Staging the Nation: Opera and Nationalism in 19th-Century Hungary [1 ed.] 9789004347229, 9789004347212

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Staging the Nation

National Cultivation of Culture Edited by Joep Leerssen (University of Amsterdam) Editorial Board John Breuilly – Katharine Ellis – Ina Ferris Patrick J. Geary – Tom Shippey – Anne-Marie Thiesse

volume 15

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ncc

Staging the Nation Opera and Nationalism in 19th-Century Hungary By

Krisztina Lajosi

leiden | boston

Cover illustration: A scene from a historical play with the auditorium of the National Theater in 1846. Copper engraving by Alajos Rohn. From the Collection of Theater History at the Hungarian National ­Széczényi Library, Budapest. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lajosi, Krisztina, author. Title: Staging the nation : opera and nationalism in 19th-century Hungary / by Krisztina Lajosi. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2018] | Series: National cultivation of culture ; Volume 15 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018001109 (print) | LCCN 2018002366 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004347229 (E-book) | ISBN 9789004347212 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Opera--Political aspects--Hungary--History--19th century. | Opera--Hungary--19th century. | Nationalism--Hungary--19th century. Classification: LCC ML3917.H86 (ebook) | LCC ML3917.H86 L35 2018 (print) | DDC 792.509439/09034--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018001109

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1876-5645 isbn 978-90-04-34721-2 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-34722-9 (e-book) Copyright 2018 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

In Memory of John Neubauer (1933–2015)

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Contents Acknowledgements ix Introduction: Opera and National Consciousness 1 1 National Opera as a Political Force 12 2 The Struggle for a National Theater 33 3 Taking the Stage: Opera in the Hungarian Theater 56 4 Hunyadi László 79 5 Bánk Bán 111 Conclusion: The Opera Chorus and the Voice of the People 155 Bibliography 165 Index 173

Acknowledgements This book is a testimony to a life-long love for music and opera, and an ongoing preoccupation with understanding nationalism. I grew up in multicultural miraculous Transylvania, where three historical nationalities – Romanians, Hungarians and Germans – shared the public sphere with each other, mostly peacefully, but occasionally riven with nationalistic tensions orchestrated by various political actors. In the years after the collapse of communism, political discourse, which was previously a patriotic rhetoric based on distinctions between class and ideology, was replaced by an identity politics seeking to turn the various ethnic groups against one another. This shift meant that people in their daily lives were constantly reminded of their nationality. Nationalism became both a public and a personal issue. As cultural identity became a political instrument, the similarities between the practices and rhetoric of nineteenth-century nation-building and the resurgence of nationalism became ­fascinating from a scholarly point of view. Just as in the days of Romantic nationalism, the performances of certain operas and theater plays, the significance of particular statues and monuments, and the emotional symbolism of specific literary documents began to matter and to mobilize people along the lines of their ethnic affiliations. History was repeating itself, sometimes as tragedy and sometimes as farce. My love for opera and music was no doubt also shaped by the fact that I happened to grow up next door to an opera house to which, thanks to my grandmother, I enjoyed unlimited access. Music and singing filled my early days, for which I am eternally grateful to my grandparents and to my wonderful music teacher, Katalin Halmos. “Kati néni,” as everyone called her, made me aware that musical pieces were not simply notes regulated by certain rules, but culturally embedded works of art that were intertwined with the social, religious, and political realities of their time: she taught me that music is a social and cultural practice, and not just the aesthetic manifestation of a composer’s talent and subjective inspiration. Her classes on Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte were magical indeed. The idea to study opera and nationhood together first occurred to me almost a decade ago and took the form of a PhD project. The interdisciplinary link between politics and the cultural history of the opera crystalized in a series of long conversations with the late John Neubauer, to whom this book is dedicated. I first met John – or János, as his family and friends called him – in 2002 during an Erasmus exchange semester in Amsterdam. He encouraged me to apply for a PhD position on the subject of national operas and n ­ ation-building,

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as he believed that such a study could make an important contribution to the understanding of national movements in Central Europe. The proposal was accepted, and I spent probably the best four years in my life reading, thinking, and writing about this fascinating topic. Meanwhile János became not only a mentor but also a close friend and a surrogate father. Besides being an exceptionally dedicated and inspiring supervisor, he was also an amazingly caring human being who made sure that I would not feel isolated or lonely in a life spent working in the seclusion of books. I am eternally grateful to János for generously offering me his time and friendship, for his relentless encouragement, inspiration, and constructive criticism. Similarly, I am deeply indebted to his wife, Ursula Neubauer, who accepted me as a family member, cooked me delicious dinners, invited me to join them for concerts and operas, and gave emotional support throughout the writing process. János was the guiding light of this project, and his memory and inspiration will be cherished forever. He set a high standard for scholarly integrity that I wish to respect and emulate for the rest of my life. The other “doctor father” for this project – to use the German term for PhD supervisor – was Professor Joep Leerssen, whom I met only after I had started my PhD, but who was generous enough to accept my project for supervision without having met me personally. Our cooperation proved fruitful and we seemed to hit it off from the first moment. With his witty attitude, sharp observations, and brilliant insights, Joep made sure that I stayed on the right track and would finish my PhD on time. He monitored my work from a distance, and let me explore and work independently, but nonetheless he was there when I needed help and knew when to plan the supervision meetings, which were always stimulating and fun. Thanks to Joep’s efforts and persistent support, I finished my PhD within the official time of four years. It is also thanks to Joep’s encouragement – not to say nagging – that years after defending my dissertation, I returned to the topic of opera and nationalism and wrote this book. Though one of the most active and busy academics I have ever met, Joep took time to discuss my research with me and continued his mentoring role also during my postdoc period. His friendship is much appreciated and highly valued. Once my PhD was in hand, the project was sidelined for several years devoted to intensive teaching and job juggling among three universities to make ends meet. Not until the dust settled, and I was fortunate enough to be granted tenure, could I focus once again on my own research. Gladly and yet anxiously I dug out the old folders and started rethinking the topic and revising the text. While reviewing the old manuscript, I realized that there was such

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a great d­ istance between the person who wrote the dissertation and the one who was re-reading it that revision was no longer really an option. To do justice to almost a decade of thinking about the subject, I decided to start again from scratch, and to shape the raw material of my dissertation into a new book. Parts of this book have been given as conference talks, and some material has appeared in a different form in some of my published articles. In this new phase, I was working on the manuscript in the teaching-free gaps. This piecemeal approach was sometimes painfully slow, but thanks to the warm encouragement of family and friends, eventually I did complete the book. I owe special thanks to my parents for all their moral support during this busy period. My gratitude also goes out to my old friend Árpád, whose loving support and selfless help through precarious years kept my spirits up. Helga’s true friendship and brilliant insights on politics and Hungarian history also helped to overcome many difficulties, and her flat in Brussels provided muchneeded refuge from the overwhelming pressures. My inseparable chums Géza and Józsi could always be counted on for comic relief and sympathy over a pint of beer. I am also deeply grateful to the staff of The Hungarian Theater Museum and Institute and to Ildikó Sirató, the Director of the Department of Theater Studies of the National Széchényi Library for their generous assistance with primary materials. All images reproduced in this volume are from the Collection of Theater History at the Hungarian National Széchényi Library, Budapest. Likewise, I am very thankful for all the help offered by Ákos Farkas, the knowledgeable librarian at the Musical Collection of the Metropolitan Ervin Szabó Library, who answered all my questions with a patience and professionalism that I have rarely encountered. This intense period of writing was alleviated by visits to Omorovicza in Budapest, which became a haven of rest and reinvigoration. These outings left me relaxed and energized, and the scent of their Queen of Hungary mist enveloped my senses long after each trip. Their location near the opera house and the amazing hospitality of their staff made each occasion feel like a celebration of beauty, tradition, and art. Last but not least, I am immensely grateful to my husband, Gene, whose patience, support, and generous help was essential to the completion of this book. He re-read this text many times, checking each chapter for consistency of style and coherence. His sharp eye for typos and ungrammaticalities, and his unparalleled editorial precision significantly improved the manuscript. Gene’s love and wisdom made me persevere to finish the book, and his invaluable affection, care, and companionship have kept me going ever since and make every moment of our lives an unforgettable adventure.

Introduction

Opera and National Consciousness Amidst the heated discussions of the “opera war,” a public debate that generated a series of pamphlets about the role of the opera and theater in nationbuilding, the director of the National Theater in Pest, József Bajza (1804–58), declared that he would rather support the building of an insane asylum than the construction of an opera house, because psychiatric care is more useful and necessary for the nation than opera. He added, What does the Hungarian nation want first? Opera! And what does the nation want second? Opera! And third, tenth, and twentieth? Opera! ­Always opera! Opera is the pledge for the happiness of this nation. If someone who thinks like this is considered a friend of the opera, then I have to admit that I am not its friend, because I have other convictions, and I cannot make myself believe that the well-being of our nation depends on the opera.1 In the nineteenth century, opera was not only a form of entertainment, or a cultural institution for the wealthy and educated, but came to be regarded a public space where political dramas took place on the stage and often in the auditorium. Not all operas had politics as their subject, but given the mindset of an age shaped by wars and revolutions, politics came nonetheless to define the production and reception of operas. In countries with long operatic traditions, like Italy or France, state politics and the institution of opera were closely intertwined. In Central and Eastern Europe, with few or no national traditions, opera was perceived as a foreign art form accessible only to the aristocracy; as a result, some rejected it altogether, while others strove to transform it into a 1 József Bajza: “Orosz bajnok,” In Tollharcok, ed. Anna Szalai (Budapest: Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó, 1981), 443–59, 450–51. (“Korántsem gúny vagy ellenséges indulatból mondom én, hogy őrültekházát kell inkább pártolni, mint operaházat, hanem komoly meggyőződésből, mert azt hiszem, amaz szükségesebb és nélkülözhetetlenebb egy nemzetnek, és így elsőbb is, mint az opera. […] Mi kell a magyar nemzetnek legelőször is? Azt fogja kiáltani: opera! S mi ­másodszor? opera! mi harmadszor, tizedszer, huszadszor? mindig csak opera! Csak neki operája legyen, megvan minden, mert ebben áll a nemzeti boldogság! Ha az tartatik csak operabarátnak, ki így gondolkodik, akkor én elismerem, hogy az operának nem vagyok barátja, mert nekem más religióm van, és nem vagyok képes magammal elhitetni, hogy nemzetünk jóléte operában álljon.”)

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004347229_002

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Introduction

powerhouse of nationhood. As operas came to be performed regularly in public theaters and became a favorite entertainment of the public, they gained more and more cultural importance and political significance. The rise of nationalism and the growing popularity of the opera were parallel phenomena, especially in Central and Eastern Europe. Therefore, studying the development of national thought and operatic culture side by side can broaden our understanding of both national movements and the history of nineteenth-century operas. The purpose of this book is twofold: to illuminate the role of music and opera in national mobilization, and to explain how nationalism affected the recycling and representation of history on the operatic stage. How did opera transform national and historical consciousness, and how did nationalism impact the history of opera? Culture and politics were intertwined in complex ways: music served as a mobilizing practice in nation-building movements, while the national idea became a dominant creative force in the musical practice of the nineteenth century. As Philip V. Bohlman argues, “Music does far more than symbolize and articulate nationalism: music actually participates in the formation of nationalism.”2 National music and national opera, which played a vital role in shaping nineteenth-century national identity, need to be understood as cultural phenomena produced by the interaction of contemporary aesthetic theories with their social and political contexts. The study of nineteenth-century nationalism would be incomplete without analyzing the role of music and musical theater. The case of Hungary is especially relevant here because opera was the subject of numerous political and cultural debates in the nineteenth century, and the popularity of opera had political consequences: it turned middle-class audiences into political crowds. Music became a topic of public interest and was regarded as a marker of national identity comparable to the national language or the national dress. The fact that nationalist ideologies affected the works and the thoughts of many nineteenth-century composers is well known and thoroughly researched; but what is less well known is that music and opera were also important constitutive factors for the formation of the Hungarian national consciousness. Hayden White has challenged the reigning orthodoxies of historical studies by insisting that historical investigation is necessarily textual, since the events of the past are not directly accessible to perception, and by arguing that

2 Philip V. Bohlman, The Music of European Nationalism. Cultural Identity and Modern History (Santa Barbara, California – Denver, Colorado – Oxford, England: abc clio, 2004), 35.

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­cultural artefacts can justifiably be seen as the subjects of historical studies.3 Music seems more resistant to immediate interpretation than literary texts or visual artefacts. Except for certain obvious musical genres, such as national ­anthems or military marches, music seems to belong to the realm of pure aesthetics, and appears completely independent from politics. However, the autonomous status granted to music is an assumption rooted in nineteenth-­ century ideology.4 Music was never performed or written in a cultural and political vacuum; it has always been created and perceived in a dynamic interaction with its intellectual and socio-political environment. The social and political role of music increased especially in the nineteenth century, when music and musical theater became important factors in shaping what Jürgen Habermas calls the public sphere. Therefore, as Hayden White has argued for literary texts, music is a relevant and important research topic for historians as well. In his essay “The Burden of History,” White described what he calls the “Fabian tactic” used by historians to defend their discipline against hard-core sociologists who reproach them for the “softness” of their methods, while with respect to art they defend history as a kind of “semi-science” different from experimental or mathematical fields of study.5 However, this comfortable and epistemologically neutral middle ground claimed by historians does not exist, according to White. He concludes: “history can serve to humanize experience only if it remains sensitive to the more general world of thought and action from which it proceeds and to which it returns.”6 National music is largely contingent on political and ideological factors and cannot be understood within an isolated musicological framework. Nationalism was not simply the extra-musical context in which much of the musical production and consumption took place, but a constitutive part of music as a social and cultural practice.7 At the same time, the formation of national 3 See Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1973) and Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1978). 4 See Lydia Goehr, The Quest for Voice. On Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy (Oxford – New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 5 Hayden White, “The Burden of History,” in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1978), 27–50, 27. 6 Hayden White, “The Burden of History,” in Tropics of Discourse, 50. 7 The famous scholar of musicology, Carl Dahlhaus, denied the existence of the “purely musical,” criticized the possibility of a sharp distinction between “musical” and “extra-musical,” and emphasized the role of language and discourse in musical perception. See Carl Dahlhaus and Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, Was ist Musik? (Wilhelmshaven and Amsterdam: Heinrichts­ hofen, 1985).

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Introduction

­identity and national consciousness owes much more to culture and cultural practices than is generally realized in critical studies of nationalism. The ­cultivation of culture – in the sense in which Joep Leerssen has defined this idea – played an indispensable role in shaping national thought in nineteenth-­ century Europe.8 According to Leerssen, nationalism can be seen “as something that emanates from the way people view and describe the world – in other words, as a cultural phenomenon, taking shape in the constant backand-forth between material and political developments on the one hand, and intellectual and poetical reflection and articulation on the other.”9 Twentieth-century studies of nations and nationalism have focused predominantly on political and social explanations; if culture was considered at all, it was seen as a side-effect or corollary expression of political ideas, but not as an active agent in shaping national thought and national feelings. Only a few scholars of nationhood, among them Benedict Anderson, Anthony D. Smith, John Hutchinson, and Joep Leerssen, have regarded the cultural component of nationalism as of equal importance to the social and political factors. ­Anderson contends that “print-capitalism” was crucial to nation-building: the co-existence of advanced print technology and modern infrastructure made the mass production of books and newspapers possible, which created a sense of temporal and spatial self-awareness among the various groups of people living within the borders of a state.10 According to Anderson, literature, and historical novels in particular, played a significant role in creating a collective identity and disseminating the idea of national belonging. Hutchinson points out that nineteenth-century cultural nationalists have often been neglected and underestimated in the scholarly literature; he argues that the cultural nationalist intelligentsia were not backward ethnocentric defenders of cultural heritage, but on the contrary, that they played a major role in the education and modernization of their communities. “The return to the folk, in short, is not a flight from the world but rather a means to catapult the nation from present backwardness and divisions to the most advanced stage of social development.”11 Leerssen emphasizes the role of antiquarianism, ­sociability, 8 9 10 11

Joep Leerssen, “Nationalism and the Cultivation of Culture,” in Nations and Nationalism 12 (4), 2006, 559–78. Joep Leerssen, National Thought in Europe (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 14. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 45. John Hutchinson, “Cultural Nationalism and Moral Regeneration,” in Nationalism, eds. John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 122–31, 129.

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civic cultural initiatives, cultural activism, and the institutionalization of culture by the state in the creation and perpetuation of national consciousness. In his model of the cultivation of culture, language, discourse, material culture, and performative practices interact with one another and play equally ­important roles in the preservation, production, and propagation of national identity.12 Smith takes up a position against the modernist view of nationhood and maintains that modern nations more often than not co-opted ethnic or religious ideas that preceded nineteenth-century national thinking. Ethnocultural roots based on religion, language, or legal traditions are key factors for self-definition, territorialization, and the creation of symbolic structures that secure the sustainability of the nation. In his theory Smith attributes a significant role to myths and heroes worshipped as moral role models for the nation. The persistence and durability of national communities is due to cultural resources which can be used for various political purposes in different historical contexts.13 Stefan Berger concurs with Smith’s view on the role of myths in nation-building and highlights the importance of what he calls mythistory for national master narratives and regional and national identities. Berger concludes that mythologies and histories have intermingled so that it is almost impossible to delineate myths from history. “Even the self-consciously professional writing of history contributed to the construction of myths which came to underpin assumptions of national character and national identity.”14 To describe general patterns of nation-building, theorists of nationhood have tried to develop categories (such as civic, ethnic, regressive, progressive, reactionary, or liberal nationalism) which overlap with one another more often than not. There is no one-size-fits-all theory or model when it comes to nationalism and the genealogy of nations. The origins of nations, the persistence of national consciousness, and the emotional appeal of national ideals have been subjected to ongoing debates among the three major schools of thought in nationalism studies: the modernist, the perennialist, and the priomordialist. The modernist school, mostly associated with Ernest Gellner, Elie Kedourie, Eric Hobsbawm, John Breuilly, and Benedict Anderson, argues that nations are basically the products of bourgeois capitalism and urbanization, created by modern technology, infrastructure, public transportation, the spreading of 12 13 14

Joep Leerssen, “Nationalism and the Cultivation of Culture,” in Nations and Nationalism 12:4 (2006): 571. Anthony D. Smith, The Cultural Foundations of Nations. Hierarchy, Covenant, and Republic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 30, 33, 39. Stefan Berger, “On the Role of Myths and History in the Construction of National Identity in Modern Europe,” European History Quarterly 39:3 (2009), 490–502, 491.

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Introduction

literacy, and education. These factors in various combinations determined the emergence of nations. Perennialists like Adrian Hastings, Susan Reynolds, or Anthony D. Smith contend that in some cases, for example in England, there is a demonstrable institutional continuity between the medieval and the modern nation. These scholars regard the modernist view of nations as myopic because modernist theories cannot account for the earlier forms of ethnic conflict and mass sentiment that played a key role in (for example) the European peasant revolts in the centuries preceding the age of modern nation-building.15 In their view, religion, ethnicity, and kinship should therefore be considered as constitutive factors of modern nations. Primordialism, which has acquired a negative connotation of essentialism and naturalism, has two major branches, one based on socio-biological arguments and the other on emotional and socio-cultural theories. The first version, represented mainly by Pierre Van den Berghe,16 holds that the resilience of nations and ethnic groups can be explained in terms of genetic and biological reproductive drives. This claim is largely discredited mainly because the ancestral myths fail to correspond with the actual scientific lines of descent, and the theory generalizes from the level of the individual to that of the collective. The second version is more viable and is associated with scholars like Edward Shils and Clifford Geertz. They seek to explain the passions and strong attachments associated with the collectivity of ethnie and nation. Primordialists stress the “participants’ primordial” sense of belonging and the importance of the “assumed cultural ‘givens’ of social existence.” Nationalism as passion cannot be explained only in a modernist paradigm, because as Geertz has argued, the coerciveness of culture and assumed relations of kinship and blood are present in African or Asian pre-industrial societies.17 However, as Smith notes, such a paradigm “can hardly serve as an historical or sociological explanation for the various kinds of cultural community, or for their transformation in time. Nor can such a paradigm shed light on why people become attached to certain historic collectivities and not others (for example, Germany rather than Prussia), and why such attachments vary in scope, intensity and timing.”18 15

16

17 18

See Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood. Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) or Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1999). See Pierre Van den Berghe, “Race and ethnicity: a sociobiological perspective,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 1:4 (1978), 401–11, and “Does Race Matter?” Nations and Nationalism 1:3 (1995), 357–68. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (London: Fontana, 1973), 259–60. Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), 54.

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The unresolved debates between modernists and perennialists about the genealogy of nations have been addressed by Aviel Roshwald in his wide-­ranging and carefully argued book about the resilience of nationalism. R ­ oshwald elucidates the tension between the need for stability and continuity and the complexities of social and political reality. These two factors often clash with each other or are co-opted in support of each other, but they do not invalidate each other: The conception of the nation as an immortal collective entity that provides comfort and a sense of meaning for the mortal, modern secular soul, is fully acknowledged in much of the modernist school’s writing on nationalism. […] The modern nation seeks to resist the flow of time in more profound ways – in ways that would commonly be considered as characteristically pre-modern. The nation is not just eternal – it is timeless. It is the timelessness of the nation that lends structure and meaning to the flux and change of historical time. This atemporal quality is embodied by certain archetypal figures (e.g. Joan of Arc) and events (e.g. the Bar Kokhba revolt) with which the nation regularly needs to reconnect.19 Roshwald examines annual commemorative national holidays or festivals that create the sense of cyclical time, comparable to religious celebrations. The performing arts, like music, theater, or opera, are by definition suitable both for creating a timeless sense of the nation and for re-presenting and reshaping archetypal figures (e.g. national heroes like László Hunyadi or Bánk Bán) and events (e.g. battles against the Ottomans or the Habsburgs). In the case of music and opera, evocative fragments with symbolic functions (e.g., the Rákóczi March, or certain arias or choral pieces) can be recycled, disseminated, and repeated as individual pieces in various contexts. These fragments function not only as metonymies for the operas or the musical works from which they are taken, but also as souvenirs of national cultural memory as a whole. Music and opera were both the subjects and the media of nationalist mobilization in the nineteenth century. They were shaped by a public discourse suffused with nationalist sentiments, and at the same time they were the mediators and carriers of nationalistic messages across different social layers and geographic locations. Operas were clusters of memories and nationalist passions, disseminating them every time they were performed.

19

Aviel Roshwald, The Endurance of Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 76.

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Introduction

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, operas were presented mostly in the theaters of royal aristocratic courts, but in the nineteenth century public opera houses were built all over Europe. They could admit a much larger and a socially much more diverse audience. While previously only a narrow stratum of society was privileged to attend opera performances, in the nineteenth century opera houses opened basically to anyone who could afford to buy a ticket. Not only aristocrats, but also middle-class and lower middle-class citizens were sitting in the audience. In earlier times they might never have met or had the chance to share the same space, but in the theater this was possible, which also gave a sense of community and collectivity. The stories presented to them evoked cultural and historical memories that were already familiar to every educated – and not so educated – person in the audience. National operas usually contain an important dramatic moment of recognition. Usually this was the protagonist’s realization that his or her identity had been erroneously interpreted or misrepresented in the past, and that this would have to be rectified in the future. This dramatic moment of recognition was linked to the poetic representation of the act of national awakening. In his study of nationalist discourses, Ernest Gellner notes that “Probably the most commonly used word in the nationalist vocabulary is: awakening. […] The root of the word is the same as that which occurs in ‘the Buddha,’ but of course what is at issue here is national, not spiritual awakening.”20 Recognition is always cultural and temporal, and it always involves memory. As Paul Ricoeur argued in The Course of Recognition, it is necessary to separate the idem identity (the same as itself) from the ipse identity (changing identity). The ipse identity is always grounded in the historical condition.21 Ricoeur also introduces a third kind: narrative identity, which places the idem and ipse identities in dialectic relation. Narrative identity also involves another dialectic: identity confronted by otherness. Identity in this sense has two sides: a private and a public one. According to Ricoeur, It is worth noting that ideologies of power undertake, all too successfully, unfortunately, to manipulate these fragile identities through symbolic mediations of action, and principally thanks to the resources for variation offered by the work of narrative configuration, given that it is always possible to narrate differently. These resources of reconfiguration then become resources for manipulation. The temptation regarding identity 20 21

Ernest Gellner, Nationalism (London: Phoenix, 1997), 8. Paul Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, trans. David Pellauer (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2005), 101.

