Tibor Tallián

From Singspiel to Post - Modern

Two Hundred Years of Hungarian Opera

 

...
It was in 1793 that the first attempt was proudly announced in a playbill of the first Hungarian theatrical company, performing on temporary stages alternately in Buda and Pest. The piece itself was a German parody of a French play, translated into Hungarian and embellished with songs alleged - ly newly composed by a certain Joseph Chudy. The claim to originality could not be confirmed over the centuries, since the score was never printed and nobody apart from the company appears to have seen any of it in a manuscript copy either. I would not be surprised if it turned out that the "original" musical insertions of this first Hungarian opera were adaptations of popular songs and arias supplied by Chudy, who was an accomplished musician, earlier in the service of Count Erdődy, at his private opera in Pressburg/Pozsony (Bratislava).
To call a modest parody with a few musical numbers of dubious origin an opera could well have been a piece of bravura on the part of a Hungarian company struggling to survive. On the other hand, opera in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was always a Singspiel everywhere in the German orbit, to which Hungary belonged: essentially a play with more or less elaborate musical insertions. In Italian operas, such as those by Mozart, secco recitative was replaced by prose dialogue. As contemporary scores show, even grand operas like La vestale, Tancredi and La straniera were often performed with spoken dialogue until well into the 19th century.
All Hungarian operas composed in the first decades of the 19th century, some with a national subject and enjoying countrywide popularity, were of the German mixed opera type. As a consequence Ferenc Erkel, the 30 - year - old first conductor of the newly founded Hungarian National Theatre in Pest, justly claimed for his Mária Bátori, composed and premiered in 1840, the proud title of the first truly Magyar tragic opera: Mária Bátori was the first through - composed opera in Hungarian that had musical continuity, with dramatic accompagnati instead of spoken dialogue, with two - part arias and large ensembles, cast in the Italian large musico - dramatical forms that Bellini, Donizetti and Mercadante exemplified.
Erkel steered the Hungarian genre, navigating in the stream of high European opera. His turning to grand opera was, however, not the only important development on the Hungarian musical stage in the 1840s. It coincided with the creation of the népszínmű, i.e. folk play, the Hungarian version of the Austro - German Volksstück, a play with popular songs for the main characters to sing and other musical numbers, especially dances. The népszínmű allowed for lighter subjects than opera, and for a less complicated elaboration of the texture of the individual musical numbers.
It will perhaps be useful to explain to the non - Hungarian reader that the adjective "nép" - whose dictionary meaning is "people" (as in "the British people") - in the compound népszínmű does not denote "people" in general but the peasantry, the village folk. Folk plays were invariably set in villages, their characters were peasants. The music of these plays had little to do with folk music in the purist sense of the term Bartók and Kodály were to give it later. Folk plays were dominated by the fashionable national songs and dances that originated mainly in towns, but which spread rapidly among the rural population too. Musically, the népszínmű was situated somewhere between the stage and real life: songs that were sung out in the streets, were often incorporated, and new songs written for particular plays were soon and rapidly disseminated all over the country. For many decades, the népszínmű was very popular with the lower middle classes, and several songs had a currency that surpassed by far anything national opera could even have dreamt of achieving.
The typical 19th - century Hungarian song, whose melodic content and rhythmic patterns have been made familiar by Liszt and Brahms, was considered a musical symbol of national identity until well into the 20th century. The identity that the songs created and reflected was not political; the body of songs that achieved country - wide circulation served more as a means for the nation's emotional self - expression. It was generally believed that Hungarians felt sentiments similar to those expressed in the songs, and that there was an atavistic relationship between the songs and the Hungarian soul.
This being so, it was only natural that their melodic essence and harmonic implications were not expunged from Erkelian opera: in fact Erkel consciously used the national lyrical melodic style at moments of the greatest emotional intensity. One such moment is the song - like beginning of Bánk bán's soliloquy in the second act of the eponymous opera: it falls to him immediately after he has learned from his wife Melinda that she had been raped by Queen Gertrudis's brother.

