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PATRIOTISM TURNED INTO SOCIAL ISSUE
demonstration”®!! on which the film was based, it was indeed the first theatre
performance of the rock opera. By that time, the play had already been
successful in four versions. (1) In August 1983, it was performed seven times
in the City Park (Városliget) in Budapest, on the so-called King Hill (simply
sledding hill before that) in front of more than 100,000 spectators. (2) In the
wake of the event Gábor Koltay made a feature film, which was seen by more
than one million people. (3) More than 200,000 copies were sold from the
two-disc recording made by Hungaroton. (4) In the summer of 1984, Stephen
the King was staged at the Szeged Open-Air Festival and was played to full
houses several times.
The 1983 antecedent of the National Theatre’s production sought a vast
emotionalimpact,*” using effects that provoked some controversy (particularly
a large tricolor pulled out during the national anthem that closed the show),
“not sublimating them into aesthetics, but in a rather direct way”.*? The siege
of Hungarian national consciousness mainly aimed at impressing the “peace
generation”, i.e. raising the national feeling of young people who “have heard
our holiest piece of national music mostly at school celebrations or before
football matches only”.*'* Seven years after “the return of the holy crown
of St. Stephen” from the United States,®' in the heyday of the dance house
movement, the country’s number one theatre made it possible to experience
811 The term was used by Imre Kerényi at 10:45 a.m. on Petôfi Radio on 23" September, 1985,
Transcript for the Hungarian Theatre Museum and Institute.
It was also highlighted by Tim Rice after a production he saw in Szeged. (Cf. Erzsébet Sebes:
István, a király angolul? Budapesten az Evita sz6vegk6nyvirdja, Vasárnapi Hírek, Vol. 2, No.
7, 16 February, 1986, 11.) Rice visited a performance of the National Theatre too a year and
a half later. He was invited by the Fonogräf GMK and the Hungarian Copyright Office to
write the English-language libretto for the rock opera. The planned London show, however,
has never been produced.
Tamás Koltai: Történelem kontra Magyarország, Élet és Irodalom, Vol. 29, No. 40, 4th October,
1985, 13.
84 Péter János Sós: István, a helyén, Magyar Hírek, Vol. 38, No. 45, 9* November, 1985, 17. —
The rock opera by Levente Szörényi and János Bródy corrected the one-sidedness of the
socialist politics of memory, which was based on overshadowing the figure of Stephen I (c.
975-1038), who established feudalism, made Christianity a state religion and was canonized
in 1083. All these achievements were considered problematic in terms of the historical
perception that prevailed after 1949. In contrast to Gabor Koltay’s film, Imre Kerényi’s
staging corrected another one-sidedness, namely the unreflected cult of Stephen (in which
only the saint is highlighted, not the man), i.e. the exaggerations of the idea of “St. Stephen’s
State”, particularly popular between the world wars and defined by Prime Minister Pal
Teleki as “the unification of two contents of our soul, the Hungarian and the Christian”. Cf.
Pal Teleki: A szentistvani állameszme, Beszéd a Katolikus Nagygyűlésen, 1939. május 19-én,
https://mek.oszk.hu/10300/10338/10338.htm (accessed 29 January 2021).
Cf. Return of the Holy Crown of St. Stephen, https://hu.usembassy.gov/embassy/budapest/
embassy-history/return-holy-crown-st-stephen/ (accessed 29 January 2021).
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