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IMRE APÁTHY: ORPHEUS, 1952 Democrats”. So Orpheus became involved in the campaign against pacifism, which used to be a swear word at that time: against the “bourgeois attitude” of those who also wanted peace, but refused to fight. However, the production was reproached for getting stuckin just “dreaming of peace”, in spite ofsome sentences about “the importance of fighting for peace”.°* On the other hand, Orpheus was also implicated in the anti-Social Democrat campaign of the Hungarian Working People’s Party, which systematically destroyed its internalized enemy between 1950 and 1952.’ All in all, ten days before the country celebrating the 60" birthday of “Stalin’s best Hungarian disciple”, ie. Mátyás Rákosi with much ado on 9" March, 1952, the production, written with remarkable ingeniousness despite its schematism, was interpreted as an example of the Operetta Theatre’s willing to comply. Ultimately, its creators could get over everything the superior institutions expected. Since “the dramatic literature of the 1948-1949 season had been condemned to be politically uncertain”, Hungarian playwrights had to “commit themselves firmly to socialist realism for the following season. Nevertheless, [...] anti-imperialist themes as well as the ‘fight for peace’ were missed and anti-church propaganda was found too weak.”#5 Orpheus focused on these shortcomings and weaknesses, even more diversely than promised by the central season planning for 1951-1952, when it was only mentioned that its “new text would satirize the relationship of the White House and the American underworld”.*°” As a tendentious refashioning of a classic, Orpheus became the season’s second premiere between The Women of Szelistye and The State Department Store, two new Hungarian operettas with a historical and a contemporary story, respectively. It was based on the lesson learned from the rewriting of The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein two years earlier, and sharply distanced from the profile of the Févarosi Vig Theatre, which started at the beginning of that season and was “planned to be transformed into a theatre of operettas from an unspecified revue theatre”.»* Although some of the productions staged under the management of Margit Gaspar so far failed in official judgement, 253 Gábor Antal: Orfeusz. Hámos György operettje a Fövärosi Operettszinhäzban, Magyar Nemzet, Vol. 8, No. 64, 16 March, 1952, 7. 254 Tbid. — “When planning the 1950-1951 season, Brecht’s classic, Mother Courage and Her Children from the German Democratic Republic was considered to be staged [certainly not in the Operetta Theatre]. However, it was treated with caution, since objections were raised to the ‘alleged pacifist’ tendencies of the work. As a result, it was only in March 1968 that this play could be staged.” Korossy: Szinhaziranyitas, 100. Cf. “Social Democrats could not be forgiven for agreeing with [Istvan] Bethlen in 1921 and operating within a legal framework and often in alliance with the various bourgeois parties throughout the Horthy Era." Ignác Romsics: Magyarország a XX. században, Budapest, Osiris, 2010, 229. Korossy: Színházirányítás, 86. The National Archives of Hungary, M-KS 276. f. 89.cs. 399. Korossy: Színházirányítás, 109. 25: a 251 a 25 S 25: ® +61 +