There are other indications that opera and folk play were not in irreconcilable opposition till late in the 19th - century. Up to 1875, both were cultivated on the stage of the National Theatre, the one and only Hungarian - language stage in Budapest. Neither its first conductor, Ferenc Erkel, nor members of the orchestra found it beneath their dignity to compose music for a number of folk plays. For them, the only difference between opera and folk play lay in their musical density. The attitude was similar in the Vienna of the time, where important opera composers such as Konradin Kreutzer produced much music for the popular local comedies by Raimund and others. A community and communication between opera and folk play were practicable as long as song - like stanzaic structures were part and parcel of operatic expression. From the mid - 1860s on, national opera increasingly began to experience difficulties with the idiomatic use of the song - based style hongrois. Erkel himself was deeply disturbed by this development in the later phase of his operatic career, so much so that he left the composition of operas that were premiered under his name more and more to his sons, the anonymous collaborators in all his later operas.
Romantic opera, committed to historical or pseudo - historical plots and Franco - Italian pathetic forms of expression, had difficulties in the representation of the life of the peasantry; Erkel did not use a plot set in rural surroundings till later, and even then the plot was, characteristically, historical rather than contemporary. Hungarian operas in rural or peasant settings were inevitably comedies, and can be seen as adaptations of the light subgenre of the Auber and Adam - type opéra comique. Ilka by Franz Doppler, the only highly succesful opera comedy of the mid - 19th century, falls into this category.
Some forty years later Jenő Hubay, the famous violinist and diligent composer, who had adapted various French opera models, especially those of Jules Massenet, undertook a promising experiment with his A falu rossza - a title I would translate as The Villain of the Village. This opera (composed for the 1896 thousandth anniverary of the Magyar Conquest) takes both title and plot directly from a folk play premiered in 1875 at the newly opened Hungarian - language Népszínház (People's Theatre). Musically, the two versions of the play hardly bear comparison. The printed edition, published by Gyula Erkel, the oldest son of Ferenc Erkel, of the music under the title "All the Popular Songs from The Villain of the Village" contains six songs, the last being the title - song which even now the elderly in Hungary still know by heart: ("I alone am the villain of the village, I get barked at by every dog from a long way of"). The characters in Hubay's opera version, similarly to those of folk plays, burst out into song at whatever moment seems appropriate to them or to their creators; however Hubay composed a number of his own songs rather than simply drawing on the songs popularised by the earlier népszínmű. As with most art songs of a more elevated national style (including Béla Bartók's Lajos Pósa songs), the results were neither fish nor fowl. For one reason, in the last decades of the 19th century, the Hungarian musical idiom had lost the nobility of style it still possessed in the 1860s, at least at the hands of an Erkel. In addition, trained composers such as Hubay seem to have lost the ability to compose folk songs that would please both singers and the public. Between songs the characters in this folk opera (magyar opera, as the title has it) converse with each other and the audiences in a fluid style that is vaguely Hungarian, supported by not very colourful French harmonies.

...

This was not so much the fault of the old genre itself, but of the general lack of interest in and information on the life of the peasants obtaining among the so called cultivated classes in Hungary. For some of the urban population, this lack of knowledge and interest may have been the result of their non - Hungarian origins. The nobility also had little knowledge of the peasantry, though they were of Hungarian origin and spent at least the summer on their country estates. The young Béla Bartók indignantly formulated this in 1906:

What I cannot fathom in the least is the thinking of the provincial intelligentsia about the peasant question. How is it pos - sible to know so little or nothing at all about what one constantly sees, as gentlemen must see peasants. When the subject is the peasantry, such incredible nonsense is spoken that I feel like fleeing by jumping through the window.

