover was made by Pēteris Logins.

This photograph, selected to demonstrate the photographic dimension of the Andrei Partoş–Radio Vacanţa-Costineşti Private Collection, shows the soloist Alexandru Andrieş during a live broadcast, alongside Andrei Partoş and one of his radio colleagues, Lilian Zamfiroiu, director of the Romanian Cultural Institute from 2013 to 2015 and currently Romanian ambassador in Luxembourg. Together with the discussions held in real time, it was mainly the music played on Radio Vacanţa-Costineşti that marked out the coordinates of a youth culture that did not align itself with the rigid demands of the age. This is emphasised by Andrei Partoş: “When I was talking to the microphone, live, I tried to be as free as I could. Of course, self-censorship operated. But I said many things in a two-edged way. And above all, I let the music speak instead of me. Music seemed to me the best way to transmit subliminal messages and, basically, to be subversive.”

The image in the photograph epitomises the live and implicitly uncensored concertos, which Radio Vacanța Costinești used to broadcast during the entire summer holiday season. Taking into account that the young people represented the exclusive audience in this resort of the Union of the Communist Youth in Romania, these concerts featured those pop singers who were the most popular among people with ages between fourteen and thirty. From among the recurrently invited guests at Radio Vacanța Costinești before 1989, Alexandru Andrieş was one of the most pleasing presences on Radio Vacanţa-Costineşti. He used to sing a genre of music which was improperly called muzică folk (in verbatim translation – folk music) and usually promoted as a phoney alternative music through the so-called Cenaclul Flacăra (in verbatim translation – The Flame Literary Circle). It is worth noting that Cenaclul Flacăra, which court poet Adrian Păunescu initiated as a non-conformist literary circle, had become by the late 1970s a frame for organising, under the disguised tutelage of the party, allegedly subversive song-and-poetry performances for young people, which were in fact meant to manipulate their rebellious nature (Petrescu 2010, 304–307). Unlike other soloists of muzică folk who used to perform during the Cenaclul Flacăra shows, Andrieş was not favoured in official circles, due to the really subversive political message of his songs (which he wrote and sang himself). He sang live for hours on Radio Vacanţa-Costineşti, although many of the pieces he composed and performed were banned. Among other songs, he performed live the famous “Today again, on the News,” a satirical song about those times of severe shortages: “Today again / On the News / I saw cheese. / I watched / The programme too / But it didn’t appear again / Although I waited / Till the end. / But no matter, / Tomorrow again / On the News / I’m going to see cheese.” This was a harsh satire directed at the pre-1989 regime, in a period when Romania faced serious economic problems and basic foodstuffs were rationed.

The photograph shows another dimension of “alternative” musical culture. Like the group Phoenix, which was also very popular among young people because of their ethno-rock with subversive messages, Alexandru Andrieş illustrates the “unofficial,” alternative element of Romanian musical production before 1989. Especially urban educated young people, who were capable to grasp the encrypted critical messages of the verses, preferred this type of music, alongside clandestinely recorded Western music.