Tamás Szőnyei

Palaces on the Danube

...

In Blaha Lujza Square, one of the busiest traffic junctions in Budapest, there is a memorial stone marking the spot where the National Theatre once stood. The building was knocked down in 1965; the sad moment when the demolition charges went off was captured on film by a news crew. The official reason was that it was an obstacle to the construction of a new underground train line; up to this day, many still believe that by destroying an institution symbolising Hungarian national culture, Communist hardliners aimed to assert their hegemony and break the spirit of the Hungarian nation. The theatre company moved "temporarily" into a different building, hastily renamed the National Theatre despite its lacklustre appearance. From that time on, there was constant and prominent discussion on the need for a National Theatre worthy of the name. One of the most popular and influential members of the company, the actress Hilda Gobbi, even launched a public subscription for its sake. The author of this article still has a 3-forint (!) memorial stamp that features one of the awardwinning designs submitted in the competition for the new building.
For decades nothing happened. Finally, in 1996, the Socialist-Free Democrat coalition government decided that it would build the new National Theatre on one of the most expensive sites, in downtown Erzsébet (pre-transition Engels) Square, then functioning as a bus terminal and a parking lot. In the spring of 1997, Ferenc Bán's design, judged unanimously to be the best, won the competition. That winter, also through a competition, the director of the future company was appointed - András Bálint, a widely acclaimed actor and director who had for years been running one of the best and most successful theatre companies in Budapest. The foundation stone of the theatre was laid in March 1998, and the building was scheduled to open in October 2000. Then, in 1998, the right-ofcentre opposition won the general elections. Normally, it would seem, such a political change would have no effect on this type of project. But, in Hungary, events do not necessarily follow a "normal" course. In the autumn of 1998, the coalition government headed by Viktor Orbán halted construction. The rationale for the halt was that the project was too expensive, and that the National Theatre could be built elsewhere, at less cost, with a different design. However, the real message was unmistakable: other changes were coming. The appointed director resigned, and the abruptly ended project was tussled over by the cabinet and the Budapest municipal government, which remained in the hands of the Socialists and the Free Democrats. The pit dug in Erzsébet Square as the groundwork of the theatre became a memento of senseless and petty political revenge. Its fate was debated for years. In the end, an underground garage was constructed below the square, while a public park was developed at ground level. No proper function has been found for the underground structure, and now a rock club called appropriately Gödör (The Pit) (which has become popular in the meantime) operates out of it. As for the location of the National Theatre, the Orbán cabinet picked the section of the Pest Danube bank, between the Petőfi Bridge and the Lágymányos Bridge (built in 1998), which had stood vacant since the aborted World Fair project. The earlier Horn government had invited international bids for the site; the deal with the winner, a property-developing consortium operating mainly on Canadian capital, was signed by the Orbán government. The Hungarian state kept the site selected for the National Theatre, while the Trigránit consortium swept up the rest with Sándor Demján at its head - a highly efficient company manager before the changeover, who emerged as one of the most successful businessmen following it. Trigránit projected the building of a conference centre, hotels and residential buildings on the property and, via another company it owned, it also took part in the construction of the new National Theatre.
The circumstances of the construction of the new National Theatre were nothing short of scandalous. In the end, it was not the competition winner György Vadász who designed the new theatre, but Mária Siklós, who was then expelled from the Chamber of Architects, because she undertook the job as a commission without entering the competition. The inaugural performance in March 2002 turned into a campaign event (It was an election year.), and the building was metaphorically demolished by architectural critics. In 2004, the State Audit Office formally reported the predictable, that construction was by no means cheaper but, on the contrary, substantially more expensive than the cost of the original design in Erzsébet Square would have been. The difference ran to several billion forints - estimates varied according to whether the funds spent on restoring the Erzsébet Square pit (which were public funds, too) were to be included.
The depressing effect of the harsh, eclectic exterior of the new National Theatre was only made worse by the theatre's placement at the corner of the otherwise empty construction site. There was nowhere to go for a stroll, a drink or a meal before or after a performance - you could only jump into your car or onto the first tram and leave as soon as possible. The situation is still the same today; the only improvement is the new Palace of Arts which stands between the theatre and the Lágymányos Bridge, almost leaning on the bridge. The two new residential buildings erected on the opposite end of the site and the office building being constructed in its centre, however, hold out hope that eventually there will be people using this vacant space. In the developers' conception, the heart of the area will be a conference centre which, if it functions properly, will fill the planned hotel rooms with big-spending visitors from abroad all the year round. Conference tourists will be ready and willing to spend on culture, especially if it is close at hand. The cultural "shop" appealing to them would be represented not so much by a Hungarian-speaking National Theatre, but by the Palace of Arts, featuring a concert hall and a theatre auditorium as well as a museum.