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that lies in the withdrawal of ipse-identity to idem-identity thrives on this slippery slope.22 Nineteenth-century nationalism, as expressed in public discourse and in the arts, promoted this shift from ipse-identity to a consciousness of idem-identity. The first music histories and literary representations of national music can be approached with an analysis of narrative identity, which is derived from the interaction of the ipse and idem identities. As a multimedia art form, opera has a great impact on the cognitive and emotional capacities of the audience. Sound is an important element of the unifying power of opera: Sight isolates, sound incorporates. Whereas sight situates the observer outside what he views, at a distance, sound pours into the hearer. Vision dissects, as Merleau-Ponty has observed. Vision comes to a human being from one direction at a time: to look at a room or landscape, I must move my eyes around from one part to another. When I hear, however, I gather sound simultaneously from every direction at once: I am at the centre of my auditory world, which envelopes me, establishing me at a kind of core of sensation and existence. […] You can immerse yourself in hearing, in sound. There is no way to immerse yourself similarly in sight. By contrast with vision, the dissecting sense, sound is thus a unifying sense. A typical visual ideal is clarity and distinctness, a taking apart. […] The auditory ideal, by contrast, is harmony, a putting together.23 The space of opera, the theater, is also designed to generate and strengthen feelings of communion. There is no collective noun or concept for readers corresponding to “audience.” The collective “readership” – this magazine has a readership of two million – is a far-gone abstraction. To think of readers as a united group, we have to fall back on calling them an “audience,” as though they were in fact listeners.24 Remembering was not only a personal, Bergsonian experience, but also a socially constructed and present-oriented collective creation, as Maurice ­Halbwachs describes collective memory. In East-Central Europe, the singing of national operas in the vernacular added extra strength to the feeling 22 23 24

Ibid., 104. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (London and New York: Methuen, 1982), 72. Ibid., 74.

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Introduction

of collectivity. Watching an opera, members of the audience could recognize themselves as We rather than I. While earlier operas about aristocrats and their adventures were presented to aristocrats in an aristocratic theater, the protagonists of nineteenth-century operas were the people, or a ruler fighting for his people. The audience was also the people regardless of the social strata to which they belonged, because they all thought of themselves and recognized themselves as being members of a collectivity called the nation. Aristotle argues in his Poetics that in tragedy the auditory nature of the verbal text and the visual realization of the play jointly help the listeners to experience pleasure. Another kind of pleasure is implied by the nature of tragedy as mimesis, since imitation involves recognition, which is pleasurable. When we are watching a tragedy we must engage in a similar process of recognition and understanding, which leads to katharsis or purification. Aristotle claims that music is a perfect vehicle to achieve katharsis. Opera has all the characteristics of tragedy: it combines music, text, and visual elements to produce katharsis and the pleasure of recognition. Opera spectators recognize themselves in ideas with which they are already familiar as individuals belonging to a cultural and national community. They are not only and not primarily an I but a We. The chorus in the nineteenth-century opera also changed its function: while in earlier operas the chorus echoed the feelings and thoughts of individuals and was a conventional structural element, in the nineteenth century it became the voice of the people. It was not only a passive voice but had an active function in the opera both on the textual level of the story and on the musical level, just as in the ancient Greek tragedies before the time of Aeschylus. The chorus functioned both as actor and spectator, and not only as a commentator on the play. Thus the audience of the opera could easily recognize itself in the chorus and identify with it. In Ferenc Erkel’s two most famous operas the heroes, László Hunyadi and Bánk Bán, recognize that they have been betrayed by a ruler whose duty was to protect them. Hunyadi, the heir of the chosen leader of “the people,” cannot continue his father’s legacy because he falls prey to a weak and susceptible king influenced by a devious councilor. The viceroy of Hungary, Bánk Bán, will be betrayed by the Queen who promised to protect his wife while he was absent, but instead helped her brother to seduce Melinda, Bánk’s wife. Bánk is humiliated; his private life is destroyed. But the real moment of truth and recognition for the audience comes when he meets the peasant soldier Tibor, who tells him about the sufferings of the common people in the country. Saddled with this bitter knowledge about the pain and suffering of his people along with his own private disillusionment, he can no longer control his passion and murders the Queen. The way the narrative crystalizes in these dramatic moments makes it

Opera and National Consciousness

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impossible for the audience to sympathize with the Queen or feel pity for her death. The opera as a re-presentation of history becomes the public historical knowledge and thus gains the power to shape national consciousness. Scholars examining the relationship between Hungarian music and nationalism have chiefly focused on Béla Bartók (1881–1945) and Zoltán Kodály (1882–1967), two iconic composers of the twentieth century who regarded the national element as a main organizing principle of their works. In contrast, the ideological embeddedness and cultural and political significance of the œuvre of Ferenc Erkel has received far less attention. Erkel’s works became musical monuments to the nation, they remain popular favorites and are performed regularly; but they suffer the fate of most public monuments: they are taken for granted and rarely receive close attention. It is not historical truth but memorable moments, symbolic struggles, and tantalizing tableaux that withstand the test of time. The legendary history of the middle ages represented in opera would become the cultural consciousness that shaped national identity and the political actions of nineteenth-century audiences. National identity is formed by the dynamic interaction between cognitive and emotional components. The textual and musical elements of opera encompass both these aspects. Music generates emotional solidarity not only through the personal and individual emotional response to the singing and music by members of the audience, but also through the unifying power of singing and the physical presence of the crowd gathered in the opera house. Despite differences in artistic taste, the collective experience of an opera performance unifies the audience. The following study explores the performative nature of national identity and traces in detail the (trans)formations of Hungarian national consciousness through its nineteenth-century operatic heroes and musical expressions.

chapter 1

National Opera as a Political Force Opera audiences in nineteenth-century Europe were by all accounts louder, more emotional, and more politically minded than the opera-going public today. The openly vocal involvement of the public in the operatic plot was more often the rule than the exception. Today the collective spirit and the ­political relevance of nineteenth-century opera have faded, but the stately opera ­houses are still prominent urban sites, reminding us of the central role operas have played in the life of European cities. The theatricality of politics and the political performativity of operas were strongly intertwined. Operas were not just a popular form of entertainment for a growing middle-class public, but were actively constructing and performing a political identity which, in the course of the nineteenth century, came to be defined in terms of nationalism. Despite its cosmopolitan reputation, opera played an important role in creating national identities. Constructivist theories of nation-building maintain that nations were created in the nineteenth century through the interplay of cultural, social, political, and economic factors. Operas had a prominent position in the culture of the upper and middle-class public; by displaying and disseminating models of nationalistic emotions, operas re-presented and rehearsed the act of nation-building with every performance. In the past the socializing aspects of these spectacular musical evenings often outweighed the artistic interests of the public. Gaining a view of high society was just as exciting as admiring the voice and beauty of a famous diva. Both the stage and the audience became a lavish display of the latest societal and political fashions. The popularity and community-building potential of the opera also enhanced the social relevance of its aesthetic appeal. Opera can be seen as the social media of its time, where public opinion was shaped, shared, and debated. Unlike the social media of the twenty-first century, where ideas and information are exchanged exclusively in a virtual sphere, the physical reality of the opera house and its social scope were important factors enabling the creation of networks and communities for whom the opportunity to discuss the latest political news or gossip was just as important, if not more important, than the performances of the opera. The emotions expressed in and evoked by music often “went viral” due to the popularity of musical practices in everyday life. Music became an active form of entertainment; people not only listened to music but also made music together. The

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004347229_003

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popularity of a piece written for the stage could be measured by the frequency with which it appeared on the programmes of singing societies, in piano transcriptions, or at open-air concerts. Because of its mobility and mobilizing effects, music became one of the most potent media that could reach, shape, and unify a massive public. In the eighteenth century “musicking,” to borrow the term coined by Christopher Small, was a private matter;1 but in the nineteenth century it pervaded the public sphere, and the boundaries between private and public emotions became more and more blurred. Gradually operas became more accessible to the general public, and for the first time in history, their success was dependent on public opinion and not on the taste of a monarch, the church, or aristocratic patrons. Traditional institutions were still prominent factors, but the repertoires of opera houses were ultimately determined by the taste of the public. Tickets had to be sold in spite of censorship or the official state ideology. In the nineteenth century, artistic autonomy and freedom were highly appreciated; yet the survival of opera composers was nonetheless profoundly influenced by public opinion, which they, in turn, sought to serve and to shape. One of the greatest changes brought about by the French Revolution was that opera became public. While earlier opera houses had been the properties of royal courts or wealthy aristocrats, in the nineteenth century public opera houses were built all over Europe.2 They were mostly funded by private donations rather than official state support. The public was more versatile and more self-conscious about its role than in the previous centuries. At the same time, public opinion was also influenced by the emerging professional criticism. The interactions of professionals, amateurs, and state authorities shaped the dynamic operatic culture of the nineteenth century. Opera, to a certain extent, was always political: it was used either to endorse the power of the monarch and the state, or served as a parable to convey a political message which the public recognized and understood.3 Nineteenthcentury opera not only reflected nationalistic sentiments, but was arguably a medium that shaped and intensified national consciousness and transformed audiences into political crowds. Operas became amplifiers and active agents 1 Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1998). 2 Before the nineteenth century there were only a few public opera houses in Europe. Among the best known were the Teatro San Cassiano in Venice, which opened in 1637, and the Hamburgische Staatsoper, which opened in 1678. But these were exceptions to the rule. 3 Ruth Bereson, The Operatic State: Cultural Policy and the Opera House (London and New York: Routledge, 2002).

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of nationalism. Crowds gathered in the opera, sympathized with the emotions presented on the stage, transposed them into their own lives, and disseminated the politicized message by repeating their favorite songs and choruses in various contexts outside the opera house. People did not start a revolution after reading a poem or a novel, but some uprisings did actually begin in theaters and opera houses. For example, in France the Opéra as a royal institution came to be seen as a symbol of the ­ancien régime and as such became the target of violent protests before the revolutionary crowd stormed the Bastille. Because the Parisians of the time regarded o­ pera as élite entertainment, their revenge was to demand that all performan­ces be canceled. For the next nine days, both the Opéra and the ­Opéra-Comique remained dark. When they reopened, their themes began to change radically. Instead of libretti that celebrated beloved rulers, selfless aristocrats, and benevolent clergy, there began to appear stories of heroic commoners, rescues from evil officials (Beethoven’s Fidelio being a famous example), and struggles against the severity of the Church authorities. So strong was opera’s influence that the French insurgents felt the need to block its conservative message and replace it with performances that advanced their revolutionary program.4 The Belgian revolution of independence in 1830 was instigated by a performance of Daniel Auber’s opera La Muette de Portici in Brussels. In 1843, after the first hugely successful performance of Verdi’s I Lombardi in Milan, the c­ horus “O Signore, dal tetto natio” was immediately adopted as a patriotic anthem, like the chorus “Va pensiero” from his Nabucco a year earlier. Verdi had to change the settings of his Un ballo in maschera (1859) because the censors did not allow him to present a scene of regicide on the stage. Originally the opera was based on the true story of the murder of Gustavus iii of Sweden, who was shot at a masked ball in Stockholm on 16 March 1792. On 14 January 1858 Felice Orsini had attempted to assassinate Napoléon iii, and the authorities of Bourbon-ruled Naples disapproved of an opera about a regicide. First Verdi refused to make any changes in his opera, and the performance of Un ballo was canceled, which caused upheavals among the people; allegedly thousand of protesters went onto the streets of Naples crying out “Viva Verdi!” Verdi’s decision not to compromise with the authorities was seen as a symbolic act of resistance against the oppressing power. Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Der Freischütz became associated with the performance of the German spirit on the stage, in part because it was the opening performance at the Neue Schauspielhaus in Berlin conceived by Karl 4 Theodore K. Rabb, “Opera, Musicology, and History,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 36:3 (2006), 322.

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Friedrich Schinkel. In its design the royal box had disappeared, suggesting the new ideals of a democratic society, and the traditional horse-shoe shape of the stage was broadened into a wider scene which brought the actors closer to the audience. In this way the audience could “inter-act” with the players and experience the feeling that they themselves were also “in the play.” Margaret King argues that the success of the opening performance in Schinkel’s new theater had almost been guaranteed from the start by its architectural design.5 It was not the intentions of the composers that turned certain operas into national symbols, but the audiences who interpreted them as acts of political performativity. Operas gained popularity both inside and outside the theater: arias and choruses were sung at public gatherings and protest marches, and operatic heroes were regarded as role models and inspired fashion trends. One of the best-known cases is that of the “Ernani hats” that became popular among Italian patriots during the Risorgimento. Because of the obvious political message represented by the hats, the Austrian authorities banned them from public spaces and levied a fine of five écus for anyone caught wearing or selling them; those who committed the crime a second time risked a double fine of ten écus and even arrest.6 Nineteenth-century operas appealed to the general public because the gap between the stage and the audience was constantly diminishing. Instead of gods (Orpheo), kings (L’incoronazione di Poppea), or aristocrats (Don Giovanni), nineteenth-century operas presented the lives of common people suffering from aristocratic or royal oppression (Fidelio) or of entire nations suffering from tyranny (Guillaume Tell, Don Carlos, Nabucco). The libretti, the musical texture, and the settings also played a vital role in popularizing opera all over Europe. While traditionally the language of the libretti was either Italian or French and rarely German, from the early nineteenth century the textual components of the operas were written in new vernacular languages: in Hungarian, Czech, Romanian, Croatian, Serbian, Greek, Danish, or Swedish. The music drew intentionally on local folk songs or dances that also enhanced the spirit of the public, who recognized their everyday rites and entertainments presented on the stage as “high art.” The settings of the plots were deliberately folkish ­(couleur locale), imitating village life, reflecting the local culture and rustic nostalgia of the public. All these factors contributed to diminishing the 5 Margaret King, “Opera and the Imagined Nation: Weber’s Der Freischütz, Schinkel’s Schauspielhaus, and the Politics of German National Identity,” Word and Music Studies 4:1 (2002), 217–28, 221. 6 Carlotta Sorba, “Le ‘mélodrame’ du Risorgimento: Théâtralité et émotions dans la communication des patriotes italiens,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 186–87, 1 (2011), 17.

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gap between the stage and the audience, between high culture and low culture, between people’s lives and the artistic representation of their everyday reality. However, opera was more than only a representation of socio-political reality. It functioned as an active agent to influence the social and political ­atmosphere of the time. What makes an opera national? How could opera houses become the lieux de mémoire of nations? Marshall McLuhan claimed that “the medium is the message”;7 what was precisely the message of the ­opera, and what made this medium so special? “National opera” can refer to a building, a state-sponsored opera company, an operatic genre, or a certain opera which has been preserved in the cultural canon as the expression of the national consciousness of a people. “National opera” as a genre is the most challenging to define. The 1980 edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians includes a definition of national o­ pera in the chapter about “Slavonic and National Opera,” claiming that national o­ peras were the result of a growing sense of national self-consciousness; they used folk music and libretti based on national history, myth, legend, and peasant life to meet the needs of a public eager to witness the operatic display of their cultural heritage. The 2001 edition of The New Grove reduces the treatment to half a page on “National Traditions” and no longer suggests a strong connection between national operas and Slavonic cultures. Instead of the production, the main emphasis is put on the dynamic interplay between the performances and their public reception. The “multiple performances” and the “association with political events” were more significant than the folk material. “The process here is important: rather than appropriating an already existing fund of national musical material, these operas typically constructed the material, becoming ‘national’ through their cumulative reception.”8 Such Volkstümlichkeit (“folksiness”) can be found in most late eighteenthcentury music, especially the opera buffa, where folk motifs were used to imitate and express a couleur locale associated with idyllic peasant life and ­pastoral scenery. The various local styles of peasant figures and the musical lingua franca for all the other characters still reflected a vertical view of society in which class rather than nation was the determining factor of communal identity. However, as soon as folklore and language were considered essential elements of a horizontally defined nation (the nation as cultural community), their cultural value increased – as did the stock of national culture in general,

7 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (London & New York: Routledge, 2003), 7. 8 The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 2001), vol. 18, 438–39.

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since it became a core issue of the newly born public sphere and a recurrent topic of political discourse. Opera, this formerly aristocratic entertainment, became a main expression of cultural nationalism. The romantic exaltation of music was certainly one important factor, but another equally vital component was a political ideology that had already gained importance in theatrical practice through the works of Friedrich Schiller and later Victor Hugo: the liberal claim that a legitimate state should be founded on the will of “the people” rather than on God, a dynasty, or imperial domination. Romantic ethnic nationalism and liberal civic nationalism both played a crucial role in the nation-building movements of the nineteenth century. Opera, and musical theater in general, contributed to the effective public dissemination of a cultural and political self-image. What institutional and historical forces lay behind the development of the theater and opera into a cultural and emotional “factory” of ethnic and civic cohesion and self-image? According to George Steiner, we cannot understand the Romantic Movement unless we recognize its impulse towards drama and dramatization in general.9 Shelley argues in his Defence of Poetry that since drama is the authentic expression of a nation’s soul, the decline of dramatic art marks the decline of the nation: And it is indisputable that the highest perfection of human society has ever corresponded with the highest dramatic excellence; and that the corruption or the extinction of the drama in a nation where it has once flourished is a mark of a corruption of manners, and an extinction of the energies which sustain the soul of social life. But, as Machiavelli says of political institutions, that life may be preserved and renewed, if men should arise capable of bringing back the drama to its principles.10 The idea that the stage and the nation are connected is not new. It can be traced back to the ancient Greeks, where drama, and especially tragedy, was regarded as the highest form of cultural practice. Nineteenth-century thinkers revived this view of the drama and wished to transform the theater into a ­public ­forum as in ancient Greece. Architects like Gottfried Semper (1803–79) and Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781–1841) designed theater buildings in the ancient Greek style – the Neues Schauspielhaus in Berlin, and the theater in Dresden – and published influential theories on the importance of Greek a­ rchitecture 9 10

George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 108. Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, in English Essays: Sydney to Macaulay, Harvard Classics, vol. 27 (New York: Bartleby, 2001).

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in relation to nation-building.11 Later Wagner based his whole concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk on the same Greek revival movement that informed every aspect of the nineteenth century. The inclination towards dramatization in art and the theatricality of the public sphere were essential for the new genre of national opera. For centuries, opera in Italy, France, England, Austria, and Sweden had been used to convey, reinforce, or question political ideas. In cultures with a wellestablished operatic tradition, the nineteenth-century genre of national opera emphasized either a continuity with or a disruption from the previous eras, and reflected new social and political values to strengthen the position of the state. Britain, which is sometimes controversially called “the land without m ­ usic,” has had a rich musical tradition. Because opera was strongly intertwined with political power, it became a site of contestation as early as the eighteenth century. During the Restoration of Charles ii the influence of French musicians grew, and like Louis xiv in France, the English monarch used opera to reinforce his power. Later the plots of operas were more explicitly based on ­“English” ­stories, and during the first period of Thomas Arne’s career, the composer of the famous “Rule, Britannia” made the so-called ballad opera quite popular. Artaxerxes (1762), an opera in the Italian style, brought him real ­success; but his second Italianate opera L’Olimpiade (1765) was an utter failure because the critics reproached him for flirting with the ballad tradition. Arne, as a ­Roman Catholic, was obliged to earn his living in commercial public arenas, and r­ esorted to setting to music domestic historical narratives of large popular interest. According to the critics, he consciously sought to prove his loyalty to Britain by choosing topics from national history and trying to establish an ­English national operatic style. Suzanne Aspden explores the paradox of Arne’s success: on the one hand, the interest in “national” themes was welcome; yet on the other, when he wanted to produce “proper” Italian operas, reviewers criticized him for having dabbled in a provincial style. According to Charles Burney, despite the fact that Arne was a man of real genius, who had on so many occasions delighted the frequenters of our national theatres and public garden, the doctor had kept bad company: that is, had written for vulgar singers and hearers too long to be able to comfort himself properly at the Opera-house, in the first 11

Gottfried Semper, Die vier Elemente der Baukunst (1851), Vorläufige Bemerkungen über bemalte Architectur und Plastik bei den Alten (1834), and Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Sammlung architektonischer Entwürfe (1820–37), Werke der höheren Baukunst (1840–42; 1845–46).

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circle of taste and fashion. […] The common play-house and ballad passages, which occurred in almost every air in his opera, made the audience wonder how they got there.12 Arne’s example throws light on a larger social and political issue: composers who wished to establish an original home-grown style, while at the same time showing that they could master the international idiom, were criticized for their eclecticism. Though the national ballad style was popular among the middle-class public, it could not conquer the hearts and minds of educated aristocratic opera lovers. This class division was marked by a difference in musical taste of the kind described by Pierre Bourdieu in his book Distinctions: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.13 William Weber argues that the nationalistic movement in music emerged earlier in Britain than in France or other European countries, since after the 1790s the Whigs controlled not only British politics but also the cultural establishment.14 According to Simon McVeigh, the foundation of The Society of British Musicians in 1834 can be seen as a landmark in the battle against the exclusion of British musicians from the King’s Theatre, which favoured Italian music.15 Italian opera became a symbol of aristocratic authority, while ­British composers were relegated to non-licensed theaters and pleasure gardens. “Composers fought against their exclusion from key elite venues by promoting their music with an ideology linked to national politics.”16 In France during the July monarchy, grand opera replaced the rescue ­operas of the revolutionary period, drawing on historical plots and constructing a sense of collective experience. Sarah Hibberd shows that the political meaning of grand operas occupied a central position in the mentalités of the period. According to Hibberd, 12 13 14 15

16

Cited in Suzanne Aspden, “Arne’s Paradox: National Opera in Eighteenth-Century ­Britain,” Word and Music Studies 4:1 (2002), 196. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinctions: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (London and New York: Routledge, 2010). William Weber, “Redefining the Status of Opera: London and Leipzig, 1800–1848,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 36:3 (2006), 517. Simon McVeigh, “The Society of British Musicians (1834–1865) and the Campaign for Native Talent,” in Christina Bashford and Leanne Langley, eds., Music and British Culture, 1785–1914: Essays in Honour of Cyril Ehrlich (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 145–68. William Weber, “Cosmopolitan, National, And Regional Identities in Eighteenth-Century European Musical Life,” in Jane F. Fulcher, ed. The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 220.

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In spite of the genre’s democratic reputation and perceived political (usually Revolutionary) topicality then – deriving from the importance of choruses in such works as La Muette and Les Huguenots, and the role that La Muette allegedly played in the Belgian uprising of 1830 – ­audiences […] were more likely to have accessed the past through the stories of individual heroes rather than through generalised representations of “the people.”17 These operas, dismissed by Wagner as superficial spectacle, were in fact displaying an array of political and temporal layers which arguably engaged the attention of the diverse contemporary opera-going élite, who developed a sense of multifocal listening: both the past and the present were constructed in the performance. According to the traditional interpretation, these different temporal planes are straightforward parables of each other; but scholars like Jane Fulcher,18 Steven Huebner, and especially Sarah Hibberd contend that the relationship between the past and the present is much more complex than a direct reflection of each other, and that contemporary audiences were more diverse, with subscribers ranging from noblemen to manufacturers, which excludes the possibility of a single homogeneous response.19 Both the messages of the operas and the political cultures of the audiences were diverse, which makes the idea of a univocal national grand opera highly improbable. In Italy, as in France, opera houses were traditionally interwoven with the politics of sovereign princes who, as Martha Feldman argues, sought to strengthen their position with the help of the opera, and with audiences who used the opera to subvert the established social and political order. The diversity of commercial opera houses in Italy is also an important factor which allowed for the politicization of opera seria in the eighteenth century and its nationalization a century later. According to Feldman, “If opera seria was at the root of the king’s opera, its relations of production and its sociabilities also tested the king, manifesting the very crisis it denied.”20 During the Risorgimento, Italian operas grew into places of protest. Verdi, who was outspoken about his liberal political preferences, appealed to an already militarized public and 17 18 19 20

Sarah Hibberd, French Grand Opera and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 5. Jane Fulcher, French Grand Opera as Politics and Politicized Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Steven Huebner, “Opera Audiences in Paris 1830–1870,” Music & Letters 70:2 (1989), 206–25. Martha Feldman, Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 8.

