Tamás Koltai

Contemporary Hungarian Operas
Emil Petrovics: C'est la guerre • Gyula Fekete: A megmentett város (The Town that Found Redemption) • Gergely Vajda: Az Óriáscsecsemő (The Giant Suckling - Babe).

 

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During that same period the Hungarian State Opera presented C'est la guerre, the first opera by the then young Emil Petrovics. This has recently been revived by the same house, and it transpired that the work was not just viable but a real success. The key may well be the fact that Petrovics was following in the footsteps of Puccini and Richard Strauss, both twentieth - century composers who innovated "from within" the existing operatic tradition, that is to say, strove to make a "courtly" genre accessible to a wider public. What again became obvious with the revival were the work's "audience - friendly" strengths - first and foremost the plot, based on Miklós Hubay's play of the same title. (The composer originally suggested the subject to the writer, on the understanding that he wished to turn it into an opera later.) The action opens with a set that represents a sitting room in a middle - class home somewhere in Budapest. The costumes might be clothes of today, for the only references to period are military uniforms of Second World War vintage. As a musical backdrop a German military march thunders from backstage - that does not quite sound familiar. The words are incomprehensible, and even if we could discern them, we would find that they are a paraphrase of Kant. A gramophone, too, is sometimes to be heard (voiced by the orchestra, of course), playing in the style of the 78 r.p.m. shellacs of pre - war dance music. An army deserter is in hiding in the room, and he is being kept under observation by a man in a wheelchair through binoculars from the house across the road. The characters have no names: we know them merely as the Deserter and Vizavi (i.e. vis ŕ vis since he lives opposite), the married couple who are sheltering the Deserter as Husband and Wife. Vizavi, the man with the binoculars trained on the Deserter is an invalid ex - colonel, and his confidante is the Concierge, whose husband and son were killed in the war and who seeks compensation for those losses in her desire for revenge. The Deserter and Wife develop a Platonic attraction for one another, which, even were there no moral barrier, has no chance to blossom because the Concierge, prompted by Vizavi's denunciation, lets the M.P.s into the apartment. Their Major sniffs around before making advances to the pretty young Wife. He gets nowhere and so departs, leaving the residents to scramble desperately to avert the impending danger. Time runs out with the Major's return, however. The Deserter and the couple who gave him refuge can only expect one sentence from a summary court: execution. The Wife takes her own life by leaping from the balcony of the apartment.
At the time of its premiere, the miseries of that war were still fresh in the mind and the political tensions of the 1950s' dictatorship an all too vivid memory for many. Even in 1962, though, the very notion that history steamrollers over victims incapable of defending themselves was enough to make Petrovics' opera suspect in the eyes of official ideologists. The Ministry of Culture felt it needed to set up a high - level advisory panel to rule on whether the premiere be allowed to go ahead, with the composer being compelled to play and sing through the score for them before the green light was eventually given.
The revival vindicates the "timelessness" of C'est la guerre, if only through its reprise of the four - hundred - years - old genre's well - tried technique. The piece certainly did not count as a "cutting - edge" modern score even at the time of its first performance, especially compared with the serial structures and electro - acoustic experiments of contemporary works by the likes of Boulez, Stockhausen, Xenakis and Ligeti (admittedly none of them had, by that time, written an opera). Still, that is no reason to feel ashamed today that it offers a touchingly melodic love duet, and all the less so given that what the work demands is far from easy for either the orchestra or the singers. The requirement that the vocal lines be comprehensible applies to the text as well as the music. Petrovics is a master of Hungarian prosody, an innovator even, the style of Sprechgesang that he demands calls for a high degree of vocal agility. The composer, who was the Opera House's manager in the late Eighties and is now its musical director - in - chief, has a keen sense of theatricality, which has largely been realised by Miklós Gábor Kerényi, the director of this revival. A peculiar framework looms like a spider's web behind the realistic stage - set of the living - room interior. The spider himself - Vizavi - barely moves, occasionally spinning around in his wheelchair as it elevates into a look - out perch in order to swoop down on his victims at the right moment.
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Tamás Koltai
editor of Színház, a theatre monthly, is The Hungarian Quarterly's regular theatre critic.