In the fifteen years from 1905 BélaBartók spent on intensive ethnomusicological field work, he undoubtely came to know the peasantry much more intimately than most members of the educated classes, whether urban or rural. He must have made the acquaintance of hundreds of peasants as he made them sing thousands of their songs and play hundreds of their dance tunes for his phonograph. He must surely have had the opportunity to know some of them as individuals, too, although his published reports contain hardly any personal references to individual members of the peasantry. Bartók's relationship with individual peasants was most odd.
I hope I will not be misunderstood if I claim that peasants for him were a species of animal with the miraculous capacity to produce song in the way that bees are animals with the capacity to produce honey for a bee - keeper. Maurice Maeterlinck wrote a wonderful book on the life of bees, but as far as I know, he did not devote a stage work to them. Nor did Bartók or his Maeterlinckist librettist Béla Balázs tackle episodes from the life of peasant individuals or communities in any dramatical form or genre. The discovery of the peasantry as a music - producing class was not accompanied by any discovery of its social life on the part of opera. To explain Bartók's lack of interest in the peasant as an individual with dramatic potentialities, I would venture to say that this resulted from his own lyric - individualistic personal attitude towards folk music. He went to the peasants not to find the peasants themselves, but to find a new self for himself. An additional argument from music would be that Bartók was passionately looking for the most archaic strata in folk music, so much so, that he was nauseated by everything in the country that smelled even faintly of the city. It was among the archaic communities of Hungarian, Romanian and Slovak peasants that he found what he was looking for: he found epic poetry, myth and ballad, but not drama with its individuation of characters. (Village drama was, even in verismo, usually set among the middling and rich peasants and rural entrepreneurs such as the innkeeper Turiddu and the carter Alfio.)
Bartók's only opera and the two other stage works, the ballet The Wooden Prince, and the pantomime The Miraculous Mandarin, allow one to reconstruct his ideals as a musical dramatist: the opera is identified both in its plot and its musical symbols as a ballad of the old European type; the pantomime, on the other hand, belongs to the new urban type of street ballad that the Germans call Bänkelgesang or Moritat. The Wooden Prince tells a parable using motifs typical of folk tales. Thus, ballad and folk tale are the secondary genres of what, on the surface, are an opera, a ballet and a pantomime. What the composer actually does, then, is to re - tell on stage ballads and tales, as peasants do on occasions that are prescribed by custom or ritual. In his stage works, Bartók models the traditional cultural activity of the peasant and not the peasant's everyday life. The stage works reflect the young Bartók's aestheticism in another way, too: they show him as a cultural producer, as a song - producing animal exactly as he saw the peasants: it is he who sings ballads and tells tales. Cultural productivity in general, and song - producing (that is, emotionally hightened articulation of sound) in particular, are sexually strongly charged activities in zoology; the unequivocal sexual symbolism of the stage works and what we know about their genesis, make it essential to interpret Bartók's stage works along such lines. It is hardly surprising that in the second half of his life as an artist and the last third of his biological life, when sexuality ceased to be of central importance to him, the stage completely lost its attraction for Bartók.

...

