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FREEDOM FIGHT FOR LOVE, AN EXCELLENT FARCE AND SOME MUSIC BY LEHÄR the background (though we would recommend stronger lighting there, since half-light is too much for half an hour), then the beautiful proportions of the ballroom and the severe simplicity of ‘the hall of truth’. Add to this the beautiful clothes, costumes and the spectacular ballet in Act II. The audience is really pleased to see all that.”**° The fact that critics did not pay enough attention to the description of scenography can be probably explained by its “invisibility”. When following the visual traces of the production, we see rather old-fashioned sets on photos that show us the space with actors in the center. An ornate romantic panorama picture largely based on painted elements in the first act, and a lavish but nondescript interior of a palace in the second, which appear to be the remnants of previous sets. The playbill reveals that the set designer was Tibor Bercsényi, who had also worked on the production of The Count of Luxembourg, directed by Vilmos Tihanyi in May 1944, in the middle of a city occupied by the Germans. We do not know that after successful cooperation with designers of the Opera House, why the management of the nationalized Operetta Theatre, wishing to remove the “dust” from the tradition of Lehar and Kalman, asked Bercsényi, who had designed some forty shows at the “old” Operetta Theatre, and Teréz Nagyajtay, who had also been frequently employed as a costume designer before 1949, to take part in the new version of The Count of Luxembourg. In contrast to the intentions of the mise-en-scéne, the two designers turned the production back towards tradition, which may have been a component of “cocking a snook at a world” in order to reproach it “by its own means, by the mood of operettas itself”, but there was no evidence of this.* We cannot assume, therefore, that the old-school set would have acted as a peculiar alienation effect in the mise-en-scéne open (mostly theoretically, of course) to the Brechtian way of understanding theatre, and the attractive costumes did not have “the politics of the sign” (Roland Barthes) either. The fact that the achievement of the orchestra and Laszlé Varady, who was conducting the opening performance, was mentioned with no special emphasis, can be explained with the serious cutting of Lehar’s music and its rendering into an almost entirely accompanying role. IMPACT AND POSTERITY Besides the 1954 production of The Csdrdds Princess, The Count of Luxembourg has the most prestigious history of effect from the 1949-1956 period of the Operetta Theatre. In fact, this history can already be observed 125 Balázs: Luxemburg grófja, 564. 126 Mátrai-Betegh: Luxemburg grófja, 5. + 92 +
