Frontátvonulás [‘Frontal Passage’]

Abstract

The legendary songwriting collaboration between the writer Géza Bereményi (1946–) and the musician Tamás Cseh (1943–2009) led to twenty full-length albums as well as countless bootlegs, singles, and unreleased recordings. With its unique mixture of absurdity and suggestion, story and song, comedy and pathos, their work broke ground in its time and influences songwriters today. Little has been written about it in English; this article aims to introduce readers to Bereményi and Cseh’s opus through their Frontátvonulás [‘Frontal Passage’], a story-song show first performed by Cseh in 1979 and released as an album in 1983. Telling of the characters Vizi and Ecsédi and the miracles they incite at Budapest Keleti Station, and setting a plethora of other characters to song, this work is at least partly about ends and endings. After briefly introducing Cseh and Bereményi, this article examines Frontátvonulás in light of its four stages (disorientation, stagnancy, breakthrough, ending), treating the last as a key to the whole. The author calls Frontátvonulás “an album of no return” both because it emphasizes its own ending and because it confronts the audience irrevocably.

Keywords

• Géza Bereményi
• Tamás Cseh
• Frontal Passage (album)
• Hungary
• communist Hungary
• Hungarian popular music