Tamás Koltai

Music and Drama

 

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For the fact is that Hungary's operatic culture, despite its distinctive traditions, is currently in crisis. And not just over the past five or six years, or even since the introduction of parliamentary democracy after 1989, but for much longer-almost half a century. That is insofar as the course of this crisis can be tied to precise dates. The nature of the crisis is equally hard to pin down categorically. The causes partly involve personalities-vanity, power games, jealousies, intrigues-just as in any other comparable institution the world over. Conflicts often assume ideological and aesthetic guises so as not to look quite so transparent. Difficult though it may be to unravel the crux of the matter, it is still worth taking the trouble. It will probably repay us to go back to the very beginnings. The current home of the Opera, that is its main venue, was inaugurated in 1884, but the history of opera performances in Hungary goes back much further. The first to be documented were mounted by German and Italian troupes in aristocratic mansions from 1677 onwards. About a century later, Joseph Haydn was Kapellmeister and composer for the princely line of the Esterházys, premiering a string of works in the superb theatre built on the grounds of the Palace of Eszterháza. With the growth of middle-class audiences in the final third of the eighteenth century, a permanent German-speaking theatre company was established in Pest; in 1784 the company began a continuous run of opera presentations with a work by Salieri. By 1812 the German Theatre of Pest opened the doors of an auditorium seating three thousand, which was filled only for performances given by foreign (usually Viennese) companies. Performances in the Hungarian language began in 1791, and the Hungarian Theatre of Pest was built in 1837, putting on its very first opera, Rossini's Barber of Seville, in the same year. From 1840 it changed its name to the National Theatre of Pest, but continued to perform both plays and operas, with the young Ferenc Erkel as its musical driving force. Erkel remains to this day Hungary's best known opera composer, with his Bánk bán and László Hunyadi still permanent features of the repertoire in Budapest. Over a ten-year period, Erkel conducted works by all the best known composers-not just Rossini, but Bellini, Weber, Auber, Donizetti, Mozart and, above all, Verdi, virtually all of whose works Erkel put on the bill. The only composer discriminated against was Wagner, whose works he loathed. That could be said to mark the beginnings of Hungarian subjectivism in matters of operatic taste, and it accounts for Lohengrin being the first Wagner opera to be put on-in 1866. (The first act of that opera-could it have been by way of compensation?-was part of the bill at

Since the National Theatre soon proved too constrictive an environment to support both theatre and opera in tandem, a competition was announced for the design of a separate building for opera. Despite an impressive number of international entries, including one from Ferdinand Fellner (half of the famous theatre-designing duo with Hermann Helmer), the winner by almost unanimous acclaim was Miklós Ybl. Amid the usual difficulties (cost overruns of 50 per cent, scaling back, etc.), construction took nine years from the laying of the foundation stone in 1875. The results, though, were imposing, both grandiose and graceful, and somewhat reminiscent of the Paris Opéra Garnier at least in respect of the interior (the main staircase), while the stage technology was reckoned to be the most up-to-date in the Europe of that time. The glittering gala opening, in the presence of Emperor Franz Joseph himself, was marred by an incident in which an outside crowd, impatient to get a view of the splendid interior, swept aside the police cordon and broke into the foyer. Before long the repertoire ran to 37 operas and seven ballets. The social, economic and cultural upswing that followed the Compromise of 1867 with Austria was a boom period for the arts in general, the opera included. Yet it was not long before cracks began to show, with the old-style management and company turning out to be inadequate to sustain such a large repertoire, not having enough of anything, whether it be good singers or money, with an unsuitable music director as Erkel was 74 by the time of the opening. A way out was finally found: the twentyeight- year-old Gustav Mahler was asked to take on the post of Generalmusikdirektor. It is hard to think of any bolder or more enlightened decision although even he was not spared the "force of destiny", as it were. Between 1888-91 Mahler did, however, usher in a golden age, inviting many outstanding singers and musicians to Budapest, and it was here that Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana found its first success. Mahler was also the first person to schedule Das Rheingold, the "prelude" to Wagner's Ring of the Niebelungs, and also Die Walküre, the first part proper of the tetralogy. The only reason that the other two works were not performed was lack of time since Mahler, not to put too fine a point on it, was forced out of his position. Whether through jealousy, vanity or intrigue, Mahler was one "foreigner" too many for middlebrow domestic opera buffs and lower-calibre careerists, as Hungarian-born Arthur Nikitsch had been during his short stint in 1892-94, who mounted Manon Lescaut and invited Puccini to coach the performers for Madame Butterfly and La fanciulla del West.

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This reviewer can only keep hoping. For the past few months the Hungarian State Opera House has been under new management, and their wares will be on offer from the 2008-2009 season. The Intendant is the internationally renowned conductor Ádám Fischer, who has performed at some of the world's leading opera houses, from Bayreuth to Salzburg. The artistic director is Balázs Kovalik, who gained his directorial experience in Germany and has staged many excellent productions, the best of them being with young casts, some of them still at music academies. An example was the marathon in which, on two occasions, the three Mozart operas with librettos by Da Ponte (The Marriage of Figaro, Cosi fan tutte and Don Giovanni) were performed on one day with virtuoso immediacy and in a way that speaks to today's tastes-probably the most significant operatic event in Hungary in recent years. Kovalik has already mounted several productions for the Opera House, too. His Turandot, although it was left within its traditional setting, was innovative, as was the Onegin that he took to the Miskolc Festival. He has also staged Britten's Peter Grimes (brilliantly) and Stravinsky's The Turn of the Screw (in the latter both performers and audience were seated on a closed stage). He was able to throw new light on Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle through avant-garde elements, and it was in his masterly production that Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre was rammed down the throats of the audience- sadly just twice. The most talented directors, as a rule, come from a theatre background. Sándor Zsótér has memorably staged Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Zemlinsky's The Dwarf and Schönberg's Erwartung, the first for the National Theatre at Szeged, the latter two in the Budapest Opera House. Róbert Alföldi, on the other hand, brought Gounod's Faust to Szeged in a profane modern-day setting in a performance that was also broadcast by the Mezzo television channel. As for how the Kovalik-Fischer team will pan out in the Ybl Palace there are wellfounded hopes for the future. It is ironic that these two appointees did garner their most recent successes in other venues: Kovalik's aforementioned Mozart marathon was performed in the studio space of a multicultural complex, while Fischer has embarked on a collaborative venture with the Palace of the Arts, billed as "Wagner in Budapest", which is due to continue for several years.

In 2006, he conducted Parsifal under this banner, while this year it was the turn for the first two parts of the Ring tetralogy, with the whole cycle to be Tomasz Konieczny and Linda Watson in the Palace of Arts production of Die Walküre. heard and seen next year-"seen" because although the performances take place in the Palace's recently built and acoustically superb concert hall, the productions are being semi-staged in a rather eyecatching "multimedia" presentation, the work of Hartmut Schörghofer. Given that the singers are top-drawer performers, several of whom can boast of appearances at Bayreuth (indeed the stagings refer to Bayreuth in their externalities), the results have been remarkable and of an extraordinarily high quality. Fischer and Kovalik will thus have to compete with standards they themselves have set.

Tamás Koltai
editor of Színház, a theatre monthly, is The Hungarian Quarterly's regular theatre critic.