The Hungarian theater portal Szinhaz.hu [1] (HUN) was the first one to announce that the famous singer Tamás Cseh died on Friday after a long suffering caused by a serious disease.
He was born in 1943 in Budapest, but had lived in Tordas (Fejér county) until the age of 13. After college he taught Arts at an elementary school in Budapest. He started to write and perform songs with Géza Bereményi while he was a teacher. He became the member of several theaters in the 1970s, and released his first album, Levél nővéremnek (Letter To My Sister), in 1976. His music influenced generations of students growing up since the communist era.
By Saturday, Hungarian users have published links to their favorite Cseh's songs on every social networking site.
A journalist-blogger, György Korbély evokes [2] (HUN) his first encounter with the singer's music:
[…] The disc featuring János Másik was the first encounter with Tamás Cseh for me too, when I was a high school student: I found the disc at the school radio studio, since they never played it, the chief of the studio very piously gave it to me. These were the great years of the confrontation between rock wave and disco fever, there was no place in this dichotomy for uncategorizable values, and the staff of the school radio couldn't deal with the songs of Tamás Cseh. But me, I knew: I listened to it day and night, I still know the lyrics and millions of people are in the same situation, from the 15-year-olds to those who are 75. […]
Károly Balla D. also remembers the singer [3] (HUN):
[…] We fretted the grooves of Levél nővéremnek (1977) until the end, we knew all lyrics by heart – the Tamás Cseh feeling reached us just then, the feeling other young people in Budapest already had experienced at universities and other kind of clubs and at theater. […]
A younger blogger of könyves.blog.hu summarized [4] the influence of Tamás Cseh on the younger generations (HUN):
[…] Through the performance of Tamás Cseh (and János Másik), via the felicitous lyrics of Géza Bereményi I got to know an era that had nothing to do with me. I did not live in the 1970s, indeed I had no relatives living in Hungary at that time, but despite this I am very familiar with that era. I know how it felt to love, to cheat, to get married and to divorce, to change lovers, to feel hunger, to switch from one sublet to another, to go to the laundry, to smuggle women to the workers’ hostel, to get my identity checked, to be a boy in gym shorts and sheathe the sword with deported girls, to be a booby who has affairs with adult women, to commit serious faults at house parties together with a dozen of other people. […]
It's very hard to explain the role of Tamás Cseh in the life of the young generations who want to understand their parents’ socialist past. Nobody could describe what socialism looked like, or what the real socialist gym shorts looked like. Nobody but Tamás Cseh.
Below is one of the songs – “Budapest” – performed by Cseh Tamás and Másik János: