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A REFASHIONED IMAGE OF REVOLUTION AS MUSICAL THEATRE members and 24 orchestra members who made up the new company.? In the spirit of the socialist ideal of work, an hour-by-hour agenda fixed the tasks of all artists and technicians from the first rehearsal to the premiere. However, the extremely high expectation was not solely “for the introduction of a theatre”, but “for the fate of operetta itself”, since the press posed the question whether “we can save the values of classical operetta into our better and purer world, forget the ‘traditions’ of Hungarian operetta, i.e. tastelessness, levity and cheap, contentless coups de thédtre. Can we offer human feelings and art instead of sentimentalism and kitsch?”?? The prelude to this question of life and death ofa genre was the “show trial” initiated against operetta, while the preparation of so many justizmords was carried out on a sample used in the USSR for nearly two decades, and typical phrases of the accusation appeared in the reviews of the first productions of the nationalized Operetta Theatre as well. Ihe newspaper of the Party blamed operettas for being made on a one-size-fits-all basis so far, and even if their title changed, the same trite record was played by the “crappy gramophone” of the Operetta Theatre. “This bleakness was particularly striking in the last years”, until “the ship of operetta sank into the swamp of low standards and adverse messages”.** Such trumpedup accusations between 1945 and 1949 created a hostile atmosphere, in which the Operetta Theatre “was tumbling, Szabolcs Fényes did not produce bad performances, but both officials and critics spiked his guns”.*° To avoid the death sentence of the genre,** Margit Gaspar began a rescue action aimed at integrating operetta into a theatrical ideal that matched communist salvation history and creating “a myth of origin” for operetta in the spirit of Marxist historiography. The very first summary of this was published in the year of Students of Vienna, and the 15-page booklet argued that operetta was not a product of capitalism, but a genre with a history of 2,000 years, dating back Over the next five years, the number of actors (supported by 21 assistant actors) rose to 41, choir singers to 44, dance choir members to 26, and orchestra members to 40. Cf. Szirtes, in Az operett kerdeseiröl, 77-78. István Fejér: Kapunyitás az Állami Operettszínházban, Színház és mozi, Vol. 2, No. 39, 29'* September, 1949, 6. 34 (L.J.): "Bécsi diákok", 6. 35 Emil Sivó: Kár volt államosítani?, Színház 23:9 (1990), 10. There was "a peoples democracy" where this judgment was made. Cf. "Last year the manager of the Bucharest operetta theatre and a composer named Kirkulescu visited us [whose There Was No More Beautiful Wedding premiered at the Operetta Theatre in Budapest on 5'" May, 1953 with moderate success] and they said that they were not allowed to play operettas for years, since operetta was expelled from Romanian stages.” Speech by Jenö Semsei, in Az operett kérdéseiről, 2. s 24 e
