Oldal 40 [40]
A REFASHIONED IMAGE OF REVOLUTION AS MUSICAL THEATRE
was intensified by László Váradys "sparklingly energetic" musical direction.''?
Várady and some of the musicians came from Szeged, where he had reformed
playing operas with Viktor Vaszy. The reputation of the Operetta Theatre
was raised by the fact that Varady, its music director, had graduated as a
student of Zoltan Kodaly and Led Weiner and gained experience in German
opera houses as an assistant to Bruno Walter and Wilhelm Furtwängler.
Margit Gäspär’s company could set high standards not only because of
excellent actors, directors, designers and dancers, but also because of first¬
rate conductors, mainly Tamäs Brödy and Ferenc Gyulai Gaäl in addition
to Värady. “Such a company worked in the Operetta Theatre neither before
nor after.”!'?
IMPACT AND POSTERITY
Theatres picked up and dropped Students of Vienna fairly quickly, but its
performance at the Operetta Theatre made the genre and the stars of operetta
also popular for a new audience. According to an entry in the promptbook
and the cultural statistics of the Ministry of Culture, 95,103 spectators saw
Students of Vienna in 96 performances held en suite until 26* December,
1949. At the time of its last performances in Budapest, its premiere took place
in Miskolc, and three more theatres (in Kecskemét, Szeged and Pécs) produced
it within the next four months. Later it was played only in Kaposvar in 1960
and 1974 (but not in the spirit of Tamas Ascher’s politically rather frivolous
State Department Store), and this fact shows its close connection to the period
of communist takeover and to the idea of revolution after World War II.
However, it played an important role in 1949 in making operetta beloved of a
new audience, as Students of Vienna was played for people with a new type of
season ticket and for larger groups as well, similarly to other productions in
nationalized theatres, so auditoriums were “mostly filled with workers”.' Old
devotees of the genre may have bought a large number of tickets too, but the
audience included at least the same proportion of those who had previously
known operetta only from hits and not from theatrical performances.
According to the evaluation of the Ministry at the end of the season, the
first “experiment of the Operetta Theatre failed, due to concessions to the
12 Téth: Kapunyitas, 7.
18 György Szirtes: Színház a Broadway-n, Budapest, Népszava, 1990, 28.
M Korossy: Színházirányítás, 91. — Artists of state theatres created brigades to go to factories,
hold cheerful shows and sell season tickets themselves. In addition, “cheaper tickets were
sold for workers and soldiers, so about two-thirds of the theatres’ capacity was filled with
organized audiences”. (Ibid., 60.) In the 1949-1950 season 140,000 of the approximately
2,100,000 tickets available in theaters in the capital were booked by state agencies, 450,000
were sold as season tickets and 550,000 to groups. (Ibid., 91.)
+ 38 +