After the Communist takeover, operetta became a suspect art form, a vestige of the old bourgeois ways. Hard-line critics argued that for all its satiric edge and delightful music, the typical Viennese and Budapest operetta was in awe of the privileged classes and glamorised the lives of the idle and decadent rich. The problem was that audiences clamoured for these discredited and obsolete musical plays. So in the early nineteen-fifties, Budapest's Metropolitan Operetta Theatre tried to come up with a few new "socialist" operettas and began to recast old ones to make them appear "progressive". During the period of the Thaw after Stalin's death, the prerequisites for staging prewar operettas eased somewhat. A playwright of the period could declare in a popular magazine that operetta is what it is; it need not be naturalistic, educative or, by hook or by crook, relevant. Thus, on November 12, 1954, a brand new production of The Csárdás Princess opened in the Operetta Theatre with a substantially revised libretto, the work of István Békeffy and Dezső Kellér, writers for the musical and cabaret stage. The present source book includes both libretti, and it must be said that the Békeffy-Kellér variant is far superior to the original. While it is true that certain changes were made so that the new production would pass muster with the watchdogs sitting in the Ministry of Culture, the reworked book on the whole is wittier, more sophisticated, dramaturgically more sound and generally more entertaining than the old one.¹
It's important to note, though, that not all the revisions were politically motivated. The librettists wanted to create appropriate roles for two stars of the musical theatre: Hanna Honthy, the reigning queen of Hungarian operetta, and Kamill Feleki, a versatile actor of great charm and dexterity. As Hanna Honthy at this time was past sixty, she could no longer play a "chansonette" who sings at the Orpheum, as Budapest's most famous nightspot was known at the turn of the twentieth century, so they enlarged for her the role of the young prince's mother, who, though a princess herself through marriage, had once been a csárdáskirálynő, that is, a celebrated singer and dancer at the Orpheum, but through a series of advantageous marriages wound up as the wife of Prince Leopold Maria Lippert- Weilersheim. All this was revealed in the original story, too, but not much was made of it. Here, however, the Princess's checkered past is played up. But in spite of the revelations, the Princess in her present position would stop at nothing to prevent her son from marrying a mere "chansonette". In the new production, then, the rather insignificant Anhilta, the Prince's wife in the original book, became the scheming, conniving yet disarmingly charming, utterly irresistible Cecília. Hanna Honthy proved once again that even as a "mature" woman she could be the prima donna.²
The part of Miska, the headwaiter at the Orpheum, was similarly built up and turned into a meaty role that would showcase Kamill Feleki's many talents. In the revised story line, the worldly-wise and unflappable Miska turns up everywhere, and always near Cecília, whom he knew and admired way back when. By rewriting these roles, Békeffy and Kellér actually shifted the focus of the story to the two older characters, which was just as well, because the romance between the prince and the showgirl was never that interesting.
Audiences loved the operetta. It would probably not be too much to say that the 1954 revival of The Csárdás Princess was one of the most successful theatrical productions of the postwar period in Hungary. As required, aristocrats were presented as nitwits. But that didn't bother anyone; it was all in fun anyway. What people enjoyed seeing on stage was the charm and grace of a bygone era which contrasted sharply with the grim Hungarian reality of the nineteen-fifties. And they adored their favourite actors, above all Hanna Honthy. The previously mentioned playwright, Miklós Gyárfás, who asked the guardians of socialist ethics and aesthetics to let operetta be what it is, also wrote that operetta should be like Hanna Honthy: "lightly witty, charmingly wry, tuneful, colourful, and able to soar".

Honthy played Cecília hundreds of times and was identified with the role to the end of her life. (She died in 1978 at the age of eighty-five.)
Of course, there were sceptical voices from the beginning that raised the issue of inconsistencies in Cecília's beloved character. In the section of the source book devoted to the critical response to the 1954 revival, we find a number of such objections. For example, the theatre critic of the Communist Party daily, Szabad Nép, pointed out that "a woman of easy virtue who, denying her past, has clawed her way to the top of society and is now trying to prevent two young people from finding happiness-such a woman cannot be so likeable." But then, reinventing oneself or airbrushing unwanted specks out of one's past was not necessarily a deplorable act in the Hungary of the nineteen-fifties. This was a time when everyone had something to hide-people were endlessly rewriting their CV's in a desperate attempt to satisfy the changing requirements of good citizenship in a socialist society. Miska the headwaiter makes this comment to an old roué in the second act, clearly alluding to Cecília: "These people are mad at their past, I tell you; they are not on speaking terms with their own selves." People sitting in the Operetta Theatre at the time must have smiled knowingly at this. Other critics were concerned about the excessive popularity of operetta. An article in the journal Népmuvelés [People's Culture] bemoaned the fact that "we have paid homage in epidemic proportions throughout the country and even beyond our borders, in theatres and concert halls, on radio and film, to The Csárdás Princess, which has no classical value and is not modern either." The veteran theatre director Miklós Szinetár, who was in his twenties when he staged the '54 revival, has said: "Operetta was a persecuted art form and has remained that." Ideologues in the nineteen-fifties had their own reasons to despise operetta, but before and since then high-brow critics and others have repeated the charges against it ad nauseam-that the stories are inane, predictable, formulaic, out-of-date, the music simplistic, catchy but kitschy, and so on. Imre Kálmán, who was trained as a classical musician and composer, and was by all accounts a modest man, said himself in an interview in 1913: "I know that half a page from the score of a Liszt work is worth more than all the operettas I have written and will ever write. But I also know that half a page from that score calls for an audience with a high degree of musical sophistication, and that constitutes only a small fraction of the general audiences that attend theatre performances."
In the nineteen-fifties, operetta-lovers received a boost from unexpected quarters. The authors recount this part of the story in a section entitled "Operetta Diplomacy". About a year after the opening of the new version of The Csárdás Princess, the entire company went on a tour of the Soviet Union, which turned out to be a triumph. They performed several operettas, including a Soviet one, but what audiences everywhere wanted to see was Imre Kálmán's great hit. The tour ended in Leningrad, but the company was asked to return to Moscow for one more performance, which was attended by practically the entire Soviet leadership, including Khrushchev, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Mikoyan and Suslov. Actually, outside of Central Europe, the country where Imre Kálmán's operettas scored the greatest successes was Soviet Russia. The Csárdás Princess (known there as Sylva) was a particular favourite, its popularity going back to the thirties. A Soviet film version of the operetta came out in 1944; and in the nineteen-eighties, a film about Kálmán's life, a Soviet-Hungarian coproduction, was released. Nevertheless, it is a sad commentary on the state of Soviet music that when influential Soviet composers visited Budapest in the early fifties, they were full of praise for the music of Lehár and Kálmán, intimating that there was more to like in operetta than in the elitist, "formalist" music of a Béla Bartók.