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became in himself a symbol of the struggle for national unity. “In 1859 the apparently innocent slogan ‘VIVA VERDI!’ was used as an acronym for the more subversive Viva Vittorio Emmanuele, Re d’Italia!”21 The Italians refashioned their long-standing opera tradition as a national art; not a particular opera, but opera in general, opera as a genre, came to be seen as their cultural heritage. When the freedoms of speech and the press were forbidden or censored, singing conveyed a political message more potently and more clearly than any other medium. In Germany, where the Singspiel had a long tradition, in the nineteenth century Romantic operas embodying folk traditions and folk songs came to be regarded as authentically national. “Weber articulated his musical influences (Italian and French as well as German folk) quite consciously, but wrote the Volk idiom into the opera via the contrast between good (rustic peasantry) and evil.”22 In German national operas the Volk element was used not only as couleur locale, but gradually gained a central position. Along with folk culture, myths (such as Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen) were also recycled and deployed to enhance national feelings and create a sense of vast temporal depth that looms beyond historical time and positions the idea of the nation and national culture in the realm of eternity. Barbara Eichner’s thorough study of the relationship between German national identity and musical practices is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the roles played by music and opera in the process of German nation-building. Eichner shows that in the first Vormärz period opera composers emphasized Treue (loyalty) and Freiheitsliebe (love of liberty) as core ­national values. “In the long run neither their endorsement of German values and virtues nor their hybrid musical language was accepted as a perfect solution to the generic problem of German opera.”23 Later, folk elements and myths became less attractive and were replaced by history. For centuries Arminius was treated as a national hero in Germany. From Tacitus to Luther, and from Klopstock to Heinrich von Kleist, many writers used the Arminius theme in their works. According to Eichner, it was the inauguration of a statue by the sculptor Ernst von Bundel in the presence of the Emperor Wilhelm I in 1875 that gave the final impetus to the Arminius fever in

21 22 23

Anthony Arblaster, Viva la Libertà! Politics in Opera (London – New York: Verso, 2000), 93. Suzanne Aspden, “Opera and National Identity,” The Cambridge Companion to Opera Studies, ed. Nicholas Till (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 284. Barbara Eichner, History in Mighty Sounds: Musical Constructions of German National Identity 1848–1914 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2012), 80.

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German music theaters.24 The recycled figure of the hero was a constant element in the German cultural tradition, but the revival of Arminius as a symbol for the German nation in the nineteenth century was a result of the interplay between cultural memory and the performativity of erecting a monument near Detmold, where allegedly in a.d. 9 Arminius united several Germanic tribes and defeated three Roman legions. Cultural practices such as building monuments, commemorating heroes, dramatizing history, and re-presenting and performing the past on the stage all jointly helped to shape, advertise, and disseminate the national image. Celia Applegate argues that before 1871 the state did not actively promote music as a symbol of German identity. However, in the course of the nineteenth century, composers became aware of the social changes around them and were more conscious of their role in promoting German-ness through music. Although nationalistic sentiments definitely fueled the compositions of Richard Wagner, he came to be canonized as the great national German composer only after his death. According to Applegate, “even in the case of Wagner, the composer and his works became mythologized as symbols of German nationalism primarily at the hands of critics, essayists, propagandists, and statesmen, far exceeding what the composer himself ever could have envisioned.”25 A century earlier, during the reign of Joseph ii in Austria in the 1770s, there had been substantial state support and active political involvement in the creation of a German national opera. The Burgtheater in Vienna traditionally hosted French and Italian opera companies, but when standards began to decline in the latter half of the eighteenth century, the Emperor […] issued a document in March 1776 bringing the Burgtheater under strict control and declaring that it would henceforth be known as the Deutsches National-Theater. The company set about staging German plays, and on free days the theatre admitted touring French and Italian companies. […] Within the space of a few years, Vienna was furnished with five theatres in which native opera was not only permitted but given strong imperial encouragement.26

24 25 26

Ibid., 84. Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter, Music & German National Identity (Chicago and ­London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 12. John Warrack, German Opera: From the Beginning to Wagner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 128–29.

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Following the example of these institutionalizing tendencies in Austria, other cultural communities within the empire also started their own movements to establish a national theater and a national opera. The national opera movement in Eastern Europe was at the same time an act of appropriation and a rejection of foreign models: while imitating foreign examples, composers were looking to use and revive local musical practices that came to be seen as national. As William Everett remarks in an article about Czech and Croatian national opera, “as far as music was concerned, there was an increasing interest in creating national musical styles that were distinct from yet related to a more cosmopolitan – that is, Germanic – approach. This effort for national music ran parallel to similar movements in languages, the visual arts, and literature.”27 The building of a new cultural institution like a theater or an opera house could mobilize crowds not only to contribute financially to the national project, but also to come together and celebrate the event, which often turned into mass political demonstrations. For example, the laying of the foundation stone of the Prague theater in 1868, the year following the Austro-Hungarian compromise of 1867, became the “largest public manifestation in the nineteenthcentury history of Bohemia. The three-day event was attended by some two hundred thousand visitors and had repercussions throughout Central and Eastern Europe. Following the Hungarians’ example, the Czechs called for recognition as a third and equal nation-state within the Habsburg Empire.”28 The cornerstone of the national theater came from the Říp Mountain, a place well-known to Czechs from national history and mythology. Tens of thousands of people participated in mass rallies demanding equal political rights for the Czechs and were singing and making music in celebration of their nation.29 In the nineteenth century the public was sensitized to hidden political messages, so any direct or covert allusion to a national struggle in plays or operas could trigger an uprising. The theater functioned as an amplifier of political emotions: for example after the Polish uprising in 1863, a performance of Mikhail Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar in Moscow led to riots with a furious public

27 28

29

William Everett, “Opera and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Croatian and Czech Lands,” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 35:1 (2004), 64. Philipp Ther, “The Genre of National Opera in a European Comparative Perspective,” The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music, ed. Jane F. Fulcher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 189. Ibid., 189.

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chanting of “Down, down with the Poles!”30 Several performances of Erkel’s Hungarian opera Hunyadi László turned into political rallies, and after the suppression of the revolution for independence of 1849 the piece remained very popular in Hungary and was seen as a sign of protest against the strict censorship and the police state.31 Polish audiences in the Austrian-ruled city of Lwów sang along and applauded certain arias and choruses from Stanisław ­Moniuszko’s The Haunted Manor, which they saw as national anthems, and they became especially emotional during an aria about an old clock that stopped ticking, which the Galician Polish audience associated with the cessation of Polish national history following the partitions of the country at the end of the eighteenth century.32 The public regarded many of these nineteenth-century operas as theaters of national memory in which every character, song, and even the stage design could be seen as carrying some sort of political message that added a second layer to the plots of the operas.33 Even before the nineteenth century, certain operas had been perceived as expressions of national character. One of the most famous controversies concerning the relationship between opera and national character was the Querelle des Bouffons (War of the Comic Actors), a pamphlet war that took place in France between 1752 and 1754. Instigated by a public performance of ­Pergolesi’s La serva padrona at the Académie Royale de Musique in Paris by a group of traveling Italian actors known as buffoni (hence the name of the quarrel), the dispute involved the defenders of the French tragédie lyrique style of Lully and Rameau and the proponents of Italian operatic music. With the exception of the German diplomat Friedrich Melchior Grimm (1723–1807), all the combatants in the pamphlet war were French. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, together with other contributors to the Encyclopédie, supported the Italian opera. One aspect of the quarrel was the relation of language to music: melody must originate from speech, Rousseau argued; it should follow the Italian operatic style and 30 31 32 33

Ibid., 193. Tibor Tallián, “Szikrát dobott a nemzet szívébe”: Erkel Ferenc három operája (Budapest: Rózsavölgyi és Társa, 2011), 242. Ther, 194. Ancient authors, among them Simonides of Ceos, recommended that public speakers should use familiar buildings such as theaters to train their memories and remember their speeches. By associating the elements of a speech with a mental image of the parts of a well-known building, the speaker could easily recall the speech. This ancient mnemonic system was widely used in the Renaissance and was closely associated with imagination. National narratives and operas often used such “common places” which made it possible for the public to activate the repository of their national memory, and this practice gained a prominent position in nineteenth-century cultural discourse.

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should not collapse into an artificial style of singing, as in the French tragédie lyrique. The relation of music to speech was to form the core of Rousseau’s language theories, and thus the quarrel was more than a mere aesthetic debate. From the beginning it also had a political tint, since the French lyrique style was associated with the royal court, and the Italian style with popular public music-making. With mild exaggeration it might be said that the one represented the stiff, aristocratic world, and the other the more democratic and bourgeois society. One of the paradoxes of this “opera war” about national styles was that Lully, the father of the French opera, was himself Italian by birth. This contest between Italian and French styles would gain importance later in the nineteenth century in the Risorgimento period, when the civically committed Italian opera began to mobilize people against both French and Habsburg rule. In his Vie de Rossini, Stendhal remarks that Italian musical selfconsciousness owed a tribute to Napoleon. By the 1840s, the artistic musical embodiment of Italian nationalism was expressed in huge choral unisons that could convey and enhance a collective national consciousness. Singing, especially group singing, became a part of the revolutionary movements. Operatic tunes disseminated like wildfire throughout the whole of Italy. Singing and raising a crowd’s “level of aggression” went hand in hand in the Risorgimento, just as they had done earlier in the French Revolution, or, for that matter, in revolutions in general.34 The interest of late eighteenth-century thinkers in aesthetics and culture was transformed into national self-consciousness during the Napoleonic Wars and developed into national movements of separatism or unification by the mid-nineteenth century. What began as an aesthetic state without nationalistic dimensions, as imagined by Schiller, ended in the aggressive cultural nightmare ruled by Bismarck. The philosopher, folk-song collector, and Protestant clergyman Johann Gottfried Herder forged a link between the romantic ideology of culture and nationalism. Herder coined the word Volkslied (folk song) and was among the early collectors of these rustic or peasant songs. He published them in a two-volume anthology entitled Stimmen der Völker (Voices of the Peoples, 1778–79). In Germany Herder was followed by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, who edited another collection of folk songs, Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn) between 1805 and 1809. The collecting efforts of the brothers Grimm eventually gave a European impetus to an unprecedented

34

See Laura Mason, Singing the French Revolution: Popular Culture and Politics 1787–1799 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).

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passion for folklore, and to a national culture supported mainly by the bourgeois intelligentsia. Like Rousseau, Herder argued that language and music were strongly connected with each other and that language, as the world-view of a cultural community, was the most authentic expression of the nation’s soul or ethos. Herder maintained that no language, and hence no nation, could be deemed superior to another. Small nations contribute to the universal treasury of human civilization as much as the powerful big nations. As a forerunner of modern semiotics, Herder extended the concept of language to other aspects of culture and learned behaviour (such as customs, dress, and art) and argued that ­every cultural component is an authentic expression of the collective spirit and character of the nation. Thus the concept of authenticity was born and became a dominant ideology of the arts until the emergence of the avantgarde movement in the twentieth century. The expression and representation of ­authenticity was regarded as both an inherent property and a goal of Art.35 In Herder’s time Germany consisted of small separate kingdoms and states; what held them together was the German language and its related folklore. Next to the great French monolith that became the feared “Other,” the G ­ ermans tried to identify differences in order to establish their distinct collective identity. The theory that language is the most authentic expression of a nation’s soul became a touchstone of the German arts, and it rapidly radiated to the neighboring cultures as well. It materialized first in the concept of the Nationaltheater, a theater reserved for plays and operas performed in the vernacular. The model was the French Comédie Française. Such theaters appeared first in Hamburg in 1767, and then spread to Vienna in 1776 and to Mannheim in 1778.36 In Vienna, Emperor ­Joseph ii initiated the foundation of the national theater, which came to be called the “Court and National Theater.” This initiative reversed his mother’s, Maria Theresa’s, policy of reserving the Burgtheater exclusively for French and Italian companies. However, Joseph ii cannot be regarded a nationalist in the nineteenth-century sense of the word. His objective was rooted in the universalism and humanism of the Enlightenment, emphasizing the importance of making education available to all the people. Public schooling could expand much more easily in vernacular German than in Latin or French, the privileged languages of the aristocracy. Nevertheless, Joseph ii’s emphasis on ­German culture became one of the most fundamental ideologies of later n ­ ationalists. 35 36

Jean-Marie Schaeffer, “A művészet spekulatív elmélete,” trans. Tamás Seregi, in Nikoletta Házas and Zoltán Varga S., eds., Változó művészetfogalom (Budapest: Kijárat, 2001), 107–25. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 692.

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Furthermore, Joseph ii’s promotion of German as the official language of the Habsburg Empire triggered the resistance of the Hungarian aristocracy. Later, Hungarian linguistic and national awareness generated a similar resistance in the neighboring Romanian, Slovakian, Croatian, and Serbian cultures against Hungarian nationalism. The Viennese court lost control; cultural nationalism spread like wildfire throughout the Empire and eventually led to its disintegration. Georg Lukács argued that, from the point of view of nation-building, the public character of drama and its direct impact on spectators was the great advantage of the historical drama over the historical novel.37 Performance could mobilize the historical awareness of the nineteenth century, especially the staging of opera, which, more than traditional theater, enjoyed the advantages of music and singing. Above all, it was the chorus, a mass of people singing together, that represented the most obvious liaison between life and drama, audience and stage. In the eighteenth century, the theater functioned as a form of entertainment where public opinion was formed and political ideas tested, but later, in the nineteenth century, this function was taken over by the opera. However, it was a special theatrical genre, the melodrama, which attracted the public and defined dramatic poetry for the next century. Peter Brooks argues that in order to understand the passion of the nineteenth century for the theater and for the theatrical in general, we should analyse the “melodramatic imagination” of the age, which began to dominate the public sphere in the time of Napoleon. Melodrama, the French equivalent of the Singspiel, was written for a large public that extended from the petit bourgeois to the Empress Josephine.38 While French melodrama was democratic in style, and directed at a ­popular audience, it was also searching for more aesthetic coherence and self-­consciousness. Brooks traces the origins of the melodrama back to the ­pantomime theater of the late eighteenth century, when only the so-called patented theaters, like the Théâtre-Français, the Opéra, and the Italiens were granted monopolies by state officials to perform both the classical repertory and full-scale new productions. The secondary theaters had to be content with ballets, pantomimes, and puppet shows. Since free speech – and thus ­performing the pieces of the classical repertory – was forbidden, these secondary theaters used music and gesture as their primary means of expression. These musical pantomimes became more 37 38

Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (London: Merlin Press, 1989), 130. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976), xii.

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and more elaborate and incorporated pieces of dialogue, coming close to the genre of the nineteenth-century mélodrame. The French Revolution abolished the monopoly of the patent theaters and liberated the secondary theaters, which had already been equipped with a well-developed theatrical style that combined music, movement, and stage design to convey the messages of plays that attracted a mostly uneducated audience. Napoleon re-established the patent system for a while along with strict censorship of the theaters, radically reducing them in number. In his opinion, classical French tragedy was the most suitable expression of imperial glory. Yet theater in general, and melodrama in particular, were flourishing in Paris. The Restoration in 1814 again brought freedom to all the theaters, possibly due to the conscious policy of an insecure monarch to provide his subjects with bread and circuses: People absorbed their theatre-going in massive doses: an evening’s entertainment would consist of various curtain raisers and afterpieces, as well as one and sometimes two full-length plays, and would last five hours or more. […] Stage theatricality was excessive, and life seemed to aspire to its status, as if in fictional representation of the historical epic of Revolution, bloodshed, battle, and Empire that the nation had been playing out.39 During and after the Restoration, the prestige of classical French tragedy and the popularity of melodrama joined forces in another genre that came to dominate the Parisian stages and later all of Europe: the grand opéra. This monumental operatic genre enjoyed the financial support of the traditional public of the Opéra, which could afford lavish spectacles with more developed and complex stage machinery than the Baroque theater. However, the previous popularity and aesthetic norm of the melodrama undeniably influenced grand opera’s theatricality and its broadening range of topics. The huge musical stage tableaux and the excessive sentimentality of the performances were all residues of the melodrama which became a guiding poetic principle of grand operas. Lukács pointed out that dramatic portrayal makes man much more the center of the story than does the epic. He quoted Schiller, according to whom the direct effect is more crucial to drama than to epic: “The action of drama moves before me, I myself move round the epic which seems as it were to stand 39

Ibid., 86.

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still.”40 While the reader of the epic has greater freedom of interpretation, the spectator of the drama is totally dependent on theatrical effects. Opera as a multimedia art form could enhance this dramatic power. Richard Taruskin emphasizes the significance of singing culture, especially the cultivation of the German Lieder, in the development of national operas and national music in general.41 The Lied, a typical German product, was characterized by both Empfindsamkeit (sensitivity) and Volkstümlichkeit (folkishness), binding together the romantic ‘I’ with the collective ‘We.’ The Berlin ­lawyer Christian Gottfried Krause (1719–70) described the Lied for the first time in his book Von der musikalischen Poesie (On Musical Poetry, 1752), which actually anticipated the genre itself. Krause’s friend C.P.E. Bach, who read the book, began to furnish the theory with more than two hundred Lieder. As Taruskin points out, the popularity of the German romantic Lied was “decidedly a cultivation, a ‘hothouse growth.’”42 These Lieder were meant for home entertainment, and were thus simple and relatively easy to disseminate. The revival of choral music marked the greatest step towards romantic nationalism, since it could unite people both physically and mentally. Choral music was not sung in the church, as in medieval times, but rather in public spaces. It was symbolic that Wagner’s Die Meistersinger moved the song contest from the church or palace to the Festival Meadow, and that the final winner was chosen not by church or town officials, nor from the tradition of the tabulatur, but by the Volk. After the French Revolution, the nation and the idea of the nation-state replaced God and the king in the popular imagination. The former rituals and state ceremonies were filled with a different kind of secular and national content. The Folk and Art became sacralized concepts in a Romantic redefinition: Romantic choral music was associated not only with Gemütlichkeit, the conviviality of social singing, celebrated in the Männerchor texts for which Schubert had supplied such a mountain of music, but also with mass choral festivals – social singing on a cosmic scale that provided European nationalism with its very hotbed.43

40 41

Lukács, 132. Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 3, The Nineteenth Century (Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 119–20. 42 Ibid. 43 Dietmar Klenke, Der singende “deutsche Mann”: Gesangvereine und deutches Nationalbewußtsein von Napoleon bis Hitler (Münster: Waxmann, 1998), 162.

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Philip V. Bohlman also points out that the cult of singing helped to spread the idea of nineteenth-century national music and opera. He argues that epic songs and ballads were proto-national genres. The epic “is the story of the ­proto-nation,” represented through the deeds of “the individual whose heroism mobilises the nation, and whose leadership provides a metaphor for the ­nation’s own coming to age.”44 The epics chronicle the longue durée of the history of the nation, while the ballads are the stories of the individuals and events that together form a national mosaic. National operas combined both of these forms. Before the advent of nineteenth-century nationalism, peasants and common people on the stage represented only their class, not their country. In Lortzing’s comic opera Zar und Zimmermann (1837), a work that raises many social issues, the Russian fugitive soldier Peter Ivanov becomes in the end the official representative of his country, but only because of the Tsar’s benevolence. Ivanov is not yet the representative of the people. His acts are motivated only by his personal desire to marry the girl he loves. In contrast, Ivan Susanin in Glinka’s opera A Life for the Tsar (1836) already acts in the name of his people and is ready to sacrifice his life to help the Tsar. In Germany and Austria the Singspiel, the vernacular comic opera, represented primarily Romantic Volkstümlichkeit and Gemütlichkeit. Comic opera easily accessible to a popular audience was epitomized in France by Rousseau’s Le devin du village, and in Italy by the opera buffa, the sung-through musical genre that conquered all the European stages by the 1750s. In France, England, and Germany, all countries with a flourishing theatrical tradition, simple musical numbers, tunes well known to the folk, were inserted into the spoken dialogues, adding to the entertainment value of the plays and making them popular. As Taruskin points out, only a character “simple” enough could sing these simple songs, which resulted in an unprecedented increase in rural settings.45 As against the “simplicity” of the German comic Singspiele, the operatic stage became in France a place for re-enacting the nation’s history. Tragedy was the most suitable genre for this purpose. In the period of the July Monarchy (1830–48) the Académie Royale became the site of huge opera spectacles. In these grands opéras art and politics were strongly intertwined, and national destiny became a recurrent issue on the operatic stage. With the theatricality and sentimentality of melodrama, and the economic and social support of 44 45

Philip V. Bohlman, The Music of European Nationalism (Santa Barbara, ca: abc clio, 2004), 37. Taruskin, 187.

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the “official” theater industry, grand operas became mega-productions, both a thriving business for their producers and a favorite of the public. The Italian opera buffa, the German Singspiel, and the French grand opéra represent in fact three different national styles as well as three different approaches to the concept of the nation and its operatic representation. A mixture of all these genres can be found in the so-called national operas that ­became popular in East-Central Europe. The opera buffa was the first to bring onto the operatic stage common people and to represent their social problems. The Singspiel brought to the foreground the folksiness and conviviality of common social singing. The grand opéra raised the audience’s awareness of history in general and national history in particular. National operas are the products of cultural transfer and are usually eclectic in style: no single tradition served as a model; what made these operas so popular was the combination of the successful elements of each tradition into a national context. The idea of history in opera appeared first and foremost on the textual level of libretti. These were based on literary works by well-known authors: Sir Walter Scott (Lucia di Lammermoor), Victor Hugo (Hernani, Le Roi s’amuse, Lucrezia Borgia), Friedrich Schiller (Don Carlos, Mary Stuart, Turandot), and of course Shakespeare (Macbeth, Otello, Falstaff) inspired opera composers and librettists. Although these dramas romanticized, fictionalized, and distorted the past, they significantly influenced the historical consciousness of the people. On the musical level, history appeared only later on the operatic stage. Exotic and folk tunes had been used earlier for the musical representation of couleur locale to depict the alien milieu of a remote land, as was the case with Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail and Borodin’s Prince Igor (Polovtsian Dances). Nevertheless, the conscious use of archaisms by embodying historical music in operatic scores was quite rare, and was practiced mostly in the second half of the nineteenth century, as with the references to Bach and allusions to Lortzing in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger. The rediscovery of earlier music by nineteenth-century composers meant an exploration of the sense of history and the historicity of music itself. Historicity came to be used in contemporary works as a conscious poetic principle. While the eighteenth-century public distinguished between music that was up-to-date or out of fashion, the historicity of music became an important criterion for nineteenth-century audiences. In the multinational Habsburg Empire, topics drawing on local folklore and history became a potential menace for the Viennese authorities, since they reminded the public of a separate cultural consciousness that was seen as different from the imperial identity. In spite of censorship, the intelligentsia and some enlightened aristocrats were ardent supporters of national theaters and national cultural practices in general. Since a large portion of the Empire’s

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population lived in rural conditions, the Singspiel with its folksiness could easily reach a wide public. On the other hand, the increasing interest in history and historical drama in the spoken theater paved the way for the grand opéra. This operatic form also contained passages from folk music and dances. National operas were ideologically the descendants of historical dramas that had already canonized and popularized certain topics and historical figures, and were musically a mixture of Singspiel and grand opéra. These operas were actual discursive formations, the artistic products of the cultural and social practices of their age, and they shaped the historical consciousness of the public more effectively than scholarly historiographies. Most of the works that were regarded as national operas were crossbreeds derived from accumulated national mythology and nineteenth-century political ideology.46 In spite of the explicit claims for national authenticity and purity by artists and critics, in reality the European nineteenth-century national canons were hybrids. They were able nonetheless to shape the national consciousness of various peoples, since the appropriated foreign elements mingled with already familiar recurrent elements of historical, literary, and musical memory. The genre of national operas was created with plots that drew on history and were perceived as allegories of contemporary local or rural settings, with libretti written in the familiar vernacular, and with echoes of folk tunes or well-known local melodies incorporated into the music, and performed in spaces that had evolved historically from theaters and opera houses into sites accessible to the general public.