There is an explanation for Kodály's chosing, out of all the genres of the musical theatre, not opera but the Singspiel or parody folk play as the model for his first theatrical venture. (He was thus, formally at least, placing Háry János in the vicinity of modern operetta, that meretricious descendant of early 19th - century musical comedy). The explanation lies in his conviction that a series of folk songs cited in their integrity either affirmatively or ironically at crucial points of a stage work, cannot be worked into a continuous musical context without an "incongruity of style" (To paraphrase his own words). It is slightly exagerrated to interpret his position as a revocation of the Erkelian operatic model, which frequently patched small - scale lyric structures together into longer operatic constructions, for the most part ignoring congruity or incongruity of style. (Erkel as an opera composer did in fact deliberately resort to eclecticism, as his own short analysis of the various stylistic layers of Bánk bán attests.) I would even hazard that Kodály's purism went as far as having reservations about the inner congruency of the musical comedy form chosen for Háry János. Certainly there is no musical incongruency; however, there is surely a discernible discrepancy between the artistic qualities of the text and the music, and also a divergence in their respective moral attitudes. Here I mean not only the contrast between the purity of the folk music, and the pseudo - folksiness of the puns in Paulini's book. Even the high poetic aspirations of Kodály's music, and the more down - to - earth literary character of Garay's poem do not harmonise completely. In Kodály's words, the Háry of Garay is a Hungarian miles gloriosus, a village boaster. His own Háry was not a boaster but a poet: he incorporated the poetic fantasy of the peasants, the poetry with which the "folk" compensated for the scant opportunities society had always burdened it with. I am probably not the only one to feel that Kodály's music can convey his message more succesfully without the dialogue, in the form of the orchestral suite that the world outside Hungary seems to have recognised as an authentic Kodály contribution to this type of historical popular comedy.
Judging by The Spinning Room, his next stage work, Kodály himself drew similar conclusions. To define it in terms of genre, one has to turn to expediencies like Liederspiel or "sung pantomime", or symphonic stage suite. The piece dispenses completely with any kind of text, either spoken or recited, other than the original lyrics of the folk songs and ballads the soloists and chorus sing in the guise of members of a Székely village community who spend their evening in a spinning - room. It is as if Kodály had returned to the Bartókian model of a stage ballad, reversing both the dramatic and musical approach. Kodály did not compose one single great ballad out of fragmented motifs of folk melodies, what he did was to arrange several authentic folk songs so that they combine into a great one. The audience can reconstruct the unspoken ballad from the pantomimed frame story, which is about the Suitor, who, for some obscure reason, is forced to escape from the village, and leave behind the woman he loves. She, the Housewife, mistress of the house where the villagers gather in the evening, is no longer a young girl but a mature woman (this was surely so that the role could be sung by the legendary Mária Basilides, leading contralto at the Budapest Opera). The Suitor was cast as a baritone, and sung at the premiere by the equally legendary Imre Palló, himself a Székely, a Hungarian from Transylvania, that other half of the Hungarian "double mother land". There is no question in my mind, that the ballad without words of the exiled Suitor, replayed in The Spinning Room, implicitly symbolises Kodály's grief over the loss that Hungary had suffered through the cutting off of Transylvania, the homeland of the Székelys, and the core - land of Hungarian folk music. However, ballads have multiple interpretations. I propose one that is significant for Kodály's relationship to opera. It is not difficult to recognise an allusion to the return to Ithaca in the scene on stage: we see a country abandoned by its master, living a life closed up into itself, centred on the matriarchal figure of the mistress, who is mourning the past and hoping for the future.
Amongst the papers of the great writer Zsigmond Móricz, Dezső Legány has found a letter by Kodály, written probably in 1930, and exceptionally revealing. He declares himself overwhelmed with compositional work and other activities, expressing his understanding for the similar situation Móricz finds himself in, only to add:

Since for years I have seen you in the turmoil of great labours, I have not had the heart to remind you of Odysseus! What could an opera mean to you that will not be performed but three or four times a year? But now after the "scandals of Zsarátnok" are over [a reference to Móricz's famous novel Rokonok, (The Relatives)] you could perhaps take it up...

Kodály apparently had for years or even decades intended to compose an opera about Odysseus, with whom he must have identified himself early in life, as his well known song "Nausikaa" (1907) shows. It is tempting to see the adventures of the boaster Háry János in this light as a persiflage to the adventures of Odysseus. And what could The Spinning Room represent if not the melancholy gesture of abandoning forever the great project of an opera about the adventurer, who sets out to seek great gains, but also to risk great losses. Instead, The Spinning Room is a play about the feminine principle of retaining what one still has, a choice that in contrast to the adventurer Bartók, Kodály would also personally take in a few years.
It looks as if by abandoning his Odysseus project, Kodály had also abandoned adventuring into opera as such: The Spinning Room is obviously a piece about not composing an opera. As such it was to be an onerous legacy for the next generation of Hungarian composers, for the most part pupils of Kodály. In the history of Hungarian opera, the period roughly between 1940 and 1960 can be described as a series of sporadic endeavours to unwrap a real opera from the Kodály song - play, which he himself designated as its bud. At the end of this period, the stage works of Kodály seemed to represent, not the bud of future Hungarian opera, but the non plus ultra of what could be achieved in opera out of folk songs.
Not that there were no attractive pieces among the operas composed by Hungarians and premiered on the Budapest opera stage after The Spinning Room and before the end of Hungarian folklorism around 1960. Some of these novelties even enjoyed a popular succes, and one or two had revivals later. It would also be a gross simplification to say that all Hungarian operas trundled along the path pointed out by Kodály. Other influences, such Carl Orff, made themselves felt; various shades of neoclassicism were adapted, and in one case even some kind of historical operatic realism was attempted. When, in the late 1970s, I first studied this specific case, Sigismund Báthory by Zoltán Horusitzky, the only attempt at a tragic historical opera that reached the stage in post - war Hungary, I believed it to be a typical product of the 1950s, written under the dictate of the political aesthetics of socialist realism. Later I learnt that Horusitzky had begun his struggle with his subject probably as early as the second half of the 1940s and thus could not originally have been inspired by socialist realism - his efforts may have reflected the influence of some other heroic historicism, like that of fascist Italy. In the 1950s Horusitzky certainly tried to make amends. He attempted to shape the historical tragedy of one of the Princes of Transylvania to the first commandement of socialist realism - optimism. I have seen a version of the score which, after the death of Sigismund, a Boris Godunov - type figure, ends with the people coming to the footlights, singing a hymn and looking confidently into the future, as the stage direction suggests. However, it was not the optimistic ending that condemned the work to failure. Horusitzky ambitiously sought to create larger operatic forms in the spirit of 19th - century historical realism, but the musical material that he had at hand was Hungarian folk lyricism, to a large extent devoid of dramatic expression. This tension threatened his undertaking from the start.