The Palace of Arts, the largest cultural investment project for many decades, was initiated by the Orbán government, as they sensed the isolation of the National Theatre. At first a new museum of modern Hungarian art seemed an option, but the lack of specifics regarding a plan threw art historians into an uproar. The competition for the architectural design was announced all the same and was won at the end of 2000 by Zoboki, Demeter & Associates. The short gestation period for planning was repeatedly interrupted by disputes amongst architects and changes in design. To mention but one, there had been a great deal of hesitation over what to put into the new museum - an issue to which art historians were far from indifferent.
The final outcome, a multifunctional art palace, was inaugurated in March 2005. (Public testing of the concert hall had begun in January.) No new museum was established; instead, the Budapest branch of the Ludwig Collection was moved from its previous home in the Royal Palace on Castle Hill. Conditions in the Palace may not have been ideal, but one can claim that at least the collection was located in a tourist epicenter, easily accessible and also attracting the casual visitor. Against the loss of the Castle Hill location, the shows can now be viewed in the kind of high-standard space familiar to anyone visiting the best museums in Europe. The permanent exhibition of this contemporary art museum, with a display area of 4500 square meters, is located on the second and third floors, the latter receiving natural light. Temporary shows are mounted on the first floor. (Exhibitions were devoted, for instance, to Gerhard Richter, an outstanding contemporary German artist, and to Tibor Hajas, an early representative of the Hungarian Neo-avant-garde, who died young in 1980.)
For a considerable period, it seemed that the House of Traditions, an institution documenting and preserving folk art, was going to move its headquarters to the Palace of Arts. Ultimately, however, it did not seize the opportunity and stayed where it was. Filling the space it would have occupied is the National Dance Theatre, which at the same time keeps its old venue on Castle Hill. The 450-seat auditorium in the Palace of Arts, named the Festival Theatre, is theirs and hosts theatre productions and concerts as well.
The third new inhabitant of the Palace of Arts is the National Philharmonic Orchestra, headed by pianist and conductor Zoltán Kocsis. The Orchestra spent long decades in a nondescript modern building demolished this year and has at last been able to move into a satisfactory home. The 1900-seat National Concert Hall offered a star-studded Spring 2005 season with the Budapest Festival Orchestra conducted by Iván Fischer, the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by John Eliot Gardiner, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with Pierre Boulez and Daniel Barenboim, the Milano Giuseppe Verdi Orchestra with Riccardo Chailly and, at the other end of the spectrum, Cesaria Evora, Madredeus and Ibrahim Ferrer (who sang in Budapest only weeks before his death).
The acoustic design of the hall is the work of Russell Johnson. A concert hall of this size and quality had been sorely missing from the music life of Budapest. The concert hall housed by the beautiful Art Nouveau building of the Academy of Music has fine acoustics, but is too small for the performance of works requiring a large orchestra. The far larger stage and auditorium of the Budapest Congress Centre, everyone agrees, fails to meet the acoustic requirements that were expected of it. Significantly, Zoltán Kocsis, not a man known for hiding his critical opinions or mincing his words, wrote of the National Concert Hall in terms of the highest praise. The world-class names picked from the programme of the Palace of Arts (www.mupa.hu) indicate the high quality of what is being offered, worthy of a modern, cosmopolitan metropolis.
Acknowledgement of this high quality is as widespread as has been the controversy surrounding the genesis of the facilities. There was a cost over-run. For this reason, the Orbán government took on a cash payment guarantee worth 52 billion forints for the construction of what was at the time still being called a "Cultural Block". On the strength of that guarantee, the job was undertaken by the same consortium which owned the property - the consortium that had also built the National Theatre. This was the public-private partnership that brought the term PPP into Hungarian public discourse - with private capital providing credit for the construction, and the government paying the money back over a ten-year period. No matter how indignantly the opposition objected that this financial setup would leave a huge sum of money, unprecedented where cultural investments were concerned, totally uncovered by the binding public procurement process, the work got under way. In the end, the Socialist-Liberal coalition which won the 2002 elections preferred to go ahead with the project. The still empty pit in Erzsébet Square was an all too vivid reminder. They didn't want to fall into a "pit" of their own making.
Thus, between August 2002 and January 2005, the Palace of Arts was completed, covering an external area of no less than two thousand square meters and an inner space of sixty-four thousand square meters. It has been functioning smoothly ever since. The building itself, with its neon lights glimmering in the evening, received more disapproval than praise from critics. Nevertheless, the criticism was far less scathing than in the case of the National Theatre. Even if it is not looked on with favour by everyone, it is beyond doubt that Budapest at last has a high-standard, state-of-the-art cultural facility, impressive in dimensions and housing a museum of contemporary art and an absolutely magnificent concert hall. For a long time to come it will be our companion, and for a long time we will also be paying for it. The post-2002 government amended the contract signed by its predecessors. The terms for repaying the debt have been extended from ten to thirty years, and the original 52 billion forint figure pledged for the building of the palace, which cost 31 billion, is now almost 100 billion.

Tamás Szőnyei
is a journalist on the weekly Magyar Narancs. His most recent book is Nyilván tartottak. Titkos szolgák a magyar rock körül 1960-1990 (Kept on File: The Secret Service and the Hungarian Rock Scene,1960-1990), 2005.