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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). 812 81. u 81. a + 164 +