46

John Neubauer, “Zrinyi, Zriny, Zrinski,” Neohelicon 29:1 (2002), 219–34.

chapter 2

The Struggle for a National Theater Modern Hungarian national consciousness was shaped on the stage and on the page just as much as – if not more than – it was in the political arena. In late eighteenth-century Hungary, actors and intellectuals who promoted the cultivation of the Hungarian language convinced the body politic to support their struggle for the emancipation of Hungarian culture. In that time, the official language of public administration was Latin or German. The Hungarian vernacular was cultivated by poets and writers; it was spoken by the middle class and lower middle class, and used in secondary schools and Calvinist churches. As in many other countries in East and Central Europe, the language of the local aristocracy and élite was predominantly German or French. Hungarian theater was non-existent; plays in Hungarian were performed only occasionally in special settings like secondary schools, and rarely on temporary stages in the homes of wealthy aristocrats. There were no professional actors until 1790, when the first Hungarian theater company was formed as a result of the joined efforts of national-minded nobility and intellectuals. The Hungarian theater was meant to promote moral values and to cultivate the Hungarian language. The pioneers and supporters of the Hungarian theater strove to organize a company that could play regularly in the capital city and in other major provincial towns, where the only high- and middle-class theatrical entertainment was provided by German-speaking actors. There were a few administrative centers in various Hungarian cities like Po­ zsony (Bratislava, today Slovakia) or Buda, which at that time had a Hungarian élite, but most of the population was multi-ethnic and the urban culture was predominantly German. Unlike in many other European countries, where the theater culture was shaped by top-down policies to foster national consciousness and enhance the power of the state, in Hungary the theater came into being as a reaction against Austrian policies of centralization and the elevation of German as the official language in the Habsburg Empire. Though part of the Habsburg Empire, Hungary was a country with a long tradition of autonomy in internal affairs. Since 1687 the Hungarian estates had given up their right to elect a king, and the Hungarian Kingdom became a hereditary province of the Habsburgs similar to the Czech territories or Austria. The Hungarian nobility nonetheless retained a number of privileges and rights, which had to be respected by the king. Only a lawful monarch crowned with the Holy Crown according to a set of prescribed rights could also become the King of Hungary.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004347229_004

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Under oath, at the coronation ceremony, the king had to promise to respect the rights of the “Hungarian nation,” which in the vocabulary of the time meant the Hungarian nobility. In 1765 the Empress Maria Theresa (1717–80) ceded power to her son, ­Joseph ii (1741–90), who became the Emperor, but his mother kept a veto power in important political matters. Only in the last ten years of his life, after the death of his mother in 1780, did Joseph ii become the autonomous ruler of the Habsburg lands; however, he did not wish to be crowned as the Hungarian king, because that would have meant recognizing the privileges of the ­Hungarian nobility, which Joseph ii was not willing to grant. This is why he is referred to in ­Hungarian historiography as the hatted king. As an advocate of the ideas of the French Enlightenment, he tried to modernize and centralize the Habsburg Empire following the French model. The preservation of the ­feudal system of the empire was unsustainable, and the only way towards a transition to ­Enlightened Absolutism was to curtail the rights of the nobility and promote the emancipation of the peasants and of the middle classes through tax reforms and education. However, these reforms would have meant curtailing the rights of the Hungarian nobility, which was resisted mainly due to negative financial consequences and also for reasons of “national pride,” since the nobility saw themselves as the nation and a restriction of their rights meant constraining the rights of the nation. One of the edicts that caused uproar among the Hungarian nobility concerned the official language of the Empire, which according to Joseph ii should be German instead of Latin. The Hungarian nobility resented this decree and referred with increasing frequency to the idea that Hungarian should be the administrative language in Hungary. The 1780s are known as the period of the nobility’s resistance, which marked the beginning of the national movement in Hungary. The Emperor underestimated the resistance of the Hungarian estates and eventually in 1790, on his deathbed as it were, he had to revoke all his edicts. It is no surprise that the protesting nobles joined forces with the intellectuals and antiquarians of the time and were ready to fund and support the cultivation of the national culture. György Bessenyei (1747–1811), the “founder” of the modern Hungarian literary consciousness, elaborated a complex cultural program that became one of the pillars of early Hungarian nationalism.1 In his work Egy magyar társaság iránt való jámbor szándék (A devout intention for Hungarian society, 1781) he linked 1 Bessenyei was a playwright and esssayist and the author of the first Hungarian novel. In ­Vienna he was one of the bodyguards of the Empress Maria Theresa. He came in contact with French rationalism and was an ardent follower of Voltaire and the Encyclopedists. Bessenyei is chiefly remembered for encouraging the revival of the Hungarian language. He has been called the father of modern Hungarian literature, and the date of his play Ágis

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the progress of society to the level of development of the national ­language. According to Bessenyei, the aim of society as a whole was to be happy, and the more educated a society was, the happier it would be. He regarded language as the basis of education. Education should be available for a wide public, including the lowest classes, the peasants. This can only be achieved through the elevation of the mother tongue, Hungarian, to a higher level adequate for complex academic thinking. The language should be renewed, polished, and made suitable for such a noble task. Since Hungarian was used mainly by the lower classes of society for everyday communication, it needed to be elevated to fit the pursuit of scientific knowledge. It is obvious that language played a very important role in Bessenyei’s thinking, but its role was functional: it was a tool, not an end. Nevertheless, language became a popular topic in public discourse, and by the early 1780s it was viewed as a symbol of the nation. By that time the concept of the nation referred to all the people living in Hungary and speaking and cultivating the national language. The supporters of Bessenyei’s program began to develop the ideas he formulated in the Devout intention and other writings like the Magyarság ­(Hungaricum, 1778), a pamphlet that became famous for the following sentence: “­Nations become intellectual powers only by using their own mother tongue, and never by using the language of another nation.”2 This declaration later became one of the most important catchwords of Hungarian nationalism. ­Bessenyei’s other important contribution was to emphasize the importance of Europe as a unified cultural community: “Whenever the concepts of homeland and patriotism are mentioned, you should think of Europe.”3 For Bessenyei language was the medium par excellence for unitfying the Hungarian nation, but he always referred to Hungary as an organic cultural and political part of Europe. József Kármán (1769–95), the founding father of Hungarian prose and editor of the literary review Uránia (1794), asserted in the preface to the first issue of his journal: The national language “is the bastion of the nation, which either keeps the foreigner, so long as he remains a foreigner, away from our borders, or else it transforms him into a patriot. Language is the ultimate means for the survival of the Hungarian nation.”4 József Péczeli (1750–92), a Protestant pastor from Komárom (today Komárno, Slovakia) formulated the same idea T ­ ragédiája (The Tragedy of Ágis, 1772) is often taken as marking the beginning of the Hungarian Enlightenment. 2 “Minden nemzet a maga nyelvén lett tudós, de idegenen sohasem.” 3 “Mikor hazát, hazafiúságot emlegetnek: Európát értsd rajta.” 4 A nemzeti nyelv “az a palladium, mely fenntartja alkotványunkat: az a végvár, amely az idegent, míg idegen, eltilt határainkról, vagy hazafivá változtat, az a mód, amely nemzetünket

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more succinctly: “One language, one nation.”5 According to Benedek Virág (1754–1830), another important poet and thinker, “Our nation cannot be called Hungarian until its language is alive.”6 And one could cite many more variations on the same idea, whose essence is that a nation lives in its language, and the cultivation of the national language leads to a flourishing nation. In 1791 Herder published his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, where in the fourth chapter, when talking about the Slavs, he ­mentioned the possibility of the disappearance of the Hungarians into the Slavic “sea.” This fear of the submersion of the Hungarian nation entered public discourse in Hungary much earlier than the publication of Herder’s work, and anyone familiar with Hungarian history will know that this fear was not just a theoretical but an actual threat. A long century of occupation by the ­Ottomans led to the division of the country between two competing powers, the Habsburg Empire and the Ottoman Empire. Most of the Hungarian cultural heritage from before the occupation was preserved only in Transylvania. The rest of the country had suffered from constant wars with the Turks and later by a series of civil wars. The founder of the Hungarian language movement, Ferenc Kazinczy (1759–1831), expressed his fears about the disappearance of Hungarian culture in a letter addressed to the Protestant pastor József Péczeli in 1789 in which, among other things, he mentioned Bessenyei’s Devout intention. The first four issues of Kazinczy’s own literary journal, Orpheus (1790–92), also dealt with the problem of the death of the nation. In Hungarian discourse, language and nation had become strongly intertwined concepts by the end of the eighteenth century, and the middle-class literati succeeded in convincing a great part of the Hungarian nobility to support their cause. The formation of the Hungarian theater coincides with, and was partly ­triggered by two important movements in the history of modern Hungarian nationhood: the resistance movement of the nobility, and the language ­renewal movement started by men of letters like Kazinczy and György Aranka (1737–1817). The latter established a society for the cultivation of the ­Hungarian language (Erdélyi Nyelvmívelő Társaság) in Transylvania, which was ­recognized in 1791 by the Transylvanian parliament (gubernium). Both Kazinczy and ­Aranka were in correspondence with many writers and intellectuals of their time and had an extended network which they mobilized for the cultivation of the ­Hungarian language. This literary élite started to modernize, s­ tandardize, and promote the Hungarian language for educational and aesthetic ­purposes. létében megtartja, az a jegy, amely megóv, hogy többek közt el ne olvadjunk…” I Uránia, B ­ é-vezetés, 1794/1. 5 “Egy a’ nyelv, egy a’ nemzet,” in Bíró (1994), 125. 6 “Nemzetünk tsak addig magyar, ameddig nyelve él,” in Bíró (1994), 125.

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­ azinczy ­proposed the emulation of foreign masterpieces, first through translaK tions and then by the creation of original works. The development of d­ ramatic literature followed the same pattern: many European plays were translated into Hungarian, mostly from German or through the mediation of the German language. Therefore, most of the plays performed by Hungarian actors were pieces popular on European stages in Hungarian translation. Only later, in the first decade of the nineteenth century, would original Hungarian plays be commissioned and writers actively encouraged to publish plays for Hungarian theaters; but the Hungarian national drama had yet to be written. As it happens, it was written in 1814, but it either went unnoticed or was deemed unimportant and not good enough to be noticed: József Katona’s Bánk Bán, a play inspired by medieval Hungarian history, was written in response to a call for an original play published in the literary journal Erdélyi Múzeum in Kolozsvár in 1814. Katona submitted his play on time, but he never received an answer from the journal, nor was his play among those mentioned as the best submissions in an article in the last issue of the journal in 1818. Katona then rewrote the play thoroughly, following the detailed advice of a friend, and Bánk Bán was published in 1821, again without much success. The author died as a disillusioned and bitter man without ever having seen his play performed in a theater. However, because his actor friends liked his play and often chose it for benefit performances, Bánk Bán began its career as the favorite play of the Hungarian actors, and over the course of two decades it was transformed into the Hungarian national play. Its memorable performance on 15 March 1848 on the eve of the Hungarian Revolution became a landmark of Hungarian cultural history. From the start, this adversary role made the Hungarian theater into a fortress of national resistance against Germanization; it became “the temple of the Hungarian language,” as it is still often called in common parlance. Actors were regarded as the “servants of the nation,”7 who advanced the cause of the Hungarian language and history on stage and also as missionaries working to achieve an ideal moral state, a concept promoted also by Schiller in his Theatre Considered as Moral Institution (1784), by performing great dramatic art for the entertainment and improvement of the masses.8 Actors were entertainers and 7 “The servants of the nation” (“a nemzet napszámosai”) is an expression coined by Gereben Vas, a popular nineteenth-century writer and journalist, in the title of his book A nemzet napszámosai (1857), a sociography of the life of nineteenth-century Hungarian provincial towns and a tribute to the traveling actors and theater companies. 8 “Consider now, how religion and law are strengthened as they enter into alliance with the theater, where virtue and vice, happiness and misery, wisdom and folly are accurately and palpably led out before man in a thousand images; where Providence solves its riddles, untangles its knots before his eyes. […] The stage is, more than any other public institution, a school of practical wisdom, a guide to our daily lives, an infallible key to the most secret

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educators at the same time; they were appreciated but also scorned by many who saw the theater as a dangerous place, disseminating nothing but disreputable stories, providing audiences with “prophane fables, lascivious matters, cozeninge devices, and scurrilous beehaviours,” to cite a letter written in 1595 by the Mayor of London to the city government.9 In Hungary this negative image of the theater as a morally corrupt institution was enhanced by another strongly prevalent stereotype which defined the Hungarian national character as serious, dignified, and proud, and thus opposed to such “demeaning” leisure activities as acting. Some conservative nobles thought that Hungarian theater plays desecrated the Hungarian ­language, which was far too precious to be allowed to serve such undignified purposes as acting. When the first proposal for the creation of a Hungarian theater company was presented to the diet in 1790 by László Kelemen (1762–1814), the father of the Hungarian theater, it caused general outrage in the house of representatives, which accused him of “treason” and “madness” for suggesting that Hungarians should become “acrobats and comedians.” However, when he explained the underlying reasons for the formation of a permanent theater company, as an establishment for the cultivation of the Hungarian language and good moral values, the house cheered and called Kelemen a “true patriot” and “the savior of the Hungarian language.”10 The most popular playwrights on both the German and Hungarian stages of Pest and Buda were Shakespeare, Schiller, Molière, and Corneille, and the two favorites of the public were the Austrian dramatists August Kotzebue (1761–1819) and Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872).11 The French concept of drama was considered more mechanical, with its classical unity of time, place, and action, while German drama followed Shakespeare and was based on the concept of organicism. The idea of organicity was borrowed from biology and ­accesses of the human soul. […] Thus is the great and varied service done to our moral culture by the better-developed stage; the full enlightenment of our intellect is no less indebted to it. Here, in this lofty sphere, the great mind, the fiery patriot first discovers how he can fully wield its powers. […] The theater is the common channel through which the light of wisdom streams down from the thoughtful, better part of society, spreading thence in mild beams throughout the entire state.” – Friedrich Schiller, Theatre Considered as a Moral Institution, Accessed at: https://www.schillerinstitute.org/transl/schil_ theatremoral.html on 27 August 2016. 9 Erika Fischer-Lichte, History of European Drama and Theatre (London: Routledge, 2004), 50. 10 Ferenc Kerényi, ed., A borzasztó torony: Képek a magyar vándorszínészet világából (Budapest: Magvető, 1979), 16–17. 11 Ferenc Kerényi and György Székely, eds., Magyar színháztörténet 1790–1873 (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1990), 35–42.

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was transported to the field of culture and elaborated by Goethe and Herder. ­August Wilhelm Schlegel, in his Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur (1809–11), and Ludwig Tieck in Dramaturgische Blätter (1826) promoted the idea of organicism in culture. Gradually this German concept of drama and the idea of German ­Romanticism became the strongest aesthetic ideology all over Europe. Through this influence, Shakespeare became the supreme and exemplary playwright. Lessing had mentioned in an earlier series of essays, Hamburg Dramaturgy (1767–69), that organicism was to be traced to the works of Shakespeare. He ­compared Shakespeare’s style to creation by nature. This is why, according to the ­Romantics, creation had to be original, accomplished by a genius, and not mechanical. The concept of organicism exemplifies a dynamic and complex relationship to the world, as opposed to the mechanical world-view of classicism. The reconciliation of this Franco-German conflict was not helped by the ongoing Napoleonic Wars, which led to the occupation of Berlin by ­Napoleon in 1806. Aesthetic considerations therefore took a more and more patriotic tone. As one of the leading figures of the German theater at that time, Adam Müller, remarked: the place of the theater is between the “church and the market.”12 Hungarian theorists appropriated this German ideology. However, they paid little attention to the individual’s relation to the universe, or the relation of drama to a philosophical world-view. Instead, they stressed the importance of more practical issues such as the moral effect of the theater, the development of a national consciousness, the cultivation of the mother tongue, and the dissemination of Hungarian culture to all social strata. Gábor Döbrentei (1785–1851), the editor of the influential Transylvanian periodical Erdélyi M ­ úzeum (1814–18) and co-director with András Fáy (1786–1864) of the Hungarian theater company in Buda Castle, claimed that “Hungarians should have dramas shaped by and tailored to their own character.”13 Besides historical, philosophical, and aesthetic considerations, the Hungarian theater gradually came to ­focus on morality and national education. The pioneers of the Hungarian theater had to convince not only the ­Austrian state administrators of the value of their cause, but also the ­conservative ­Hungarian nobility, who in the beginning were not keen to support “a band of clowns and comedians.” A third obstacle was the already prospering ­German theater culture. Buda, Pest, and many other provincial cities had successfully 12

13

Adam Heinrich Müller, “Vorlesungen über die deutsche Wissenschaft und Literatur, Gehalten zu Dresden im Winter 1806,” in Kritische, ästhetische und philosophische Schriften (Berlin: Schroeder und Werner Siebert, 1967), 11–137. Kerényi and Székely, eds., Magyar színháztörténet 1790–1873, 241.

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operating German theater companies, which performed frequently enough and well enough to attract large audiences who would rather see a wellacted play in a German theater than a poorly performed play in Hungarian. ­Hungarian actors at that time were uneducated amateurs whose only stage speech “technique” was shouting, and whose diction was heavily tinted with the accents of various Hungarian dialects.14 It was not easy to convince the Hungarian aristocracy and élite to rent boxes in the Hungarian theater instead of the German, or to attend performances by Hungarian actors. The fourth and most serious impediment to the development of a Hungarian theater was the lack of funding. Though many wealthy aristocrats and affluent bourgeois patriots donated significant amounts of money to theaters, these costly institutions could not survive without state support and a regular income, on neither of which Hungarian theater companies could count. The first theater groups were dependent on the generosity of the Hungarian nobility, but these occasional endowments were not sufficient for a sustainable long-term solution and, despite their heroic efforts, most Hungarian companies could not survive. The smaller cities were not big enough to support a theater, especially if there was already a German theater, or in some cases two. The absence of a German theater company in the city was an important factor in the success of the first Hungarian theater company in Transylvania, in Kolozsvár. The moment a German company appeared in the city, it affected the situation of the Hungarian theater, as it divided the public, which in the case of a city of about 10,000 inhabitants had serious financial consequences. Even in Buda and Pest, with well-functioning German acting companies, it was very difficult for a new Hungarian theater to build up a viable business. German companies began touring and establishing themselves in Hungary in the second half of the eighteenth century, which coincides with the reign of the Enlightened ruler, Joseph ii. In 1783, he moved the council of the governing body from the more peripheral Pozsony/Pressburg (Bratislava, today ­Slovakia) to Buda. All the state officials and clerks needed entertainment, so the ­Emperor himself fostered the idea of building a theater in Buda.15 The first German company performed in the Reischl-house, a small wooden theater situated on the Danube and named after its carpenter-builder, Gaspar 14

Rita Szilágyi, Thália Szekerén. Magyar Királynék és Nagyasszonyok (Budapest: Duna International, n.d.), 11. 15 Joseph ii founded the National Theater in Vienna and, after dismissing the French theater company from the Michaelerplatz, he invited and sponsored German players. He also compiled a set of rules for the country’s German language theater, advocated a German repertory, sent one of his trustees to search for the best actors of the country for the emperor’s German theater, and set an example for the other people of the Monarchy.

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Reischl. In 1787, an old Carmelite Church in Buda Castle was transformed into a proper theater for 1,200 visitors. This Várszínház/Burgtheater (Castle Theater) was originally designed as a German theater, but Hungarian actors could also give occasional performances in the building. Between 1833 and 1837 the most popular Hungarian traveling theater company from Pozsony rented it for the symbolic sum of one forint. The Emperor was not directly involved in the affairs of the theaters in Pest, where since 1774 an active German theater company was entertaining the middle-class public in an old bastion, part of the old city wall called the Rondella, with an estimated capacity of five hundred seats. It was not frequented by the more sophisticated public; nonetheless, in the rapidly expending city of Pest, which was becoming an important commercial hub, the Rondella theater company was very popular. In 1812 the German company moved to a new, modern theater in the heart of Pest with a capacity to seat 3,500, which was destroyed by fire in 1847. After the German actors moved out from the Rondella, Hungarian players took their place and turned it into a more or less permanent theater, though by that time the building was run down and badly needed renovation, which the new Hungarian actors could not afford. This shabby theater could not compete with the élite German theaters in Buda and Pest, and was finally demolished in 1815 by a decree of the Archduke Josef, Palatine of Hungary, because it was considered an eyesore on the bank of the Danube and stood in the way of new plans for the development of the city. The demolition of the Rondella meant the end of the permanent Hungarian theater in Pest for decades, and forced the company of László Kelemen to tour the country and stay for longer periods in cities with existing theaters like Kolozsvár, where the first Hungarian stone theater was built in 1821.16 The institutionalization of the Hungarian theater is usually divided into three major periods: school acting, castle theaters, and commercial theaters.

School Theaters

Following the Council of Trent in 1563, the Catholic Church sought to gain influence all over Europe. Education, mainly in the hands of the Jesuits, was a key element of the anti-Reformation movement. Acting was considered a suitable form of public speech, and therefore a proper exercise for the students. The Jesuit order was involved in the Hungarian educational system for about two hundred years, from 1561 to 1773. During this time they founded forty-four

16

Kerényi and Székely, eds., Magyar színháztörténet 1790–1873, 61–233. Chapters 2 and 3. ­Accessed at: http://mek.oszk.hu/02000/02065/html/1kotet/index.html on 28 August 2016.

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schools all over the country and performed some 4,000 plays.17 The students of the Jesuit schools belonged mainly to the nobility, while other orders, such as the Piarists, the Minorite church, and the Franciscans educated pupils mainly from other, lower social strata. These other schools were founded in the seventeenth century and were therefore able to incorporate the new trends of ­Hungarian theater life. In the beginning, the plays performed in Catholic school theaters were almost exclusively in Latin.18 The Piarist schools began to translate and act on the stage in Hungarian much earlier than the Jesuit schools, which clung to Latin as a sign of aristocratic education. The social differences among the students were visible not only in the contrast between the sophisticated stages of the Jesuit theaters and the modest accommodations of the Piarists, but also between the élitist repertoire of the Jesuit schools and the mainly folk-like, para-liturgical dramas acted by the Piarist students. One of the first theater stages in Pest was set up in a Piarist school in 1718. School theaters spread all over the country and also became popular outside the schools. The Jesuits popularized Metastasio because his plays easily conformed to the religious spirit of the Catholic schools; they involved many characters and were suitable for both educational and devotional purposes. More and more plays written in Hungarian enriched the Jesuit repertories and generated a need for professional players.

Castle Theaters

Castle theaters also contributed to the development of Hungarian theater life, even though they had small private audiences and hosted German, French, and Italian companies. The example they followed was the theater culture of the eighteenth-century French aristocracy. The plays were performed occasionally for the entertainment of the castle owners and their guests. The players were mostly family members, but they could also involve the servants as well. In castles where theatrical performances became a regular long-term entertainment, professional acting companies were hired. German actors and Italian opera singers came for longer periods to Hungary, and when the a­ ristocratic families temporarily left their castles, the companies entertained the bourgeois public of the nearby cities. The first castle theater performance dates from 1746, and took place on the estate of the royal family in Holics. Lotharingian servants performed Molière’s 17 18

Ibid., 22. Károly Szász, A magyar dráma története (Budapest: Franklin Társulat, 1939), 14.

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comedy Les Fâcheux for the royal family that was enjoying a vacation in the castle. The most famous Hungarian castle theaters were in Kismarton (­Eisenstadt) and in Eszterháza at the residence of the Esterházy family. The first mention of the theater in Kismarton dates from 1749: an Italian artist, Giuseppe Quaglio, was hired to contribute to the theater’s design. The castle became mainly famous for its flourishing musical life, which was enhanced by the presence of Joseph Haydn.19 One of the most exceptional events in the history of entertainment at the Esterházy’s castle was the visit of the Empress Maria Theresa in 1773. The program was followed by a dance and music by more than a thousand Hungarian peasants. The general European interest in Hungarian culture and the popularity of “exotic” Hungarian music in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was also reinforced by this visit of Maria Theresa. She arrived at the Esterházy estate with many courtiers and Austrian state officials who were impressed not only by the truly royal reception they were given, but also by the Hungarian folk culture. Beethoven composed his C Major Mass (1807) for Eszterháza, and Miklós Esterházy ii was the first to appreciate the talent of Franz Liszt, whose grandfather was also in the service of the Esterházys as an organist.20 The Brunswick family also had theaters built in their castles in Alsókorompa, Buda, and Martonvásár. Beethoven spent a few days in the Martonvásár castle at the invitation of his friend, Count Ferenc, who was the renowned violinist to whom Beethoven dedicated his piano sonata in F Minor, op. 57, the Appassionata.21 The Pálffy, Grassalkovich, Erdődy, Ráday, Károlyi and Festetich families also owned remarkable castle theaters. In Nagyvárad (Oradea, Grosswardein) the Catholic bishop, Ádám Patachich (1717–84), built an impressive theater that was used mainly as an opera house. He hired such renowned ­musicians

19

20 21

One of the Esterházy counts, the governor Pál Esterházy (1635–1713), was an accomplished composer who in 1711 published his musical cycle Harmonia Coelestis. The theater life of the castle started to develop on a high artistic level during his lifetime. E ­ ducated by the Jesuits, Count Pál Esterházy considered both dramatic theater and opera as important forms of entertainment, so he also encouraged musical theater in the castle. ­Joseph Haydn was hired as the second Kapellmeister of his castle. Pál Esterházy began the construction of a new theater which was eventually opened in 1762 by his son, Miklós ­Esterházy “the Glorious.” The new and very modern theater was celebrated with fireworks and four Haydn operas. The opera section began to function officially in 1769. Many renowned European singers and opera companies followed each other on the stage. The only permanent musician was the faithful servant of the Esterházy family, Joseph Haydn. László Dobszay, Magyar Zenetörténet (Budapest: Planétás, 1998), 218. Ibid., 219.

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as Michael Haydn (1737–1806), the younger brother of Joseph, and Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf (1739–99).