...

Over many years of engagement with contemporary Hungarian opera, I wondered a great deal why opera dramaturgy leaned towards the Passion, a dramaturgy that also led to an epic structure in most works, where the narration was developed as in the Stations of the Cross. I have to admit that, in the 1970s, I found myself astonished by the fact that this tragic and individualistic type of opera, employing progressive or even avant - garde music (at least for its time and place), was so eagerly accepted by the political regime as its own, a regime that had still not abjured optimistic socialist realism as its official aesthetics. I must confess that I suspected some kind of unspoken complicity on the part of the composers: I felt that through a heroic pessimism and a quasi - sacral presentation of their subjects, they were lending human authenticity to a political system, that was neither human nor authentic. In more recent years I did learn to see the Hungarian opera of the last socialist decades in a different light. Now I realise that the heroic pessimism of the works derived, at least in some of their authors, from the emotions or, even, the passions of national frustration. More importantly,
I recognised that the heroic masquerading by Hungarian composers, like Goethe's Liebhaber in allen Gestalten, derived from intentions that were poetical rather than political. By disguising themselves as heroes of mythical greatness, they intended to put their compositional vocabulary into a grandiose perspective. I am quite sure now that at least in Balassa, Bozay and Durkó, true lyricists among the Hungarian composers of the time, their opera must be appreciated as a means for organising musical structures of a quasi - mythological power. Through opera (and oratorio for that matter) their intention was not to present musically an autonomous drama with characters who live their own lives on stage, but to lend greater pregnancy and power to their own musical communication; this objective was imbued with a strong longing to be understood and accepted by the community as their own. This longing has inevitably tinged these operas with quixotic colours; it is still an open question if it ever took them beyond quixoticism to the realm which they really intended to move into: Utopia.
In Sándor Szokolay's case, who was, if I may say so, the only professional opera composer of the last forty years in Hungary, with seven full operas to his credit, the lyrical attitude was initially less obvious. Szokolay's music has characteristics that are sometimes idiosyncratic, but out of these stylistic elements he never developed an ideal type of opera such as Durkó did. Instead, at least in the oeuvre of his first two decades, he succumbed to the attraction various operatic paradigms exerted upon him. What he did in his operas was to try to recreate (some would say, to remake) such paradigms: Blood Wedding he projected along the lines of a realist peasant drama of the Janác©ek type which at the end turns surrealistic. That Hamlet and Samson mimicked mid - 19th - century French grand opera is borne out by the titles themselves, recalling as they do Thomas and Saint - Saëns. Ecce homo, set in rural Greece under Turkish rule, offers the opportunity to introduce peasant crowds chanting Orthodox hymns and thus creating the atmosphere of an unknown Russian folk opera. In his later attempts, Szokolay distanced himself from operatic models, and experimented with a more personal musical dramaturgy; unfortunately his later operas did not find much resonance in the public.

Tibor Tallián
is a Vojvodina - born Hungarian writer who now lives in Budapest. Of his three volumes of short stories one appeared in the former Yugoslavia, the other two in Hungary.