Oldal 50 [50]
MILITARIZING OPERETTA, OR THEATRE CRITICISM AS WAR PROPAGANDA
"the wax figures of bourgeois operettas wearing different evening dresses but
being the same”! and also its focusing on the people itself.°° According to
the idea of operetta’s being a political genre, they also projected a new canon
behind Free Wind, based on musical plays said to be “expressions of their
time”!
All these things were attributed to Dunayevsky’s outstanding merit, but
the music, which was actually his product, but also reworked, received less
attention. The 1947 Soviet radio recording of the operetta does not confirm
Margit Gaspar’s remark that Free Wind was a “real jazz operetta” that could
not be staged in its original form because “jazz was considered extremely bad
at the time” and “classified along with Coca Cola as harmful capitalist excise
goods”.!%® There is no record in the archives either that the re-orchestration was
“made at the request of the Music Association”. However, the piano-vocal
score of the production at the Budapest Operetta Theatre makes it clear that
the music was also adjusted to the reworked play, and this musical adaptation
was carried out by Tibor Polgár." The theatre advertised Free Wind as a grand
operetta and the orchestra certainly played it as such, so Endre Székely could
added foperetta romanticism" to this not so well-defined term, and he found it harmful in
its old form, because "it stood for a pile of illusions behind which there was no content. It
consisted of false passions, behind which there was no heroism. It included gaiety behind
which there was no humor.” (Ibid., 12-13) However, he found it acceptable in Free Wind in
its new form, full of ideas and optimism.
L. J.: Szabad szel, 6. - What the article called the creation of “living and real” characters
was in fact the substitution of old stereotypical figures with new ones, who do not offer more
opportunity for acting than characters from other/previous operettas.
Cf. “The tale is not about the frivolous adventures of fatigued counts and grand duchesses in
love, but about the people of a port, brave sailors willing to fight. We care about their fate,
because they are like us, because they feel, think and love like ordinary people really do.”
The scenes where port people are hiding Marké from the police give “a magnificent picture
of folk humor and solidarity of workers ready to fight”. Ibid.
Cf. “Offenbach ridiculed French colonial exploitation in his ‘Perocola’ [i.e. La Périchole,
1868], Suppé’s ‘Donna Juanita’ [1880] aroused sympathy for the Spanish freedom fighters,
Lecoques [i.e. Charles Lecocq] depicted the ‘heroes’ of Thermidor satirically [in La Fille de
Madame Angot, 1873]. The classics of operetta were not afraid of politics, they did not put
their heads into the sand and their hits always came from feelings that everyone shared and
understood. They spotted the weakness in the structure of society and politics, and their best
examples gave distorted mirrors of their time. [...] Dunayevsky does the same: his operetta is
an anti-imperialist play, a flag in today’s anti-war protests.” Fogarasi: Szabad szél, 484-485.
Banos: A színigazgató, 26.
16° Ibid.
Tibor Polgär is mentioned only by Margit Gaspar (Ibid.), his name cannot be found in any
documents related to Free Wind. His first work was the re-orchestration of The Grand
Duchess of Gerolstein in the nationalized Operetta Theatre. It was followed by the musical
adaptation of Orpheus, another operetta by Offenbach. He also set Vernon Beste’s An
American in London to music in 1956. The successful hit composer first worked with
Margit Gaspar in 1946 on the production of her play, New God in Thebes at the Belvárosi
Theatre. Cf. Tamas Gajdé: Théba vagy Verona? Gaspar Margit politikai reviije 1946-ban,
Irodalomismeret 26:3 (2015), 40.
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