Commercial Theaters

The first Hungarian public theater performance was given in 1784 in Buda, in the small wooden Reischl-theater. The first regular Hungarian theater company gave performances between 1790 and 1796. Along with Pest and Buda, a third permanent Hungarian theater company began to perform in Kolozsvár. The development of Hungarian theater in Transylvania began in Kolozsvár thanks to the generous financial support and organizational skills of Baron Miklós Wesselényi (1750–1809) and the enthusiasm of György Aranka, the linguist, educator, and cultural activist who was part of a large network of intellectuals. Like the other famous writer and literary activist, Ferenc Kazinczy, Aranka supported the idea of the Hungarian theater on the grounds that it would contribute to the cultivation of the Hungarian language and the elevation of the moral behavior of the public. He wrote a petition in support of the Hungarian theater which he read in the Transylvanian parliament: “The foundation of a Hungarian theater should be the priority of all our endeavors concerning the education of the public and the improvement of our mother tongue. It is certain that the theater is the most important tool for reaching these goals.”22 The Transylvanian estates supported Aranka’s proposal and agreed to allow theater performances as long as they complied with two criteria: moral education and the cultivation of the Hungarian language. Aranka invited the group of László Kelemen from Pest to come and play in Kolozsvár, or to send actors who could teach Hungarian actors in Transylvania, but his plan was unsuccessful since Kelemen’s group could barely survive and did not have the capacity to travel and help another city so far away from Pest. Márton Soós, a doctor and writer, helped Aranka to recruit Transylvanian actors for the theater, which finally had its opening night in the ballroom of the Rhédey Palace on 11 November 1792. The first play performed by the Hungarian actors 22

“Egy Magyar játékszínnek felállítását talán legelől kell tennem azok között az ­eszközök között, melyek anyai nyelvünk gyarapítására s közönségesítésére szolgálnak. ­Bizonyos, hogy legfőbb eszköz.” György Aranka – quoted by Lajos Szabó, “A kolozsvári m ­ agyar színjátszás. 1792–1821,” in Lajos Szabó, ed., A kolozsvári nemzeti színház évkönyve. 1941/42– 1942/43. sziniévad (Kolozsvár: A Kolozsvári Nemzeti Színház Igazgatósága, 1943), 10. ­Accessed at: http://dspace.bcucluj.ro/bitstream/123456789/27720/1/BCUCLUJ_FP_114053_ 1941-42_1942-43.pdf on 28 August 2016.

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in Kolozsvár was Titkos ellenkezés, vagy Köleséri, which was probably a sentimental German play in translation, but since there are no further records either about its author or about the plot, it can only be assumed that it accorded with the trend of an age dominated by sentimental dramas.23 The original enthusiasm of the aristocracy and the middle-class public subsided, and despite their successful beginning, the theater company of Kolozsvár soon faced the same financial difficulties as Kelemen’s theater group from Pest. János Kótsi Patkó (1763–1842) was the first director of the Hungaria theater company of Kolozsvár, and is said to have led the group as strictly as an army officer. He demanded discipline and constant edification from his actors, and contrary to the customary melodramatic style of the time, he emphasized natural speech and acting on stage. In 1794–95 the Transylvanian diet accepted the plan for a permanent stone theater, and Ferenc Fekete, a well-known liberal thinker, was given the task of supervising the process. Fortunately, the original transcripts of the parliamentary speeches and petitions concerning the building of the theater have survived, which provide an accurate picture not only of early developments in Hungarian theater history and the exact costs of such an ambitious plan, but also of the political thinking and discourse of the time.24 The theater needed more funding than previously estimated, so Baron Miklós Wesselényi donated a substantial amount for the cause and relentlessly tried to convince other wealthy members of the diet to follow his example. The governor of Transylvania, György Bánffy (1746–1822) also fully supported the cause of the Hungarian theater and provided material and moral support to the committee. Many aristocratic families gave clothing and props to the theater while others, to set a good example, did not attend foreign performances at all. Construction of the new stone theater started in 1804. The Hungarian company played on the stage of the Rhédey Palace, which after a thorough renovation was offered to a new German company in 1810, to the great disappointment of the Hungarian actors and their supporters. In the same year Wesselényi’s widow offered their equestrian school to the Hungarian company, which they gladly accepted, but which proved inadequate as a theater and could not compete with the fully refurbished theater in the Rhédey house. The public was also more eager to enjoy the comfort of Rhédey Palace and the professionally staged pieces of the German company, and began to neglect the Hungarian performances. Until the new theater was built, the Hungarian company traveled in Hungary and Transylvania. When the Hungarian theater was finally 23 24

Kerényi and Székely, eds., Magyar színháztörténet 1790–1873, 86. Az erdélyi országgyűlések színházpolitikai vitái és iratai. 1791–1847 (Budapest: Magyar ­Színházi Intézet, 1990).

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f­ inished in 1821, the German actors left the city, as they were not happy to share the same building with the Hungarian company. According to contemporary accounts, the new building was one of the most beautiful and modern theaters of Central Europe, and could compete with the best theaters in Vienna. It had 1,200 seats, and the company often played to a full house, sometimes even for 1,400 people, who usually gathered in such large numbers for an opera.25 Despite the modern theater and the great actors, after two successful years the theater again faced problems with financing, which, according to the memories and accounts of actors from that time, were caused by the divergent tastes of the board of supervisors. It was the opera that saved the theater when Lázár Nagy took over the leadership and invited from Pest the most famous diva of the age, Róza Széppataki (1793–1872), known to the public by her married name as Déryné. Nagy also hired as conductor József Ruzitska (1775–1823), the composer of the first Hungarian opera, Béla futása (Béla’s flight), which was first performed in Kolozsvár in 1822. Under Nagy’s directorship, in one year the theater company performed eight operas and twelve Singspiele, along with many classical and new dramas.26 The traveling performances and tours were not successful in provincial cities of Transylvania like Marosvásárhely and ­Nagyszeben (today Târgu Mureș and Sibiu in Romania). The actors were also unhappy with the heavy-handed leadership of Nagy, and he also faced criticism from the city when he could not pay the rent for the theater. On one occasion, when Nagy realized that some of his actors had left his company and were staying in Marosvásárhely, he asked the city authorities to arrest them and bring them back to Kolozsvár. The police denied his request on the grounds that his actors were noblemen and therefore their free movement could not be restrained. In 1826 the notoriously strict and thrifty director was replaced by a committee of noble citizens who revised the repertoire of the theater and included more opera in the program, which seemed to bring about some improvement in the financial situation of the theater; but like its predecessor, this committee also fell apart because of differences in taste and management. Many actors left and moved to Kassa, where they established a new theater company. The public of Kolozsvár had to wait a year until performances resumed again in 1828 under the direction of a popular actor, Miklós Udvarhelyi (1788–1864), who preferred older classics to new plays; but the theater-going public was of a different opinion and did not attend the performances. Déryné,

25 26

Jancsó Elemér, Az erdélyi magyar színészet hőskora, 1792–1821: Nagy Lázár visszaemlékezései (Kolozsvár: Minerva, 1939), 28–29. Lajos Szabó, ed., A kolozsvári nemzeti színház évkönyve, 16.

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who was the absolute favorite of the opera-loving public, left the company together with other actors who went to join the group in Kassa. This meant that the theater was bankrupt once again. The city rented it to both a German and a Hungarian company, who played on alternate days. However, while this seemed a logical solution to the city council, the hard-core Hungarian nationalists among the public did not like the idea of a German theater company returning to Kolozsvár. The students of three high schools formed a secret society in support of the Hungarian theater and wrote an angry note to the German company asking them to leave the city, which they posted on the door of the theater. One of the reasons they gave against the German actors was that with their light comedies they “damage the serious manliness of the Hungarian character.” Their “Instructio admonitoria,” as they called their letter, had no immediate effect, so the students resolved to undertake direct action and one day, as the German actors were leaving the theater, ­Hungarian students dressed up in costumes harassed them and beat them. The students were prosecuted, but the German actors no longer wished to play in the ­Hungarian theater after this scandal.27 The next stage in the history of the Hungarian theater in Kolozsvár came in 1837 when the National Theater was built in Pest, which attracted the best actors from all the provincial theater companies. The later development of the theater was marked by the immense popularity of the opera, which meant that the theater directors filled their repertoires with opera, provoking criticism from the conservative public who felt that the original goal of the theater, namely the cultivation of the Hungarian language, was being betrayed by the theater directors in the hope of material gain. However, this was a general trend everywhere in the country and the popularity of the opera was an irreversible process. Opera took the lead over theater and fulfilled the same role that had been reserved for the prose theater a few decades earlier. According to the famous Hungarian theater historian Ferenc Kerényi, the theater-going public of the nineteenth century can be divided into three factions: liberals, conservatives, and radicals. These groups with different political convictions disagreed about the function of the theater in the nation-building process. The liberals advocated a theater that would educate and further the cause of the Hungarian language and of an independent, original Hungarian literary culture. The most important representatives of this movement were the Romantic poet Mihály Vörösmarty (1800–55), the literary critic and theater director József Bajza (1804–58), and Ferenc Toldy (1805–75). The conservatives preferred an entertaining theater, and seized every chance and forum to a­ ttack 27

A kolozsvári nemzeti színház évkönyve. 1941/42–1942/43, 19–20.

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the liberals. One of their most ardent representatives was János Munkácsy (1802–41), a successful playwright and editor of a literary journal, but as it turned out later also an agent of the Austrian secret police. The radicals were actors and writers who left the liberal camp and became members of Young Hungary under the leadership of Gábor Kazinczy (1818–64). Their views about the role of theater could be summed up in one word: propaganda. They wanted to use literature and theater for political purposes in order to appeal to the national feeling of the public. It was this group that canonized József Katona’s play Bánk Bán.28 The various factions of the stratified audience also had differing ideas about the expression of emotions in the theater. Showing national enthusiasm and patriotic emotions in the theater became more and more common, to the great annoyance of the aristocracy, who found the behavior of the bourgeoisie rude and even proposed greater segregation in the auditorium ­between the “higher” and the “lower” classes.29 The theater shaped public opinion – the very term itself originates from the theater – but this public opinion ­became  more and more diverse by the 1830s. Some conservative aristocrats, even those who s­ upported the national idea, wanted to empty the “balcony,” or at least to discipline the voices of the students, craftsmen, and lower middle-class public; but the social changes and the political emancipation of the lower classes were inevitably too advanced for such reactionary measures. The theater had to rely on the financial support of the aristocracy, who often paid for their boxes but never frequented the Hungarian theater, or only rarely, so it needed even more the support of the middle-class paying public who came to regard the theater as a social and political platform where they could assert themselves with an unprecedented self-consciousness. But the middle class was not evenly strong throughout the whole country. Déryné was surprised at the silence of the audience in Kassa at the end of her performance, and at the cold social interaction among the members of the audience; while in Pest the public applauded and cheered loudly, in c­ ities like Kassa or Kolozsvár, where the theater and public life were predominantly under the influence of the aristocracy, such emotional and unruly conduct was less tolerated.30 In a pamphlet entitled Magyar játékszinrül (About the Hungarian Theatre) published in 1832, Count István Széchenyi proposed the introduction of a set of rules, a codification of public behavior that would regulate the rowdy youth on the balcony and would make the theater a much 28 Kerényi and Székely, eds., Magyar színháztörténet 1790–1873, 259–64. 29 Ibid., 261–62. 30 Déryné: Emlékezései ii (Budapest: Szépirodalmi Kiadó, 1955), 315.

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nicer experience for the “civilized” public like himself.31 In the same pamphlet, Széchenyi pleaded for a concentration of effort to create a single theater, the National Theater in Pest, instead of many Hungarian theaters in various cities. He argued that the country was not ready yet, either financially or culturally, to support multiple national theaters, and the solid foundation of one model theater that could function as an example for the rest was the only way to elevate Hungarian dramatic art to the level of European theater.32 Széchenyi sketched a whole plan for the construction of this theater: he argued that 1) it should be built in Pest; 2) construction should begin only once the total amount necessary to finance such a costly enterprise had been collected; and 3) the director of the theater should be a person not only driven by nationalistic enthusiasm but also experienced in finance. The rest of the document was a detailed analysis of the financial situation of the country, which was backward compared with other capitals in Europe. Széchenyi envisioned the National Theater as one institution among others like the Hungarian Academy of Sciences or the National Casino in the cultural district of Pest. He thought about the development of the whole capital (which he called Buda-Pest, though the two cities were united only in 1865), and he lamented the lack of a permanent stone bridge between Pest and Buda.33 When the Hungarian Theater in Pest opened, Széchenyi’s financial concerns turned out to be well founded: the theater was built not in the center, but in the suburbs, which was too far away for the government officials and nobility living in Buda or in central Pest. The shareholders were counting on further support from the aristocracy and other institutions who had already contributed to the building of the theater, but were very surprised when only a fraction of the boxes were rented out to the nobility. In Pest the board of directors made the same mistake as the directors in Kassa or Kolozsvár: they thought that the wealthy aristocracy would purchase boxes, and that their contributions would cover the costs for the maintenance of the theater and would pay the salaries of the actors. The prices of the tickets were unaffordable for the middle class. As a result, the Hungarian Theater in Pest was often almost empty; only when they staged operas were the performances sold out. Széchenyi also complained about his own theater-going habits and mentioned that in the first year he visited the Hungarian Theater only ten times and stayed only for a few minutes.34 31 32 33 34

István Széchenyi, Magyar játékszinrül (Pest: Landerer, 1832), 90. Accessed at: http://mek .oszk.hu/09700/09707/09707.pdf on 29-08-2016. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 54. Ibid., 264.

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The repertoire of the Hungarian theaters reflected the various social tastes of the audiences: the bourgeois public was not eager to watch tragedies, while the aristocracy and the state civil servants, who constituted a solid permanent basis for the theaters, would have preferred fewer burlesque-style comic and popular plays. Everyone liked opera, but the directors and boards of trustees who operated the theaters often felt that by filling their repertoire with opera they would betray the original purpose of the theater, namely the cultivation of the Hungarian language on stage. This argument was often brought up by writers and intellectuals in defense of the prose theater against directors who, for financial or aesthetic reasons, were biased towards opera. The memoirs and the diary of Déryné suggest that many actors also loved opera more than the prose theater, mainly because there were not many good original Hungarian plays at that time and operas attracted larger audiences. The classic European dramatic literature was available in Hungarian translation, but since the Hungarian theater started half a decade later than the German, it suffered a time lag also in terms of taste and audience preferences. The theater program committees were divided over the question of the repertoire, and there were endless discussions of whether the theaters should offer more tragedies to please the aristocrats, who did not frequent the Hungarian theater in large numbers but were important contributors to the budget, or whether they should follow the general trend and perform more modern pieces with sentimental nationalistic undertones and comedies, thus satisfying the taste of the largest theater-going public, the middle class and students. The German theater in Pest was bigger, had a larger budget, and a larger paying public, so their program offerings were more varied and attracted theater-goers from every social class. Even after the Hungarian Theater (which in 1840 became the National Theater) was built in Pest, the Hungarian public often chose to attend performances in the German theater because they found them more appealing than the old-fashioned plays and acting style of the Hungarian actors. The actors themselves were not nationalistic. Many were of German origin, like Déryné herself (she was born Rozália Schenbach, later Róza Széppataki in Hungarian translation), Kántorné (Anna Engelhardt), or Schodelné (Rozália Klein). They made their careers by performing national emotions on stage with great success, which appealed to the bourgeoisie but was less appreciated by moderate national-minded aristocrats like Széchenyi; yet they themselves were not chauvinistic nationalists, or only in isolated cases. Often they p ­ erformed in Slovakian or German, and could easily switch between German and Hungarian in everyday conversations.35 The diaries and memoirs of contemporary actors 35

See Déryné, Emlékezései ii, 13, 316–17, or Emlékezései i, 318–19.

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reveal that most performers were mainly concerned with playing well, enjoying their roles, and achieving artistic success on stage, rather than making politics; though doubtless some of them, like Lázár Nagy in Kolozsvár, were also ardent nationalists. Déryné, for example, saw herself also as the servant of her nation, and rejected a chance to join a Viennese theater because her departure would have left the Hungarian public without opera “for at least one hundred years. There are no other opera singers in the country. Hungary brought me up, and I would like to be buried in my native soil.”36 The political emotions provoked by certain plays with historical content were fermenting not so much on the stage, but rather in the public, especially among the young intellectuals and middle-class professionals. A dedication in the preface to an almanac published in 1793 distinguished four layers of the audience that were reflected in the division of the space in the auditorium: (1) the aristocracy, institutions, state officials and city servants belonging to the high nobility who rented the boxes; (2) the front-row seats close to the stage and orchestra pit on the parterre rented by the nobility; (3) the middle-class bourgeoisie with seats behind the nobility on the parterre; and (4) the rear end of the auditorium and the balcony reserved for students, craftsmen, and the less affluent bourgeoisie.37 The theater was the only place where, despite these differences in social class, position, wealth, and taste, people of all classes and backgrounds were physically together and could at least see each other or even address each other. The materiality of the space created a community which, though separated, participated at the same time in the same event, thus shaping a sense of collective belonging, albeit for a short time, which was then discussed and further developed in the newspapers and specialized theatrical criticism of the time, in which authors paid attention not only to the stage but also to the reactions of the audience. The first journals specialized in theater criticism were published in 1778 in German in Transylvania, in Nagyszeben (Sibiu, today Romania), the city that hosted the Transylvanian diet until 1791, when it was moved to Kolozsvár. Thereafter theater life in Nagyszeben declined, and the German company of ­Temesvár/Temeschwar (Timișoara, today Romania) provided entertainment for the public of Nagyszeben.38 This example shows who the main theater .

36 37 38

Rita Szilágyi, 29. Ferenc Kerényi, A régi magyar színpadon (Budapest: Magvető, 1981), 24. Nóra Wellmann, ed., Színházi hírek. 1780–1803 (Budapest: Magyar Színházi Intézet, 1982), 379. Accessed at: http://bpfe.eclap.eu/eclap/axmedis/7/7fe/00000-7fe83de9-ea24-4bab -b42c-e5db1d975baf/2/~saved-on-db-7fe83de9-ea24-4bab-b42c-e5db1d975baf.pdf on 30 August 2016.

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­ ublic was, and how important it was for a thriving theater culture to have p a strong basis of educated clerks and sponsoring state institutions who frequented the theater regularly and supported it financially. From the end of the eighteenth century until the middle of the nineteenth century, the bourgeoisie was not yet wealthy and educated enough to sustain theaters, which had to rely mainly on state funding and the support of the aristocracy. Another comprehensive theater newsletter which surveyed the performances in every single theater in the Habsburg Monarchy was published in 1791 in Pozsony (Bratislava, today Slovakia). The first Hungarian theater journal appeared in Kassa (Kosice, today Slovakia) with the support of Count Tivadar Csáky.39 All these journals had brief lives and were basically chronological reviews of the performances with occasional comments about certain actors. The first professional theater magazine, Magyar Színházi Lap, was published in 1860 and edited by Gábor Egressy, who had excellent and expert contributors; but unfortunately this journal survived only for one year, like its counterpart from 1859, Kolozsvári Színházi Kölöny, a journal published in Kolozsvár. A scholarly yet popularizing journal that would publish serious criticism and academic reflections on the theater along with an overview of programs could not survive, as there was no reading public for such a publication. As mentioned before, the tastes of the audience were divided along lines of class and political preferences. In 1792, of twenty-two pieces performed, only one was a tragedy; in 1793 there were only five tragedies out of fifty-nine performances. The tragedies that did make it to the stage were strongly sentimental and had fictitious historical plots. The uneducated audience in Pest was not receptive to the moral message of the classic tragedies; instead of a cathartic experience and the elevation of human character envisaged by the proponents of the drama, most of the spectators reacted only to sensational scenes displaying spectacular passions of joy or suffering. The Hungarian dramatic literature presented on stage at the end of the eighteenth century consisted mainly of a large number of sentimental plays translated from German. The most popular genres were the bürgerliche Trauerspiel (bourgeois tragedies) whose characters were not monarchs or mythological figures but ordinary citizens, and whose drama unfolded in the realm of the family. Plays like Lessing’s Miss Sara Sampson (1755) or Emilia Galotti (1772) could evoke a strong emotional response from audiences who are said 39

Géza Staud, A magyar színháztörténet forrásai ii. Rész (Budapest: Színháztudományi Intézet, 1962), 6. Accessed at: http://bpfe.eclap.eu/eclap/axmedis/1/1d0/00000-1d00fd24 -e384-423b-a411-d265cc342c68/2/~saved-on-db-1d00fd24-e384-423b-a411-d265cc342c68 .pdf on 30 August 2016.

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to have burst out in tears repeatedly.40 Instead of family ties, the Sturm und Drang sentimental plays focused on the individual, whose identity “is no longer confirmed in relation to the family role (as it is in the characters and the spectators of middle-class drama), but only through the certainty of one’s own personal value. It is a question of realizing the individual, one’s own self.”41 In Hungary the German Sturm und Drang tradition was complemented with the sensational Ritterdramen (with medieval knights as protagonists), which constituted a source of inspiration for later original Hungarian historical plays. The popularity of the Ritterdramen and of the Romanticized historical plays inspired by the Hungarian Middle Ages had a material dimension which was just as important for the shaping of national identity as the cultivation of the language: the costumes of the actors. The clothing actors wore on stage was primarily the díszmagyar (the festive Hungarian national garment worn by the aristocracy and nobility). Both Hungarian theater companies, the one in PestBuda and the one in Kolozsvár, had plenty of Hungarian costumes donated to them by the theater-going nobility and later manufactured by tailors who supported theater companies by providing costumes for their wardrobes.42 In 1860 a critic of the theatrical journal Magyar Színházi Lap (the Hungarian Theatrical Journal) argued that “the costume of a character on stage is like the representation of the character of the nation.”43 The effect of the Ritterdramen was often enhanced with sensational music, but there was no singing in these pieces; music served only as a scene-setting tool, as an illustration of the emotions of the characters, similar to the function of music in silent movies. Comedies became popular on both Hungarian and German stages at the end of the eighteenth century. In 1792, of the forty-eight plays to be found in the library of the Hungarian theater company of Pest and Buda, fifteen were comedies. A year later, in 1793, the records show a radically different picture: comedies became the main genre of the repertoire. In the first half of the year eighteen comedies were staged, and on fifty-nine nights the company played comedies thirty-one times.44 The appeal of the parodies was a continuation of the school theater tradition where students performed comic scenes in the interludes of the moralistic dramas. The German slapstick comedies that came to be known as Hanswurst plays were totally absent from the Hungarian stages. 40 Fischer-Lichte, 165. 41 Ibid. 42 Kerényi, Régi magyar színpadon, 60. 43 Hedvig Belitska-Scholtz, Edit Rajnai, and Olga Somorjai, eds., Színháztörténeti képeskönyv (Budapest: Osiris, 2005), 63. 44 Ferenc Kerényi, A régi magyar színpadon, 65.

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Hungary had no such popular traditions since the main theater-going public in Hungary was the aristocracy and the educated intellectuals whose taste was not compatible with this form of popular entertainment.45 The first Hungarian comedy, A filozófus (The Philosopher), was written in 1777 by György Bessenyei, emulating the French play L’homme singulier by Camille Destouches (1680–1754); but Bessenyei’s protagonist, Pontyi, was not a copy of the French character but a stereotype of a Hungarian nobleman. This play was first performed by the Hungarian actors of Kelemen’s company in 1792. In Transylvania, where the public was more aristocratic and educated, the repertoire consisted mainly of dramas by Shakespeare and Schiller, while popular Hungarian fictitious historical tragedies were completely absent. This strict institutional policy was introduced and maintained in Kolozsvár by Sándor Boér (?– c.1835), the theater director officially appointed by the Transylvanian diet; but his choice of the program would be challenged by other theater directors and actors such as János Kótsi Patkó, who wanted to appeal to a larger public by staging modern plays and comedies.46 Boér was also a productive translator and the author of a few original historical sentimental plays. Like most writers of the time, he chose his topics from the era of King Mátyás i (1443–90), who was born in Kolozsvár and by the eighteenth century had become the protagonist of many legends and myths. Mátyás represented the Golden Age that was lost after the Battle of Mohács in 1526. This marked the end of an era of cultural and economic prosperity and military success that came to be much appreciated in the following centuries of Ottoman occupation, Habsburg domination, and the struggle for greater national sovereignty. The era of Mátyás and the Middle Ages were favored not only in the theater but also by the first Hungarian operas in the nineteenth century. In the spirit of national Romanticism, Boér’s plays did not seek to convey historical accuracy, but to create a sense of history that could make a lasting impression on the viewers and had the dramatic power to kindle national emotions in the hearts of the audiences. Like József Katona, the author of the Hungarian national drama after him, Boér had thoroughly studied the historical material that he dramatized and also mentioned his sources.47 Although scholarly research and the sentimental dramatization of history might seem to contradict 45 46 47

Ibid., 68. Zoltán Ferenczi, “Az erdélyi magyar játékszín kezdete,” Erdélyi Múzeum 9:9 (1892), 522–37. Katalin Ágnes Bartha, “Kövesdi Boér Sándor: a világi színjátszás erdélyi mindenese,” Erdélyi Múzeum 65:3–4 (2003), 48–62, 54. Accessed at: http://eda.eme.ro/bitstream/ handle/10598/25660/EM_2003_3-4__005_Bartha_Katalin_Agnes-Kovesdi_Boer_Sandor .pdf?sequence=1 on 30 August 2016.

