... the directors said when the audience wanted to sing the National Anthem without machine music in honor of their favourites. Although we were close to the Day of Hungarian Culture, on this January day neither the date nor the name of Ferenc Kölcsey came to mind. We were not in a theater or concert hall, but in a sports hall. In the MVM DOME.
We were talking about handball fans, hard-headed and hard-fisted fans, not young people with a poet's soul. But after we were disciplined, all twenty thousand of us, we waited for the recording to start. And it shouted over Csaba Vastag - who previously tested the building's supporting structure with the EC Handball anthem - and immediately filled the air space from the level of the court to the 12-ton display floating on the ceiling. We just gaped. Well, not from wonder, but from the fact that the sound that left our throats did not even reach our own ears. So I didn't even hear the singing of the person next to me. Down on the field, the members of our national team held their jersey crests and spread their palms, while we were already at the penitentiary, which the machine choir sang so high that it barely fit under the dome. Then, while we descended the vocal ladder, from the people's past to their future, old party-state New Year's Eve house parties appeared on the screen of my memories. At midnight, clinging to the National Anthem of the television, we tried to say goodbye to the old year and welcome the hopeful next one. Only the popping of champagne could make us forget that a woman's arm was conveying Ferenc Erkel's notes on the screen, but in such a tone that a healthy Hungarian man could not sing it even after drinking at the end of the year.
Then we finally won. Hungarians sing when they are sad, but even more so when they are happy. So let the holy prayer of our nation come from the choir of fans, just a'capella, accompaniment, instruments - that is, the way we wanted it - without machine music! But the Lord did not listen to our petition. Our singing was not a blessing, if not a curse.
Couldn't we finally play an orchestral recording on such elevated social occasions that the crowd could sing along to? Couldn't it be a condition of the grade of Hungarian language and literature in elementary school that all teenagers know all eight verses of our national prayer, and the singing lessons in Kodály's country could at least have enough results that we can decently sing the first verse of the National Anthem?
Author: NéMA
"From the stormy centuries of the Hungarian people."
Cover photo: Hungarian Handball Association / Anikó Kovács
