Oldal 18 [18]
INTRODUCTION
Working Community of the Operetta Iheatre (based on music by Johann
Strauss Jr. and his time) became a pillar of the three-way program structure
of the nationalized theatre and launched the institution to become the
Hungarian counterpart of Komische Oper, focusing on the genre of operetta,
certainly politically justified.
The following chapter details the first performance of a Soviet musical play
at the nationalized Operetta Theatre, described by critics as a “breakthrough
in our cultural policy”. Since it was a Soviet work, the Operetta Theatre
handled Free Wind with extreme care, but its lyrics and music were as much
reworked as any other operetta’s. Dunayevsky’s play, born in 1947 and a
Stalin Prize winner, received a large-scale dramatic structure, well-planned
intersections of music and drama, and grandiose finales made into highlights
of musical dramaturgy at the time of its Hungarian adaptation. But critical
discourse openly launched cold war propaganda and transformed the play
into a simple message by giving a rather tendentious summary of the plot.
Although the Operetta Theatre created a brilliant grand operetta from Free
Wind (1950), full of lavish melodies, the ideological chains which criticism
forced it into cannot be removed now.
The next two chapters show two ways of adapting classics of operetta.
Orpheus (1952), a rewriting of Orphée aux Enfers, was born from the political
zeal of the Operetta Theatre to comply with the expectations of “state¬
religious culture”, but it ended up as an obvious failure. Despite comprehensive
musical arrangement and re-orchestration, the production could not master
the tension of the renewed libretto about the lofty story of fighting for peace
and the score, i.e. Offenbach’s frivolous music. But probably the most daring
experimental venture of the Operetta Theatre led by Margit Gaspar provided
a lasting lesson in dramaturgical work. The authors of the new version of
Lehar’s Der Graf von Luxemburg already tried to avoid this trap and set a
good example of appropriating the revitalized tradition of operetta in sucha
brilliant way that it was acclaimed by critics not only as a theatrical, but also
as a cultural act. Istvan Bekeffy and Dezsö Keller wrote a “sound comedy”
of fighting for freedom through love, and although the 1952 production of
The Count of Luxembourg at the Operetta Theatre gave a strong Marxist
reading of the plot, the revised play lacked the textual acquiescence to the
regime and remained popular even later. However, the critical potential of
the story was exploited in the much-increased dialogues and serious cuts had
been done in the composition. The Count of Luxembourg has been part of the
Hungarian tradition of playing operettas ever since in this textually enhanced
but musically mutilated form.
Topicality was a key issue at the Operetta Theatre between 1949 and
1956, yet it became rather ambiguous in the productions of the National
Theatre during the next decades. First I explore King Lear (1964), which
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