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each other, such mixing was common practice for the educated playwrights of the age, who sought both to present history as recorded in the chronicles and historiographies available to them, and at the same time to explore the rhetorical potency of the theater in order to turn it into a morally edifying institution. These sensationally dramatized historical plays focusing on legendary figures and landmarks of Hungarian history paved the way for the historical operas of Erkel and Mosonyi.

chapter 3

Taking the Stage: Opera in the Hungarian Theater Opera appeared on Hungarian stages at the same time as prose theater, and was from the beginning its greatest rival. In the Hungary of the late eighteenth century, operas and theater plays were performed on the same stages, and ­often by the same actors, as no separate opera houses had yet been built. In the beginning they co-existed peacefully, inspiring and enriching each other; but by the mid-nineteenth century certain critics began to regard them as adversaries competing for the hearts and minds of the public. Opera was very popular from the start, and attracted a larger public than the prose theater almost regardless of the quality of the work or the performance. Intellectuals who promoted the cause of a national theater feared that too much opera would betray the original ideals of the Hungarian theater; opera was deemed ­unsuitable for either the cultivation of the Hungarian language or the moral education of the public. Some disliked it because of the quality of Hungarian opera, which at first could not compete with performances in the German theaters; others were suspicious of the opera because it was a foreign art form which, according to its opponents, was meant only as entertainment and could not serve national purposes. Nonetheless, despite this criticism, opera remained the favorite genre of both the public and the actors. The first Hungarian operatic diva, Déryné, noted in her Diary that “singing made the theater appealing to the public, and it was through singing that they became used to the theater and came to know and like plays.”1 Such diaries and memoirs are invaluable historical sources because, though subjective and mostly chronicling everyday events, they provide glimpses of the lives of ­actors and theaters. These “egodocuments” are a record of the repertoires of the time, the casts, the difficulties actors faced during their careers, their ­travels, the reactions of the public, the stage designs and costumes for the plays, and the ­interactions among the actors, the public, and the boards of directors of the theaters. When Déryné chose to give benefit performances she opted for operas, not only because she preferred singing on the stage, but also because opera was usually a guarantee that all the seats would be sold. Her company played on a more permanent basis in Pest and Buda, in Kolozsvár especially after the first Hungarian stone theater was built there in 1821, and in Kassa, Pozsony, and Miskolc. But they also toured relentlessly in other towns 1 Déryné, Naplója ii, ed. József Bayer (Budapest: Singer & Wolfner, 1900), 191.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004347229_005

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in Hungary and Transylvania, since audiences everywhere were great fans of music theater. The formula for success in those days was predictable: the more music and singing there was on the stage, the more popular the shows were with audiences. This period of the beginning of the Hungarian performing arts coincided with the popularity and rapid dissemination of verbunkos music, a type of army recruiting music which soon became an emblem of Hungarian national identity. Verbunkos was a spectacular kind of dance initially performed at recruiting ceremonies by soldiers of the Habsburg army wearing Hussar uniforms to the accompaniment of music played by Gypsy bands who were also dressed in full Hussar attire.2 These spectacles romanticized military service and sought to entice young men to join the army. Ironically, the verbunkos music that was first associated with the Habsburg army became, by the end of the eighteenth century and especially the early nineteenth century, a symbol of the Hungarian nobility’s resistance to Habsburg domination. Eventually it would be embraced by all social classes as the Hungarian national style in music because of its cultural association with military service and its material aspects, such as musical instruments regarded as “typically” Hungarian, such as a Turkish pipe called the tárogató, or the cimbalom, a kind of hammered dulcimer. Since it could travel and be easily disseminated, verbunkos spread rapidly throughout the country and even abroad, where it was carried by traveling Gypsy musicians who were usually dressed either in Hussar uniforms or in traditional Hungarian costumes. Hungarian music, which began to be called Gypsy music, was incorporated into the works of composers like Beethoven, Haydn, Berlioz, Liszt, and later Brahms. The image of Gypsy musicians dancing with soldiers or merry village folk was also disseminated through lithography and printed engravings that were widely available and popular in that time. In the western part of Europe these images satisfied the need for orientalism and exoticism, while in their country of origin they were embraced as an “authentic” cultural product that appealed to all layers of a society eager to identify itself as proudly equipped with a long-standing and unique cultural heritage. Easily recognizable for its 2 For a detailed description of verbunkos music, see Bence Szabolcsi: “The ‘Verbunkos’: The National Musical Style of the Nineteenth Century,” in A Concise History of Hungarian M ­ usic (Budapest: Zeneműkiadó/Corvina Press, 1974), 53–64 (accessed at: http://mek.oszk .hu/02100/02172/html/6.html on 04 August 2016); and Lujza Tari: “‘Verbunk’–‘Verbunkos’ Interaction between Towns and Villages in an Instrumental Musical Genre,” in Doris Stockman and Jens Henrik Koudal, eds., Historical Studies on Folk and Traditional Music (Gylling, Denmark: Danish Folklore Archives, Museum of Tusculanum Press, 1997), 107–21.

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distinctly catchy tunes, verbunkos provided a marketable “national logo” that embodied bonding and branding and was ubiquitously present in the public sphere. By the time the first Hungarian operas were composed, verbunkos was the obvious musical choice for composers seeking to invoke couleur locale and create a “national” atmosphere on stage. Since it was so widely embraced by all social classes and had strong political undertones as the musical symbol of national resistance against the Habsburgs, verbunkos produced and enhanced national emotions in the public. Composers were aware of the powerful effects these tunes could evoke in audiences, and therefore they were eager to saturate their compositions with verbunkos, and later in the nineteenth century with a quicker version of it, the csárdás, a term derived from the Hungarian word for “tavern,” since this music was first played in taverns for dancing and entertainment. Along with folk songs, verbunkos and csárdás became primary musical elements of Hungarian theater plays. Like the Hungarian prose theater culture, the musical theater also had its roots on the stages of school theaters. In the eighteenth century, musical ­interludes became popular in plays performed in Latin on the stages of the ­Piarist and Jesuit schools. Though the plays were written and presented in Latin, the singing of choral and solo pieces was performed in Hungarian, often accompanied by instrumental music and dances. The musical sections of most school plays were predominantly Hungarian and foreign dance music; but the singing of folk songs and popular tunes also gained prominence, especially on the ­stages of the Piarist schools. Among the works popular on the school theater stages were the opere serie of Pietro Metastasio (1698–1782), the court poet of Maria Theresa. Inspired by mythology, Metastasio’s plots avoided politically sensitive topics and social conflicts, while his libretti were well structured rhetorically and always contained a moral message suitable for school theaters.3 It is recorded that in 1736 at a school in Beszterce (Bistrița, today R ­ omania), a town northeast of Kolozsvár, students performed a Hungarian folk dance, the kanásztánc; and in 1774, in a school play performed in Tokaj, folk dances were staged and songs idealizing peasant life were sung by students of the local Catholic high school. In 1767 in Pannonhalma, one of the centers of Catholic education, students danced the hajdútánc, a dance from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, which became especially popular in Hungary during the period of the Rákóczi insurgencies and anti-Habsburg kuruc war

3 Ferenc Kerényi, A régi magyar színpadon, 75–76.

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of ­independence (1703–11).4 There are many similar examples of Hungarian songs and dance music in Catholic and also Protestant school performances.5 At the end of the eighteenth century, in a period of resurgent anti-Habsburg feeling following the unpopular centralizing policy of Emperor Joseph ii, the Rákóczi era gained new significance; both its ideology and its cultural history came to be regarded as exemplary for the new national resistance. The nobility, men and women alike, again began wearing national costumes from the Rákóczi era as statements against the “Germanization” of Hungary that Joseph ii sought to implement. This revival of the material culture of the Rákóczi era conquered not only the Hungarian fashions of the time, but also the ballrooms of the aristocracy, where Hungarian dances became increasingly popular. The Rákóczi kuruc period was also invoked frequently in music, literature, and the arts, and along with the reign of King Mátyás i, it became one of the most popular historical frames of reference and repositories of national memory. In this interplay of political and cultural platforms, the Rákóczi period was shaped into an emblem of modern Hungarian national identity.6 Gypsy musicians played a significant role in cultivating and disseminating the cultural heritage of the Rákóczi era, or what was perceived as such. Gypsies provided the music during the first performance of the Hungarian theater company of Pest and Buda. The Latin newspaper Ephemerides Budenses noted that “the Gypsy band from Nógrád county was dressed in festive Hungarian dolmans with golden braids and tassels and played well.”7 Hungarian opera was fostered first by traveling theater companies who were able to perform even grand operas, albeit on an amateur level. Opera in Hungary did not follow the development of opera in Italy or France, nor was it so widely popular as in Germany, Austria, or England, where Italian and French companies continuously performed a repertoire from Monteverdi to Scarlatti, from Lully to Grétry. Through-composed opera was imported into Hungary in the late eighteenth century for a very limited audience in the aristocratic castle theaters. The time lag was a result of the century and a half of Turkish 4 Kuruc is the name of armed anti-Habsburg insurgents fighting in various rebellions and wars against the official Habsburg army in the years 1671–1711. 5 Ferenc Kerényi, A régi magyar színpadon, 74. 6 In 1867, Kálmán Thaly (1839–1909), a nationalist poet and Hungarian historian and founder of the historical society, published an anthology of poems, epics, and songs “from the Rákóczy period” that later became notorious as the most famous example of literary forgery in Hungarian literature. Available online at: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/42325/42325-h/42325 -h.htm , accessed on 30 August 2016. 7 Ferenc Kerényi, A régi magyar színpadon, 76.

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o­ ccupation and the subsequent wars of independence, which prevented an intensive cultivation of the arts. There was, however, a subversive oral culture of kuruc songs, both musical and literary, which later became one of the most significant sources of national canon-formation. Eighteenth-century aristocratic culture was international. The same opera companies toured in European castles, and the same theater players entertained the guests of the noblemen. They differed only in their preference for French or Italian style, but usually they were familiar with both. The Esterházy family owned the most famous theater. The first record of opera performances in Hungary refers to the inauguration of Duke Miklós Esterházy ii, at which an Italian opera company performed a range of short opere buffe by Haydn: La marchesa, Nespola, La vedova, Il dottore, and Il Sganarello.8 In 1768 a new theater was opened in Eszterháza – another Esterházy estate, in the village of Süttör – also with a Haydn opera, Lo speziale. The so-called “music house” of Eszterháza, from the same year, was built as a home and concert hall for Haydn and his orchestra. The theater in Eszterháza was one of the most modern theater buildings of its day, with a Winkelrahmenbühne designed to enhance perspective that could replace an entire scene within thirty seconds.9 After Miklós Esterházy’s death in 1790 his successor, Duke Antal, dismissed the opera company and the orchestra. His son, Miklós Esterházy ii, reopened the old theater in Kismarton, which was renovated with two stages, one of which served for regular opera performances. In 1804 the opera company presented Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, and in 1805 Die Entführung aus dem Serail. By that time Johann Nepomuk Hummel had already replaced Joseph Haydn as court composer. The Napoleonic wars put an end to opera and theater performances. In 1813 Miklós Esterházy ii had to disband his theater company and the actors tried to find work at one of the public theaters in the country. In the castle of the Erdődy family the earliest records of opera performances date from 1787, according to the Theateralmanach auf das Jahr 1787.10 Mozart’s Entführung was staged in 1785, three years after its premiere in the B ­ urgtheater, and Paisello’s König Theodor in Venedig was played nine months after its ­Vienna permiere. The first public opera performance was given in Pest in 1774 at the Rondella, where German actors regularly performed Singspiele and ballets.11 After Joseph 8 9 10 11

Géza Staud, A Budapesti Operaház 100 Éve (Budapest: Zeneműkiadó, 1984), 8. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 12. See Jolán Kádár, A budai és pesti német színészet története 1812-ig (Budapest, 1914).

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ii transferred certain governing bodies of the Empire to Buda, opera performances at the Buda Castle Theater became more and more frequent. The first opera was Salieri’s Die Schule der Eifersüchtigen from 1784. The big favourite was Mozart’s Entführung, which was first performed in 1788 and remained popular throughout the history of the German Theater. Even though most of the public in Pest and Buda consisted of wealthy German burghers, the Hungarian nobility also patronized these theaters. This situation did not change when the new German Theater was built in Pest in 1812, or after 1837 with the opening of the Hungarian Theater of Pest. Franz i, who succeeded the enlightened Emperor Joseph ii, reinstated censorship. After 1793 the only plays allowed on the Hungarian stages were those that had had at least two performances at one of the theaters in Vienna. Of course this order meant that Hungarian theaters would be completely dependent on Viennese cultural politics. In the early nineteenth century, the most important center for public opera  was Kolozsvár, where the actor and theater director János Kótsi Patkó (1763–1842) translated and adapted plays for the theater and opera: the settings and characters were transposed into a Hungarian context, given Hungarian names, and sometimes the texts were re-written to arouse greater interest in the Hungarian public. French and Italian plays were translated not from the original texts but from German, because this was easier, and anyway only a few people spoke other languages. The opera repertoire in Kolozsvár was initially the same as elsewhere in the country, but when Hungarian theater playing became regular, opera developed into an independent section of the playhouse sooner than in Pest. The first opera performed in Kolozsvár was called Lindor and Ismene (1794); its librettist and composer are unknown.12 Kolozsvár’s first Hungarian stone theater opened in 1821 and became an important forum for the development of Hungarian public opera culture and concert life. The aristocracy, who were the main sponsors of the Hungarian theater, donated sheet music and opera scores to theater companies and encouraged the performance of operas. The Hungarian newspaper published in Vienna, Hadi és Más Nevezetes Történetek, regularly received Hungarian dance music compositions dedicated to the theater companies, and the mixed musical and prose theater shows performed by amateur nobles in the 1790s in Kolozsvár and Pest promoted the co-existence of the two types of theater and paved the way for the so-called quodlibets, a form of light-hearted humorous composition that consisted of a series of juxtaposed popular melodies.13 German theaters often inserted Hungarian folk tunes and popular music into the texts of the German 12 13

Ibid., 26. Ibid., 77.

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plays, as in the Latin school theater performances. The first composers and singers of Hungarian operas were German by birth or had a German ­musical education, as did most of the musicians employed by the theater. When the Hungarian theater company hired János Lavotta (1764–1820) as conductor and musical director in 1792, he was expected to compose and perform “not only symphonies, but also national Hungarian dances for the delight of the public.” Antal Csermák (1774–1822), who was hired as first violinist for the orchestra, had the same requirement in his contract. They both contributed to the flourishing verbunkos music culture with hundreds of instrumental and vocal pieces.14 The first Hungarian opera, Pikkó Hertzeg és Jutka Perzsi, with music composed by József Chudy (1753–1813), the conductor of the Erdődy family, was performed on 6 May 1793 in Buda by the Hungarian theater company of László Kelemen, and was the first real success of the Hungarian theater. A Hungarian translation of a popular German Singspiel Prinz Schnudi und Prinzessin Evakathel by Philipp Hafner (1735–64), Pikkó Hertzeg was a lustiges Trauerspiel, a parody of a serious drama in the style of the Viennese Zauberposse, a mixture of Baroque miracle plays, Commedia dell’Arte, and French fairy tales, a beloved genre of the Austrian folk theater. It was translated into Hungarian by Antal Szalkay (1753–1804), a Hungarian officer of noble descent, who was also the translator and personal secretary of the Palatine of Hungary, the Archduke Alexander Leopold.15 Szalkay’s life story would have been a perfect inspiration for an operatic plot. He was an Austrian spy, hired initially by the Emperor Leopold ii himself to spy on his son, Alexander Leopold. Szalkay wanted to remain useful to his employer and proposed to become an agent provocateur and spy on hotbeds of Hungarian nationalism such as the theater company. The 14 15

Ibid., 78. For a long time the identity of the Hungarian translator was not clear, because the front pages of the Hungarian texts contained only the initials “S.A.” Theater historians in the past attributed the translation to András Szerelemhegyi (1762–1826), an actor in Kelemen’s company who was in charge of the production of the first opera performance. Ede Sebestyén also mentioned Szerelemhegyi as the translator of the play in his frequently cited book about the history of the Hungarian opera, but he added that the translation was based on “the new verses of Antal Szalkay” (Ede Sebestyén, Magyar Operajátszás Budapesten, 1793–1937, Budapest: Somló Béla, 1937, 23). Later scholars discovered new evidence in a nineteenth-century Hungarian newspaper, Magyar Hírmondó, which published a necrology by Lajos Schedius about Antal Szalkay where he named Szalkay as the translator of Prinz Schnudi. See Jolán Pukánszkyné Kádár, “Az első magyar énekesjáték: Pikkó Hertzeg és Jutka-Perzsi,” in Zenetudományi Tanulmányok az Opera Történetéből, eds. Bence Szabolcsi and Dénes (Bartha, Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1961), 15.

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organization and support of the theater involved moderates and radicals of all social classes, and it was a useful source of information about the political atmosphere in Hungary. The actors were delighted to accept Szalkay’s offer because they were in desperate need of Hungarian libretti and he was a learned man with a good reputation. He was in touch with the actor Ferenc Sehy (ca. 1765–99), who with Szalkay’s help infiltrated the anti-royalist group of the “Jacobins” lead by Ignác Martinovics (1755–95), a political adventurer and professor of theology and chemistry who was originally a spy for the Emperor Leopold i. After Leopold’s death his son Francis i terminated Martinovics’ employment and he was forced to leave the court, which he found deeply humiliating, and he began an antiHabsburg campaign. He wrote a couple of pamphlets opposing the strict censorship in the country, and met with other like-minded intellectuals to form an anti-Habsburg group, which did not enjoy wide support. Not long after its creation it was undermined by the actor Sehy and its members were executed in Buda on a field that is known today as Vérmező, the “field of blood.” Later, in the reform era of the 1830s and during the revolution of 1848, Martinovics was celebrated as a national hero, and the Jacobin movement, so named by posterity long after its dissolution, was regarded as the first anti-Habsburg political organization a century after Rákóczi’s kuruc rebels. At that time most people did not know about the shady past of Martinovics or about his personal motivations to begin an anti-Habsburg agitation.16 Though ostensibly working for its success, Szalkay and his accomplice Sehy also undermined the Hungarian theater company, which eventually led to its disintegration in 1796. However, in the beginning Szalkay’s help was welcome and contributed to the successes of the company. As the Emperor Leopold ii wrote: “Szalkay […] sait toutes les langues et est un homme d’un talent, d’une activité et d’une capacité surprenante, bon pour quelconque commission.”17 When he was commissioned to translate the operatic parody originally written by Hafner and later revised by Joachim Perinet (1763–1816), the writer and actor of the Alt-Wiener Volkstheater, accompanied by the music of the Austrian composer Wenzel Müller (1767–1835), Szalkay rightly assumed that this production would enjoy great success if performed in Hungarian. First of all, 16

17

See Sándor Eckhardt, A francia forradalom eszméi Magyarországon (Budapest: Franklin Társulat, 1924), 152; and Jolán Pukánszkyné Kádár, “Az első magyar énekesjáték: Pikkó Hertzeg és Jutka-Perzsi,” 15. “Szalkay knows all the languages and is an exceptionally active and talented man with great capabilities who can be trusted with any commission”; quoted in Jolán Pukánszkyné Kádár, 16.

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this light form of musical theatrical entertainment was already familiar from the repertoire of the German theaters in Pest which, inspired by the popularity of Hafner-Perinet in Austria, embraced the quodlibet genre and successfully staged many plays by Perinet, among others also Prinz Schnudi, which was performed four times in Buda and Pest in 1792–93 before it disappeared from the repertoire of the German theaters. When it was first presented in Hungarian, it became a familiar and coveted novelty for the Hungarian public, who were happy to attend any Singspiel, and if in addition the singing was in Hungarian, the triumph was assured. Pikkó Hertzeg combined the orientalism fashionable in opera with a parody of the French classicist style, which was a popular genre in the Volkstheater: the strange plot is set in a town called Ypsilon and revolves around a love story involving the daughter of a Tartar khan (Jutka Perzsi, the daughter of the khan Gömbötz) and the “Kalmuk” King Pikkó. “Kalmuk” does not suggest in Hungarian anything more specific than Asian exoticism, but the rest of the characters have onomatopoeic or humorous names inspired by folk traditions that immediately prepare the theatrical public for a parody of some sort: Gömbötz means “dumpling” and can also be used as a metaphor to denote an obese person; Pikkó refers in folk dialect to a drunkard; Jutka Perzsi is a folk version of “Judith Elisabeth,” a parody of the typical “Fanny or Rosalind” heroines of the classical sentimental tradition.18 Pikkó is in love with the khan’s daughter, but the khan does not allow them to get married. Therefore Pikkó invades Gömbötz’s country, defeats his army, and kills the khan. When Jutka Perzsi sees the head of Gömbötz on the tip of Pikkó’s sword, she swears to avenge her father’s murder, but eventually, instead of killing Pikkó, she commits suicide. Pikkó also commits suicide, but instead of stabbing himself in the heart with his sword, as expected from a lovesick tragic hero, he eats so many s­ ugar-coated almonds that he dies of indigestion.19 The bathos of the original Prinz Schnudi was easily understood by the audiences of the German-language theaters who were familiar with the parodied material. Hungarian middle-class and lower middle-class audiences who preferred the typical genres of the Volkstheater, however, did not share this frame of reference, since the tradition of French classical tragedy was absent from Hungarian dramatic literature and Hungarian theaters. Nonetheless, 18

19

Jolán Pukánszkyné Kádár, “Az első magyar énekesjáték: Pikkó Hertzeg és Jutka-Perzsi,” in Zenetudományi Tanulmányok az Opera Történetéből, eds. Bence Szabolcsi and Dénes Bartha (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1961), 17. Ede Sebestyén, Magyar Operajátszás Budapesten, 1793–1937 (Budapest: Somló Béla, 1937), 24.

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the Hungarian public enjoyed the humorous character of the play, which was enhanced by the lively, appealing music. The music was composed by József Chudy (1753–1813), the conductor of Count Erdődy’s German theater in Pozsony who, before he was hired by the Erdődys, had pursued an acting career in various Volkstheater companies in Vienna. He was familiar with the conventions of the Singspiel and he easily adjusted this style to a number of lighthearted plays.20 The Hungarian public received Pikkó Hertzeg with enthusiasm, and though it was not exactly a masterpiece, it became the most successful play of the Hungarian theater company of Buda and Pest in 1793. The duet of Jutka and Pikkó was a magyar nóta, a Hungarian popular song, and the play also i­ ncluded Turkish music, waltzes, and verbunkos.21 Chudy’s contribution was praised even though he composed his music to the German libretto, which did not fit the Hungarian prosody. Though the public in general liked the performance, the dissonant relationship between the text and the music was received with criticism by the poet Ferenc Verseghy (1757–1822) who, in his review in the Hungarian newspaper Magyar Hírmondó published in Vienna, mentioned that the singers had to adjust their diction to the music. His criticism was taken seriously by the Hungarian theater company, and the next translators made sure that when they wrote to the authorities to ask for permission to translate a Singspiel or opera they use the words “adapt the text to the music” rather than “translate,” which provided the translators of the libretti with more artistic freedom and resulted in much better Hungarian texts.22 Pikkó Hertzeg became very popular everywhere in Hungary. In 1794 the students of the Calvinist college in Debrecen sang the “farewell” aria, “Én gyilkosa Gömbötznek” (I, the murderer of Gömbötz) even though the music had not appeared in print. How could they have learned the melodies? The songs could have spread easily and quickly due to the popularity of the music, the “friss Magyar nóta” (the fast Hungarian dance tunes). The songs might have been brought to Debrecen by students or tradesmen who studied and worked in Pest and Buda. Another sign of its success was that in 1793, in the year of its performance, the libretto was published by Trattner, one of the most famous publishing houses of the time.23 The boxes of both theaters where Pikkó Hertzeg was performed, the Reischl-house and the Rondella, were filled. It has been 20 21 22 23

Ervin Major, “Chudy József,” in Zenei Szemle 12:3–4 (1928), 65–68. Accessed online at http://db.zti.hu/mza_folyoirat/pdf/ZSz_1928_XII_03-04.pdf on 6 September 2016. Ferenc Kerényi, Régi magyar színpadon, 82. Ibid., 83. Jolán Pukánszkyné Kádár, 5.

