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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 “statereligious 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 +16 +