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recorded that the play was immensely popular with women, who occupied seats originally reserved for them on the ground floor of the auditorium, but which were almost always empty. The theaters were operating to their full capacity: the first rank places of the aristocracy and nobility were just as full as the balconies bursting with craftsmen and students. The Singspiel inspired the Hungarian poet Csokonai, who used it as a source of inspiration for his own satirical musical drama the Karnyóné (1799). Pikkó Hertzeg was followed by other Singspiele translated and performed by the Hungarian theater company of Kelemen. András Szerlemhegyi (who was born to a German-speaking family named Lieberberger) is thought to have translated Prinz Schnudi, and was indeed responsible for the translations of eighteen other Singspiel-style operas, such as A lantosok (Die Lyranten oder das lustige Elend) by Emanuel Schikaneder, A magokkal elhitetett filozófusok (I filosofi immaginari) by Giovanni Paisiello, and Johann Baptist Henneberg’s Csörgősipka (Die Zaubertrommel). Many of these Singspiel operas were set in an imaginary oriental or exotic setting and their plots involved love stories, so the translator did not have great difficulty “adapting” them for the Hungarian public. The only Singspiel that proved challenging in this respect was Die Lyranten (A lantosok), because its protagonists were three professional musicians. To make it appealing for the Hungarian public, Szerelemhegyi introduced three Gypsy musicians, two violinists and a cellist, which was the customary instrumentation of contemporary Gypsy bands.24 Given the popularity of these plays, he applied to the governing council of his city of birth, Kecskemét, for funds to publish his translations so they could become available to Hungarian theater companies all over the country. Though the city council was proud of Szerelemhegyi’s acting career and his work as a translator, they granted him only a fraction of the sum necessary for the press. This setback and the slow disintegration of Kelemen’s theater company left him so disillusioned that he stopped acting and became an estate manager for the Catholic bishop in Vác. The next phase in the history of Hungarian opera started in the newly built Hungarian theater in Kolozsvár, which had both the technical capacity and the financial means to hire good singers who were able to perform more complicated operatic pieces. Elek Pály (1797–1846), who had learned singing and music in Vienna and was hired by the Hungarian theater company in Kolozsvár as a tenor, translated, among other works, the libretti of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Die Zauberflöte, La Clemenza di Tito, and Weber’s Der Freischütz, in which the famous diva Déryné sang the role of Agatha and had a resounding success when 24

Ferenc Kerényi, Magyar színháztörténet, 78. Accessed at: http://mek.oszk.hu/02000/02065/ html/1kotet/10.html on 6 September 2016.

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the opera went public. It is remarkable that Don Giovanni (which in Hungarian was translated as Don Juan) was advertised as a vitézi játék or R ­ itterdrama because that genre, like tragi-comedy, was popular with the public; the front page of the printed version mentions that the author of the libretto, Lorenzo Da Ponte, “is eighty years old and lives in New York.”25 These plays were popular despite the sensational advertising, and opera became the most successful genre in the Hungarian theater in Kolozsvár just as it did in Pest and Buda. Thanks to the stability that a permanent theater could offer, the Hungarian company of Kolozsvár became not only the nexus of serious opera culture, but also the birthplace of original Hungarian operas. The Hungarian theater in Kolozsvár hired as conductor József Ruzitska (1775–1823), who had conducted army bands before he joined the theater company. After his theatrical success he was hired by Count Ferenc Bethlen as the conductor of his Gypsy orchestra in Bethlen. Ruzitska composed Béla futása, which is considered the first original through-composed Hungarian opera. It was first performed on 26 December 1822 and instantly became a resounding success. It was so popular that it was still being performed in 1863, though in a revised version, and is the earliest opera in Hungarian whose score has survived. The libretto is a translation of Bela’s Flucht, a play by the Austrian playwright August von Kotzebue. This first Hungarian opera was an adaptation of a foreign play inspired by Hungarian history, just like the first Hungarian drama, József Katona’s Bánk Bán. Ruzitska had to compose this opera quickly, and with the musical education and talent of his performers in mind. Typically, the theater orchestra would consist of ten to fifteen musicians plus a choir of ad hoc amateurs, while the arias were sung by actors many of whom had had no special musical training. These circumstances could explain the evident simplicity of Ruzitska’s opera in its harmonization and orchestration. He composed all the horn parts in C and D major, probably to accommodate the instruments at his disposal at that time.26 The next conductor of the theater, József Heinisch (ca. 1800–40), composed an overture for the opera and later also revised some parts, as did his successor, Gyula Káldy (1838–1901). When Heinisch’s revised version of Béla futása was performed in 1838 at the opening of the Hungarian Theater in Pest, it was not particularly well received, probably because of its old-fashioned orchestration.27 Later it was also reworked 25 26

27

Ede Sebestyén, 15. István Lakatos, “Az első erdélyi magyar opera,” in Korunk 31:11 (1972), 1722. Accessed at: http://epa.oszk.hu/00400/00458/00425/pdf/Korunk_EPA00458_1972_11_1719-1722.pdf on 10 September 2016. Ede Sebestyén, 32.

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for the National Theater in Pest by Ferenc Erkel’s son, Gyula Erkel (1842–1909), who was also a composer and conductor. Ruzitska’s score contains many slow palotás and verbunkos dances, and the arias imitate the style of the Hungarian song tradition (magyar nóta). The orchestration and the musical conception of Béla futása inspired Ferenc Erkel to write his first opera in Hungarian style, Bátori Mária (1840). Between 1827 and 1834 Erkel was a pianist, music teacher, and the conductor of the philharmonic orchestra in Kolozsvár, where he became close friends with Ruzitska and Heinisch. In 1823, Déryné, the leading actress of the age, signed a contract with the theater in Kolozsvár, which had an invigorating effect on theater life in general. Déryné preferred to sing opera and knew an impressive repertoire by heart. She mentions in her Diary that she was called a “universal genius,” and because of her many talents she was exceptional in every opera company.28 The directors of the German theater companies knew of Déryné’s talent and wanted to hire her, but she insisted on playing with a Hungarian company in Hungarian. She wrote in her Diary that “there was no price for which I would have left the Hungarian stage to become a permanent German actress.”29 Despite her German family background and upbringing, she became deeply attached to the Hungarians and dedicated her career to the service of Hungarian culture and the Hungarian public. She became Hungarian overnight, so to speak: when a stage director wanted to print a poster for the play and asked Déryné what her name was, she replied “Róza Schenbach”; the director said that her name would look better on the poster in Hungarian translation.30 And so she became “Széppataki,” a name she used until she married the actor István Déry (1792–1862), after which she became known by her married name. Her “conversion” to the Hungarian stage happened suddenly, but it was irreversible, and  she took pride in her “role” as a Hungarian actress. According to her ­memoirs  she  deeply admired Hungarian culture, and especially the “proud character” of Hungarian music. She spoke highly of the artistic quality and emotional character of Gypsy music. On one occasion in Marosvásárhely she listened to the improvisations of a Gypsy violinist that were so moving and beautiful that they brought tears to her eyes.31 For her début performance in Kolozsvár she chose an aria which she had cherished from early on, and had had it copied for herself when she first heard it in Pest around 1810. It was composed by Gáspár Pacha (1776–1811), a 28 Déryné, Naplója ii (Budapest, Singer and Wolfner, 1900), 178. 29 Ibid., 379. 30 Déryné, Naplója i, 114. 31 Déryné, Naplója ii, 355.

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c­ omposer who became the first conductor of the Hungarian actors in Pest. It was a cantata entitled A magyarok hívsége és nemzeti lelke (The loyalty and national soul of the Hungarians) and was composed for the guests of the diet in Pozsony in 1809. The verses were translated from German and adapted to music by the poet Ferenc Verseghy. The piece was a combination of a cantata and a pantomime with allegorical figures (such as Genius, who wears a festive Hungarian national costume, Virtue, Apollo, and Mars) and with different choirs, including a children’s choir.32 Déryné liked the aria of the Genius and chose it for her first introductory song at the Hungarian Theater in Kolozsvár. According to Déryné this aria was the most perfect expression of the Hungarian character. The recitativo of the cantata is a pledge of loyalty to the Empress Maria Theresa, whom the Hungarian nobility swore to protect with their “life and blood” in times of war and peace, which is a testimony to the loyal heroism of the Hungarians.33 The conservative patriotic message of the text appealed very much to the governor of Transylvania and the aristocracy in general, because it praised the Hungarian nation (which at that time meant only the aristocracy) and was neither radical nor anti-royalist. As the theater in Kolozsvár was mainly sponsored by the aristocracy who made up most of the public, Déryné’s aria became a resounding success that led to many other similar celebrations. Every month a new opera was presented on the Kolozsvár stage, which meant that Déryné specialized in opera singing and also taught young women who had reasonably good voices how to become singers in the choir. It is thanks to her that Heinisch joined the Hungarian theater as conductor: she was invited to the house of Baron Farkas Bethlen for lunch, where she met Heinisch, who was the music teacher in the Bethlen family. Déryné complained that the theater company did not have its own conductor and therefore could not perform the more difficult operas. The Baron offered to allow Heinisch to help out the theater company when needed, and Heinisch agreed. Later the theater company officially asked the Baron to allow Heinisch to work for them permanently; at first he was reluctant to part from his favorite musician, but eventually he agreed. Heinisch, a learned Austrian musician and composer who corresponded with Beethoven and was familiar with the music of the leading cultural centers of his time, elevated Hungarian opera practice in Kolozsvár to the level of Vienna. According to Déryné, Heinisch’s presence marked the dawn of Hungarian opera. They ordered and translated the latest and most fashionable operas.34 32 Ferenc Kerényi, Magyar színháztörténet, 142. 33 Déryné, Naplója i, 113. 34 Déryné, Naplója ii, 157.

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Opera was important for Hungarian audiences and became a symbol of the public’s engagement with the national cause. Sometimes emotional a­ rguments about defending the honor of the Hungarian stage led to street brawls and fistfights. One such occasion is described in Déryné’s Diary: after she sang an aria from a Rossini opera, someone on the balcony whistled. This behavior, which according to the theatrical conventions of the time was a manifestation of dislike that could ruin an actor’s career, was taken seriously by the public that night. Once identified, the whistler was attacked and beaten up by the people on the balcony. The scuffle got out of hand and they almost threw the insolent whistler to the parterre. When the police arrived and offered to take the offender to jail, the angry mob kicked him down the stairs step by step to the ground floor, where he was finally rescued by the police. The next day, the rioter had to appear in court with a fractured skull to explain why he had whistled during the performance. It turned out that his sign of dislike was not a criticism of Déryné’s singing, but rather a desperate demonstration of his love for a German actress who had demanded that he whistle during a Hungarian performance as a proof of his unconditional love for her. His confession did not sway the opinion of the public, who said that if a woman could make a patriot betray his own kin and turn him against the noblest endeavors of his nation, such as opera performances in Hungarian, he must indeed be a villain and had no place in society.35 Theater- and opera-related arguments and riots, like those remembered by Déryné, were common in the nineteenth century. The physical site of the theater became an important public platform where political emotions were expressed and “staged” not only on the stage but also in the audience. This clash of opposing views about the primacy and importance of opera in Hungary raged for years, and the period between 1837 and 1843 came to be known in Hungarian cultural history as the period of the “opera war.” The opera war was fought over the role of opera and theater in the Hungarian nation-building movement, and the battlefield consisted of a series of pamphlets and articles published in the most popular newspapers and literary journals.36 The debates started with the preparations for organizing a separate department for opera within the Hungarian Theater of Pest, and ended with the premiere of Erkel’s opera Hunyadi László in 1844. More than a series of theoretical debates about the role of the music in theater, it was a clash between nineteenth-century Hungarian intellectuals with differing cultural 35 Déryné, Naplója ii, 372–75. 36 Ferenc Kerényi, “Az operaháború. Egy színháztörténeti jelenség complex leírása,” in Színháztudományi Szemle 1 (1977), 110.

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world-views. According to Kerényi, the “war” was an expression of the stratification and diversification of Hungarian audiences which manifested itself in a clash of tastes and ideas about nationhood. It was a war about class differences, political preferences, and artistic tastes. The Hungarian Theater in Pest was renamed the National Theater on 8 ­August 1840. The piece chosen for this festive occasion was Ferenc Erkel’s opera Bátori Mária.37 The fact that an opera opened the National Theater was both a symbolic and a pragmatic choice by the board of directors: opera was the most popular genre across the political spectrum among the Hungarian public, and because Erkel’s opera was inspired by Hungarian history, it could satisfy the radicals who were suspicious of the spread of foreign opera culture. According to the liberal intellectuals who influenced the repertoire of the theater, opera should also serve the cultivation of national culture, as did the theater. The period of the reform movement (1830–48) and the general d­ isposition of nineteenth-century Europe were unquestionably in favor of the opera, though opera was not explicitly considered a national art. By the end of the reform period, every piece performed at the National Theater was either an opera or a melodrama with longer or shorter musical interludes.38 Opera needed no special publicity; it emerged as the most popular genre in a totally democratic way. Audiences wanted, liked, and supported opera. Nevertheless, some Hungarian intellectuals did not favor opera, and regarded it the enemy of prose theater; according to them, opera was a foreign entertainment, whereas theater was the institution for the cultivation of the Hungarian language and the national culture. The defense of opera reached its climax in 1842, when a group of “offended opera-loving citizens” sent a petition to the king without first discussing it with their local governing body. They accused the radicals, the liberals, and members of the Hungarian Academy of an anti-operatic policy. However, the petition never reached the king’s office, for it went directly to the archives of the governing directorate and became classified as an anonymous letter.39 From the beginning, Hungarian traveling actors had to adjust their repertoires to the demands of urban theater-goers who were used to German drama traditions and theatrical performances. By the end of the eighteenth century, the tastes of audiences in Pest-Buda, Kolozsvár, or Pozsony did not differ on ethnic or national grounds, but according to levels of education. There was no state-subsidized Hungarian theater as yet. Since the actors could not find 37 Kerényi, Magyar színháztörténet, 286. 38 Ibid., 324. 39 Ibid., 286.

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permanent sponsors for Hungarian drama, they had to follow the tastes and expectations of the public in order to secure an income and to support dramas written in Hungarian. Opera was highly popular among the theater-goers both within Hungary and abroad. The Hungarian traveling theater companies therefore included Singspiele in their repertoires. These were fashionable theater plays which contained shorter or longer musical pieces, mostly well-known songs. These plays usually fulfilled another requirement: they were written in a volkstümlich (folksy or popular) style. However, Hungarian aristocrats who had been educated abroad – mainly in Vienna – expected to find on Hungarian stages the styles and standards to which they were accustomed in foreign theaters and opera houses. Yet it was difficult to perform grand opera in Hungary because of the lack of financial support and also because the actors did not have the requisite musical education. One of the theater directors mentioned in his reminiscences that the Hungarian peasants in Dunapataj and the craftsmen in Nagykanizsa wanted to see more spectacle on stage: swordfights, animals, music, stunning stage design, lots of action. However, Hungarian theater companies possessed neither the necessary equipment and technology, nor the infrastructure, actors, and last but not least, the budget for such spectacular productions.40 The competition for public attention was fierce. By 1820 there were two big theaters in Pest: the German Theater and the Hungarian Theater. The monumental German Theater opened with two plays by the German dramatist Kotzebue: Ungarns erste Wohlthäter and Die Ruinen von Athen (for both of which Beethoven composed incidental music). The musical repertoire of the German Theater included mostly operas by Mozart and Rossini. The Hungarian Theater of Pest, known as the National Theater after 1840, had no choice but to compete with the German theater by assembling a repertoire that would attract audiences; they had to stage operas. The German Theater of Pest could afford to stage grands opéras since they had both sufficient funding and performers capable of such productions. Rossini’s William Tell was staged there in 1830, and later in the same year Bellini dominated the scene with La straniera, La sonnambula, I Capuleti e i Montecchi, and Norma. Among the Hungarian traveling theater companies, the one from Kassa was the first to stage grands opéras, beginning with Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi in 1836 and later Norma. An army band played the instrumental part, and the German Theater of Pest contributed the chorus. The opening of the Hungarian Theatre of Pest did not improve the situation. Since there 40

Kerényi, “Az operaháború,” 111.

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were no highly educated Hungarian opera singers, prose actors performed the often very demanding vocal parts with more or less success. Even so, the public enjoyed it and demanded more opera. Gábor Mátray-Rothkrepf, who wrote the first history of Hungarian music, was chosen in 1837 to direct the opera section of the newly opened Hungarian Theater of Pest. As a musician, music critic, and ardent Hungarian nationalist, Mátray worked to organize Hungarian operatic and musical life. His first task was to convince the high-class audience to rent expensive first-floor boxes for a longer term, so that the theater could be assured of a stable income. The boxes were then complemented with prices paid by the less wealthy members of the public: intellectuals in the second-floor and ground-floor boxes, supplemented with tickets for the parterre and the balcony occupied by the lower middleclass audience, mainly students and soldiers. Though the choice of repertoire was increasingly determined by the liberals and the radicals of the balconies, the theater was financed chiefly by the aristocracy’s rented boxes. The price of a first-floor box was five times more than the price of a front-row seat on the parterre, and sixteen times the price of balcony seats.41 Even when they rented a box in the Hungarian theater, the aristocrats continued to visit the German theater more frequently or in some cases exclusively, because of its higher a­ rtistic level. Mátray wanted to change this by raising the prestige of the Hungarian opera; but he constantly had to struggle with financial shortages, unprofessional musicians, and, later, with ideological debates about the function of theater as opposed to opera. There was a disagreement about the repertoire of the Hungarian theater between András Fáy (1786–1864) and Gábor Döbrentei (1786–1851), the two directors of the Hungarian theater company who had played in the Várszínház, the former German theater in Buda Castle, before the Hungarian Theater in Pest was opened. Fáy wanted to promote original Hungarian drama and hoped to secure the prosperity of the Hungarian theater by staging more prose plays. Döbrentei wanted to stage more operas and Singspiele in order to gain the support of the Hungarian aristocracy and the wealthy middle-class who frequented the German theater.42 History proved Döbrentei right, as opera indeed became the more popular genre and the main source of income for the Hungarian Theater. The schism between the opera supporters and those who were in favor of prose theater divided the board members of the Hungarian theater and the intellectuals of the time. While Hungarian drama had a solid program aiming to promote the moral education of the public and the cultivation of the Hungarian language, the 41 Ibid., 112. 42 Ibid.

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­opera had no such well-defined ideological basis, nor even the facilities required for grand opera, which by that time had become the most popular genre in the German theater in Pest. This was the main reason why Erkel first accepted an appointment as second musical conductor for the opera section at the German theater and not in the Hungarian theater. Mátray laid the theoretical foundations of Hungarian opera and music in his History of Music and his articles on Hungarian musical culture, but his voice was ignored by the Hungarian Academy and by nationalist intellectuals. For many, music was considered purely as entertainment, a privilege and amusement of the aristocracy that had nothing to contribute to nation-building. Although many opera performances at the Hungarian castle theaters were admired and well known throughout Europe, this did not really help to establish a permanent opera culture in early nineteenth-century Hungary. After the revolution of 1848 the situation changed, mostly because of the important role played in it by music. This can also explain why Erkel’s operas, which had had little effect on the public before the revolution, swept through all the theaters during the revolutionary years and became exceedingly important later in the century, especially during the period after the Compromise with Austria in 1867. The liberals tried to extend the arguments for original Hungarian drama to the field of opera. The theater director and literary critic József Bajza (1804–58) formulated an “advice” in an article published in 1839 arguing that Hungarian opera should be based on national music, and its text should help cultivate the national language.43 Bajza also attempted to secure a theoretical foundation for the opera. In an article in Athenaeum, the liberal journal of that time, he illustrated the difference between prose theater and opera using the metaphor of painting: prose theater is like a carefully drawn picture, because the actor has to present transformations of the human soul through the plot of the story in a sequence of well-conceived scenes, while the opera singer’s task is to make one single but intense impression on the stage, comparable to a less precise but vividly sketched picture in which the artist uses harsher brush strokes to express emotion. This tableau-like idea of opera was inspired by the French grand opéra style. Theater is like a drawing to be analyzed from close up, while opera, because it combines various media, is like a tableau to be observed from a greater distance.44 Yet, in spite of Bajza’s attempt to define opera and situate it theoretically in its cultural framework, the theoretical conceptualization of the opera in Hungary remained neglected. Two years later, 43 44

József Bajza, “Szózat a pesti magyar színház ügyében”; accessed at: http://mek.oszk .hu/05000/05073/html/gmbajza0002.html on 10 September 2016. Athenaeum, 13 December 1838.

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the journal A ­ thenaeum published an article translated from German, About the Opera Today, which blamed grand opera for spreading the harmful spirit of “delectation.” Even though Bajza published similar criticism of opera in the journal, he did not entirely reject it or deny its ability to contribute to the development of national thought. In a pamphlet published in 1839 in Buda entitled Szózat a pesti magyar színház ügyében (An Oration Regarding the Hungarian Theater of Pest), Bajza asserted: for us, Hungarians hoping to use the theater for national purposes, the theater is much more important than for the German, French, or English nation. It is the cornerstone of our national identity. […] Every attack against Hungarian theater […] is also directed against the Hungarian nation. […] There are a few among us who want to hide their unpatriotic feelings under the disguise of loving art. […] If we are always going to visit the German theater for its higher artistic standards, who will raise the standards of the Hungarian theater? […] Our theater was originally intended for prose works. Nevertheless, we responded to the demands of the public and also introduced opera on the stage. Not gradually, as it should have had happened, but immediately in medias res, we bought lavish scenery and hired the most expensive singers.45 […] Opera is too expensive an amusement and is unable to sustain the theater. Opera is not a lucrative business in the German theater either, in spite of its popularity among the audience.46 Bajza also used the famous trio of “school-church-theater” for the cultivation of culture,47 while he rejected the idea of a merely entertaining theater. He proclaimed: “For me the theater is a Hungarian institution par excellence, which should be given only a Hungarian spirit.” Bajza also wrote about opera, and attempted to refute the repeated accusation that he was hostile to it. His main argument could be summarized with the following excerpt from his Oration:

45

46 47

Bajza refers here to the most celebrated soprano of the age, the prima donna Schodelné Klein Rozália (1811–54), who was hired for wages matching what she could demand from every other leading European theater. Her monthly salary was more than the collective salary of the whole drama section. Tollharcok, 407–10. Ibid., 414.

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If opera is more important for us than prose theater, the whole institution is not worth a penny of the money paid by the nation for its maintenance. All these operas are foreign products, with foreign subjects, ­foreign languages, foreign colors and characters, foreign – German, ­Italian, or French – feelings, but never Hungarian. These are feelings, colors, and characters that did not acclimatize in our country, or if they did, the more we gain from them for the sake of art, the more we lose from our national consciousness, because they are going to transform our feelings and our way of listening into German, French, or Italian. […] I do not want art at the expense of our national consciousness. Let us first become a nation; only then can we think about art. This art should grow out organically from our national feelings; only then can it be compared to the original art of the French, Germans, or English. […] We often hear that opera is able to attract also the foreign public to our theaters. This is exactly why I say that opera is a foreign art. It is a universal language, and as such it is unable to help in the development of our mother tongue.48 Bajza’s remark, “Let us first become a nation; only then can we think about art” shows how consciously the leading figures of the national movement thought about nation-building, how aware they were that a nation had to be created. Bajza was not completely against opera, so long as it was national: I do not say that music or opera cannot express national feelings; on the contrary, I believe that operas are going to play a remarkably important role in the development of our national consciousness. Even though they are unable to cultivate our language, they have great potential for the cultivation of national feelings. But these operas have to be national, written with a penetrating Hungarian spirit, not like those we see on the stage nowadays.49 This statement of 1839 is one of the earliest descriptions of the nature and role of opera in nation-building, and shows that the liberals were not against the art of opera; they only wished to connect it to national thought. János Munkácsy, who accused Bajza of being hostile to opera, was of the opinion that the most educated and most intellectual people would turn away from the idea of the nation if futile art was accepted by the theater just because it conveyed national ideas. 48 49

Ibid., 418. Ibid., 420.

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The radicals, under the ideological leadership of Gábor Kazinczy and Gábor Egressy, were decidedly negative about opera. Egressy’s criticism was also directed against the exceptionally high salary paid by the Hungarian Theater of Pest to the celebrated soprano Schodelné Klein Róza, who also enjoyed special treatment from the directorate. She could leave for three months with pay, and could choose the time of her rehearsals and decide with whom she wanted to be on stage. All these privileges made her very unpopular among her actor colleagues, but the public adored her, not only for her beauty but also for her sophisticated voice.50 Lajos Kossuth, the leader of the revolution of 1848–49, also contributed a pamphlet to the opera war in the newspaper Pesti Hírlap. Though he supported the radicals in the debate, he tried to unite the two groups under a common goal: the success of the national movement. To achieve national independence, Hungarians had to unite and stop fighting with each other over questions such as opera. The opera war continued and influenced also the reception of Erkel’s first opera, Bátori Mária (1840). It was not particularly successful, and there was only one longer review of it, by Mátray in the journal Honművész. The radical Imre Vahot, editor of the Pesti Divatlap, wrote an Oration Concerning the Case of Opera in Our Country in which he declared that to allow national heroes to sing was to desecrate them. Meyerbeer for example, remarked Vahot, did not let any of his national figures sing on stage. When Meyerbeer was asked in 1842 to compose a work for the reopening of the opera house in Berlin, he could not choose an ancestor of King Frederick the Great for his hero, because it was forbidden to depict members of the royal family on stage. And Vahot cried out: “My God! I hope they would never make our great national leaders and heroes like King Lajos the Great, Máté Csák, or János Hunyadi sing on stage! If something like this should happen, the theater would deserve to collapse immediately.”51 János Hunyadi did not sing, but his son László sang in Erkel’s Hunyadi László (1844) and it became a resounding success. The opera war was more than a malign and jealous attack on Schodelné, or a fierce criticism of the policy of the theater director József Bajza. It marked 50

51

Déryné Széppataki Róza, the other diva of the age, also complained about Schodelné. She told Erkel that she had also been asked to go abroad to play in the German theater, but had refused all the invitations because she was patriotic. She would be ashamed to demand as much money from the nation as Schodelné did, even though her own talents were comparable to those of Schodelné; Magyar Zene Krónikája (Budapest: Zeneműkiadó Vállalat, 1962), 247. Tollharcok, 621.

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the ascension of a genre from the status of an “amusement” to an eminent position where it became politicized and could mobilize people with common or antagonistic political views. As Kossuth noted, the opera war was the crystallization of a larger social and political issue dividing the Hungarian public, but because of the popularity of the genre, opera could either be co-opted to serve national purposes or framed as a popular but nonetheless foreign art that threatened to subvert the cause of national unity. With his two operas László Hunyadi and Bánk Bán, Ferenc Erkel created two musical monuments for the nation, works whose symbolism and historical narratives represented national unity and could serve as the canonical operatic self-image of the nation.

chapter 4

Hunyadi László According to Eric Hobsbawm, the first half of the nineteenth century “was perhaps the only period in history when operas were written as, or taken to be, political manifestos and triggered off revolutions.”1 Ferenc Erkel’s opera, ­Hunyadi László (1844) was not directly responsible for the uprising on 15 March 1848, but it certainly contributed to the national mobilization on the eve of the revolution. Some of its arias and choruses, which had become popular in the years preceding the revolution, came to define the sound of protest and revolt against Habsburg rule. Despite the anti-operatic campaigns of critics like Imre Vahot, the journalist of the Regélő, who could not conceive of Hungarian historical figures and kings singing on stage, the demand for historical operas was rising and the public was eager to see operatic renderings of Hungarian history. Ferenc Erkel responded to this demand and came to be seen as the father of Hungarian national opera. While Franz Liszt’s symphonies popularized Hungarian music in European concert halls, Erkel’s operas and choirs established a tradition and created a public for Hungarian music at home. Erkel’s life spans the nineteenth century and coincides with the period of nation-building and the making of the Hungarian national theater and opera. He was the scion of a musical family, probably of Dutch origin. From the sixteenth century the name Erkel appears several times in official documents in Pozsony (Bratislava). Ferenc’s great-grandfather was already a musician, and his ancestors were either musicians, music teachers, or estate administrators. This tradition was continued by Erkel’s father, who started his career as music teacher in Gyula, a small trilingual town in the eastern part of the Hungarian plains. Later he gave up his job as a teacher and became an administrator of the estates of Count Wenckheim. His first son, Ferenc, was born in 1810 in Gyula. His father wanted him to follow in his footsteps in the service of the Wenckheim family, but Ferenc chose a musical career. He received his first music lessons from his father, and later went to school in Nagyvárad (Oradea, now Romania) and Pozsony (Bratislava, now Slovakia), where his teacher was the famous composer and music pedagogue Henrik Klein (1756–1832). The author of an essay on ­Hungarian national dances, Klein was a columnist for the Leipzig Allge­ meine Musikalische Zeitung, was in touch with Beethoven, and was probably the author of the first anonymous criticism of Liszt’s concerts in Pozsony. 1 Eric Hobsbawm: The Age of Revolution. 1789–1848 (London: Abacus, 2014), 311.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004347229_006

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Erkel lived in his teacher’s house, and under Klein’s guardianship he not only received a thorough musical education, but also had the opportunity to familiarize himself with the broad operatic repertoire of the time, as Pozsony’s German theater was almost as up-to-date and professionally equipped for complex operatic productions as the theaters in Vienna. At the same time, Pozsony was the administrative center of the Habsburg Empire and the city where the coronations of monarchs took place. As such, Pozsony became one of the most important cultural centers of the Empire, with a lively musical scene. The city also played an important role in the development of the Hungarian theater, as the Hungarian aristocracy and middle class serving in government offices supported the Hungarian acting companies. It was here that Erkel heard for the first time a concert by the admired virtuoso Gypsy musician, János Bihari (1764–1824), who made popular the verbunkos music that came to be seen as the Hungarian national idiom.2 After finishing his studies in Pozsony, the seventeen-year-old Erkel went to Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca, now Romania), the cultural capital of Transylvania, which had a rich musical tradition and became the cradle of Hungarian theater and opera. Erkel worked as the conductor of the Kolozsvár philharmonic orchestra and distinguished himself as an excellent concert pianist. He made many friendships with the German and Hungarian musicians active in the city. One of his friends at that time was the composer József Heinisch, the conductor of the local opera company. The Hungarian public of Kolozsvár were ardent supporters of the cause of Hungarian music and opera. In 1822 the first Hungarian opera, Béla futása, by József Ruzitska, was performed in Kolozsvár, and the atmosphere of this city inspired Erkel to write Hungarian historical operas. According to his first biographer, Kornél Ábrányi, Erkel remembered Kolozsvár fondly and said that the happiest time of his life was the years he spent in Kolozsvár. “Everything I am now – he told me several times – everything I became, I owe to Kolozsvár. In that city I learned the most and was encouraged to work for the neglected cause of Hungarian music; it was there that I heard the most beautiful Hungarian folk songs, whose memories would not let me rest until I released from my soul the music that was inside me.”3 In 1834 Erkel was invited to become musical director for Count Saalenstein’s orchestra in Szemeréd. He left Kolozsvár via Pest, where the governing board of the National Casino invited him to give a concert. The leading music ­critic of the time, Gábor Rothkrepf (1797–1875), who later changed his name to 2 Amadé Németh, Erkel (Budapest: Gondolat, 1979), 23. 3 Kornél Ábrányi, Erkel Ferenc élete és működése (Budapest: Schunda V. József, Zeneműkereskedő és Kiadó, 1895), 17–18.

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Mátray, wrote a rave review in the journal Honművész emphasizing not only Erkel’s musical talent, but also the fact that he spoke Hungarian fluently.4 In the first half of the nineteenth century, the official languages of state administration were Latin and German, and the Hungarian élite was mostly bilingual ­(German-Hungarian), or in some cases could not speak Hungarian at all. For example, Count István Széchényi (1791–1860), whom posterity has dubbed “the greatest Hungarian,” did not speak Hungarian at all. However, the educated middle classes were becoming stronger, and as elsewhere in Europe, they were ardent supporters of the cause of national culture. In the 1830s, which is also known as the reform era, the cultivation of the Hungarian language in schools and in the theater was one of the most important causes promoted by civic organizations. This explains why Mátray mentioned Erkel’s fluency in Hungarian in his review of the concert. Soon after his first concert and a few uneventful months as a music teacher at Szemeréd, Erkel was invited to return to Pest as conductor for the Hungarian theater company who performed in the Castle Theater in Buda. Despite all the critical acclaim and the enthusiasm of the actors, the company went bankrupt because it could not attract a large enough public. In 1835 Pest and Buda were two separate cities divided by the Danube. There were no bridges joining the two parts which later became Budapest, the current capital of Hungary. Pest was the administrative and cultural center, while Buda, the old capital, was mainly inhabited by a few aristocratic families. The theater in Buda Castle was therefore not easily accessible, and despite all their efforts, the Hungarian theater company was unable to fill the seats night after night. After the bankruptcy of the Hungarian company, Erkel was invited to become conductor in the German theater in Pest, an offer he accepted albeit, as Ábrányi recalled, not without reservations: I was struggling for a while with this offer, but I had more reasons to accept than to decline it. My national feelings, which I had to repress for a while in order to serve a foreign art, were against it. However, I accepted the offer because of my personal professional ambitions and for the sake of Hungarian music, whose interests I could serve much better and more efficiently in the capital of the country, which was connected to the rest of the world and offered me a broader musical horizon than in Kolozsvár.5

4 Amadé Németh, Erkel, 34. 5 Ibid., 42.

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In Pozsony Erkel had acquired a thorough musical education, in Kolozsvár he espoused the cause of Hungarian music, and in Pest he gained theatrical ­experience which enabled him to become the father of Hungarian opera. During his time in the German theater he became acquainted with the operatic repertoire of his time and gained insight into both musical direction and the ­practical ­aspects of running an opera theater with high standards. The German theater performed the works of Italian opera composers of the bel canto tradition (Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti), French grand operas (by Auber, Meyerbeer, and Méhul), and the works of German composers (Mozart, Beethoven, and Weber).6 In 1838, when the new Hungarian Theater of Pest was erected, Erkel left the German theater and accepted a post as chief conductor in the Hungarian Theater on the condition that he be given full control over the ­orchestra, the hiring of singers and musicians, and the planning of the program. He had to organize the orchestra and work with singers who were often uneducated amateur musicians, while those with musical training demanded high salaries comparable to what they could expect from the German theater or from prestigious opera houses in Europe, which created serious rivalry and dissent among the members of the Hungarian company. For example, the well-­ educated ­Schodelné, who was a much-applauded singer also on Italian and Austrian stages, asked for a wage that was four times higher than the s­ alary of the other diva, Déryné, and more than six times higher than the salaries of the other ­actors and members of the orchestra. This inequality led to a r­ ebellion among the players and eventually resulted in the so-called opera war. As discussed in the previous chapter on the beginnings of Hungarian opera, the “war” between opera fans and supporters of the prose theater was not only a disagreement about tastes or art forms, but also a difference of opinion about which medium could better serve the needs of the Hungarian public and contribute more efficiently to the cultural propagation of nation-building and national mobilization. Bajza, the director of the Hungarian theater, used S­ chodelné’s exorbitant and “unpatriotic” demands as an argument against the opera. As the conductor of the theater, Erkel did not have it easy amidst such internal turmoil and external attacks on the opera. The public ended the “war” with their preference for opera performances. Only operas filled the auditorium, while the prose theater, which was considered the temple of the H ­ ungarian language, was kept alive artificially by the joint efforts of the patriotic public and enthusiastic actors touring all over the country. However, the opera definitely emerged victoriously from the “war.” Erkel and his fellow musicians and critics – like Gábor Mátray, Mihály Mosonyi, or Kornél Ábrányi – realized that 6 Ibid., 42.

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the public’s fondness for opera could be co-opted for the interests of the nation. Opera was not simply a form of entertainment but gradually became a powerful medium for nation-building. In the years preceding the revolution of 1848, the Rákóczi March and Erkel’s Hunyadi László (1844) came to be regarded as the musical expressions of the Hungarian national movement: both conveyed strong anti-Habsburg sentiments and deployed mnemonic cultural practices that reinforced the binary opposition between the freedom-loving Hungarians and the treacherous Habsburgs. Both pieces re-enacted certain historical narratives with high emotional valence that were shaped and widely disseminated through artistic and literary representations. Such performative re-enactments of national memory in opera created a national public that could easily be mobilized for political purposes. Musical and artistic reminiscences of the past helped to shape, crystalize, and support the political articulations of national thinking in the nineteenth century. During 1848 and 1849 a typical evening at a Hungarian theater would consist of a number of patriotic songs, famous Hungarian opera arias, and poetry recitals. Certain familiar poems and tunes took on a new political significance during the revolution: an evening would commence with the Rákóczi March, followed by an orchestrated version of Erkel’s poem Himnusz (which later became Hungary’s national anthem) or Mihály Vörösmarty’s Szózat (“Appeal”), then some folk songs, the recital of Petőfi’s poem Európa csendes (“Europe is Silent”) by Fáncsy, a leading actor of his time, followed by another folk song and ending with the final chorus from Erkel’s László Hunyadi entitled “Meghalt a cselszövő” (“The Schemer Is Dead”). During the intermissions, the orchestra would perform verbunkos and other national dances.7 One Russian officer garrisoned in Nagyvárad, Mihail Lihutin Dormindontovich, noted in his diary that every evening the local theater turned into a site of anti-Austrian protest and celebration of Hungarian culture; the program featured either a Hungarian play or a compilation of Hungarian dances, among them the quick csárdás, which brought forth cheers from the audiences.8 Opera houses and concert halls turned audiences into political publics by creating a platform where the nation was cast in different roles, and where politics was understood in terms of emotions evoked by the re-presentation of stereotypical self-images contrasted with images of “the other.” “The other” could be anybody who was perceived as a threat to the nation: the aristocracy, 7 Kerényi and Székely, eds., Magyar színháztörténet, 352–53. 8 Tamás Katona, A magyarországi hadjárat 1849: Orosz szemtanúk a magyar szabadságharcról, (Budapest: Európa Könyvkiadó, 1988), 794.

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the cosmopolitan élite, a neighboring nation, or, in the case of smaller ethnic groups seeking independence, the center of imperial power. The protagonists on stage were re-enacting historical roles from the repertoire of cultural memory and creating a framework of reference for contemporary audiences, who interpreted the politics of their own time in terms of these well-established stereotypes. In the Hungarian theatrical tradition the betrayed loyal warrior and brave self-sacrificing patriot were the most common roles associated with the nation since the sixteenth century. By the nineteenth century the theater, concert halls, and operas had become affective scenes where anger, disgust, revenge, and love were experienced both as individual and as collective political emotions. The interrelations among (a) experienced and named emotions (such as anger, shame, hatred, or patriotic pride), (b) the range of the embodied affective states displayed on stage (crying, shouting, swooning from pain, or any dramatic transformation produced in reaction to certain situations), and (c) the context or situation which induces such emotions (for example disenchantment with the leadership of a ruler, or interaction with foreigners seen as a threat) are crucial for our understanding of the impact of theater and opera on real political emotions and actions. William M. Reddy claims that “emotions and emotional expression interact in a dynamic way,” and therefore emotional expression needs to be studied for a thorough understanding of human behavior and actions. Reddy quotes ­Madame de Staël, who argued in 1800 that the readers of novels experience new and more nuanced emotions.9 Opera, which became one of the most popular public entertainments in the nineteenth century, exhibited and taught audiences a whole new range of emotions which played an important role not only on the stage, but also in the aftermath of the theatrical experience, in the everyday lives of the people. The new topics of the plays and the emotional responses shown on stage shaped the emotional repertory of the audiences. Following his concert in Pest, Berlioz wrote to a friend about the stunning ­effect of his Rákóczi March on the Hungarian public: when the orchestra played the first bars, the hitherto calm public erupted in an unspeakable explosion of emotions and outcries. Nothing could stop the volcano of violent passions triggered by this music. Their overcharged souls burst with a tremendous explosion of feeling that raised my hair with terror. I lost all hope of making the end ­audible, and 9 William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), xii.

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in the encore it was no better; hardly could they contain themselves long enough to hear a portion of the coda. […] It was lucky that this was the end of the programme, for certainly these excitable people would have listened to nothing more. As I mopped my face in the little room set apart for me, a poorly dressed man slipped quietly in. He threw himself upon me, his eyes full of tears, and stammered out: “Ah, monsieur – the Hungarian – poor man – not speak French – Forgive, excited – ­understood your cannon – Yes, big battle – Dogs of Germans!” Striking his chest ­vehemently – “In heart of me you stay – ah, French – Republican – know to make music of Revolution!” I cannot describe his frenzy; it was almost sublime.10 The emotional politics of the nineteenth century were characterized by binary oppositions, crystallized images (“dogs of Germans” and loveable French), exaggerated gestures, and the extreme “sublime” intensity of affects. These staged emotions of love and hate, anger and devotion, were not simply reflections of public opinion but also shaped the moods and political attitudes of the time. The spectacle and the psychotropic nature of the musical experience turned operas into mobilizing emotional practices. Monique Scheer contends that emotions can be understood in a performative sense, as something people do rather than have. Furthermore, she argues that the contexts and technologies “do not frame emotions that are always the same, but instead play a significant part in shaping emotions and feelings.”11 Staged emotions have their own histories and are part of the socially ordered world. In the theater these emotions become institutionalized; the theater as an institution helps to generate and regulate these emotions. Since antiquity the theater has played an important role in modeling feelings and defining their valence and intensity. These institutionalized emotional practices on the stage are capable of shaping political emotions as practices in the audience (i.e., as encoded social reactions in the sense defined by Pierre Bourdieu, which involve the self, other people, or the environment, and are dependent on their social and cultural contexts outside the theater).12

10 11

12

Hector Berlioz, The Life of Hector Berlioz as Written by Himself in his Letters and Memoirs, trans. Katharine F. Boult (London: Dent, Everyman’s Library, n.d.), 198. Monique Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (And Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuan Approach to Understanding Emotion,” History and Theory 51:2 (2012), 209–10. Ibid., 193.

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Public theater and opera in the nineteenth century created “emotional communities” which varied according to differences in class, culture, ethnic background, age, or gender. Not everybody responded with the same enthusiasm to Erkel’s operas. Count Széchenyi, for example, noted in his diary that he found Erkel’s first opera, Bátori Mária, boring and musically uninteresting.13 The premier of Bátori Mária in 1840 coincided with the official renaming of the Hungarian Theater as the National Theater. Erkel’s opera was chosen for this festive occasion partly because of its content based on Hungarian history, and partly because audiences preferred opera to prose theater plays. This preference was a clear message that the cause of the “national will” should be promoted and performed through opera. The thirty-year-old Erkel composed an opera based on a libretto by Béni Egressy, with whom he collaborated on his next two operas, Hunyadi László and Bánk Bán. Bátori Mária was based on an eponymous tragedy by András Dugonics (1740–1818) published in a volume of collected plays in 1794. Dugonics’s play was in fact a Hungarian adaptation of the German play Ignez de Castro (1784) written by Count Julius Heinrich Graf von Soden (1754–1831). The tragic fate of Inez Castro was made famous by the Third Canto of The Lusiads, the national epic poem by the Portuguese writer Luis Vas de Camões (ca. 1524–80). Dugonics kept the plot but gave the characters the names of Hungarian historical ­figures. In Dugonics’s version Inez became Mária Bátori, King Alfonso iv became King Kálmán, and his son, Pedro, was renamed István. For the rest the story is almost identical. In the eighteenth century, in the early days of the development of Hungarian drama, it was not unusual for Hungarian playwrights to translate and adapt works from world literature, mainly from German and French. Dugonics’s Bátori Mária was received with enthusiasm by the Hungarian public and became one of the most popular pieces of the early nineteenthcentury theater.14 In Béni Egressy’s dramaturgy the play was transformed into operatic scenes and Erkel experimented with Hungarian verbunkos style, though the play was mainly written according to the conventions of the Italian and German opera of its time. The main topics of Bátori Mária are dynastic struggle, legitimacy of power, and intricate conspiracy, which would be explored further in both ­Hunyadi László and Bánk Bán. In a nutshell, the story tells the tragic fate of Mária, the beloved companion of Prince István, King Kálmán’s son, who is to be 13 14

István Széchenyi, Napló (Budapest: Gondolat, 1978), 918. Gusztáv Heinrich, “Dugonics ‘Bátori Máriá’-ja,” Egyetemes Philologiai Közlöny vi:5 (1882), 453–64. Accessed at: http://epa.oszk.hu/02300/02392/00015/pdf/EPA02392_egy_phil_kozl _06_1882_05_453-464.pdf on 23 January 2017.

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­ urdered in a conspiracy by the King’s scheming and jealous courtiers. ­István m wants to marry Mária, with whom he already has two sons out of wedlock, but the King’s advisors cannot accept this marriage with the “immoral” woman and convince King Kálmán to have her killed. While István is away hunting, Kálmán and his advisors pay a visit to Mária, who suspects a plot against her, so she appeals for pardon for herself and her children. The purity of the woman and the sight of the innocent children touch Kálmán deeply; he is deterred from the execution of the abject plan, but when he leaves Mária’s house the weak King is again persuaded by the villainous schemers to proceed with the murder. Kálmán allows them to execute Mária, but he distances himself from the plot and does not wish to be personally involved. The play ends with the return of Prince István, who finds the body of his beloved and vows revenge. The most important element of this play for the nineteenth-century Hungarian public was the motif of the schemers who influence the weak king and contribute to the death of an innocent victim. The monarch could not be criticized openly or represented as villainous, so his vile advisors were blamed for having misled the ruler. This motif will play a significant role in the dramatic structure of both Hunyadi László (with Czillei and Gara as schemers against Hunyadi) and Bánk Bán (with Bieberach as an opportunistic knight who plots the seduction of Bánk’s wife, Melinda). The first night of Erkel’s Bátori Mária was a great success and received much attention from the press.15 Even the most ardent anti-opera critic, Imre Vahot, admitted that “it is worth mentioning that Mr. Erkel endeavored to establish the Hungarian art of opera.” The music critic of the Pesther Tageblatt remarked that Bátori Mária was an opera of high value and that he hoped Erkel would soon write another opera in the same spirit. The literary and opera critic of the Athenaeum, Ferenc Toldy, asserted that Bátori Mária was the first real Hungarian opera.16 To establish original Hungarian operas had been an old wish of the intellectuals in the Reform Movement. As theater director Gábor Döbrentei wrote in 1817 in the afterword to his Mozart biography,

15

16

For an excellent and thorough study of the performance history and a musical analysis of Bátori Mária, see Tibor Tallián, “Szikrát dobott a nemzet szívébe”: Erkel Ferec három operája: Bátori Mária – Hunyadi László – Bánk Bán (Budapest: Rózsavölgyi és Társa, 2011), 51–176. István Barna, “Erkel Ferenc első operái az egykorú sajtó tükrében,” in Zenetudományi Tan­ ulmányok ii.: Erkel Ferenc és Bartók Béla emlékére, eds. Bence Szabolcsi and Dénes Bartha (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1954), 196.

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our pure Hungarian cities do not nurture for us a Hungarian composermusician, nor do they raise Hungarian singers. […] Shall we ever hear an original Hungarian opera, whose music is composed by a Hungarian and is sung by Hungarian singers? For only this totality could awake in us a special attention towards the art of the opera. Without a Hungarian ­music academy, this would never become a reality.17 Gábor Mátray responded in his Hungarian music history, A muzsikának közön­ séges története: so long as Mr. Döbrentei expects from a Hungarian opera that both its music and libretto should be written by a Hungarian, and it should also be sung by Hungarians, then we do not have one. Because the libretto of the first Hungarian Singspiel by József Ruzitska (1775–1824), Béla futása (Bélas Flucht), was written by Kotzebue, and he was German.18 Mátray’s argument reveals that the earlier Hungarus identity, which was associated with the homeland, gradually shifted towards a collective identity that was more and more characterized by culture and the cultivation of culture. Anyone could be Hungarian who was sentimentally bound to Hungarian culture or – as Mátray put it – to the “Hungarian spirit.” However, what this “Hungarian spirit” actually was, how it should look and how it could contribute to the making of Hungarian opera, had not yet been explicitly worked out. Hungarian critics felt that Erkel’s first opera was too much in the German or Italian vein, while the German critics emphasized its merits because of its Hungarian musical character. The verbunkos music and the adaptations of Hungarian folk songs were more evidently present and used with greater sophistication in Bátori Mária than the Hungarian motifs in József Ruzitska’s Béla futása. Erkel’s opera was a first siginificant step towards the creation of the Hungarian historical operatic genre that had long been demanded by both music critics and the public. Despite the opera’s foreign subject and transnational genealogy, the musical and artistic merits of Bátori Mária were recognized by many critics and its patriotic message was understood by the public. In its first eighteen years the opera was performed thirty-eight times.19 Erkel was inspired not only by the success but also by the criticism of his Bátori Mária. He realized that there was a great public demand for operas 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Amadé Németh, Erkel, 56.

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based on Hungarian history. If he wanted to serve both the national interest and further his career as an opera composer, he had to find topics that would be popular enough among the public, thanks to their wide literary circulation, and would also be dramatically suitable for the stage. The story of Hunyadi met all of these requirements. The interest in national history was triggered and enhanced by a gigantic project to promote an imperial identity among all the different nations of the Habsburg Empire. This project, led by the Austrian statesman and historian Josef von Hormayr (1781–1848), resulted in several volumes dedicated to historiographic and ethnographic descriptions of the various nations and regions of the empire. The publication of works such as the Archiv für Geschichte, Statis­ tik, Literatur und Kunst (1823–28) or the Taschenbuch für die Vaterländische Geschichte (1823–28) played an important role in collecting and presenting historical materials also for the various national publics of the Habsburg “Völk­ erstaat.” Hormayr called upon the artists of the monarchy, especially painters, to look for inspiration in the “historical past of their country” in order to promote patriotism.20 The Hungarian cultural journal Tudományos Gyűjtemény (Scientific Collection) propagated this idea and urged Hungarian painters to depict historical subjects, which the literary circles had begun promoting a decade or two earlier. Thanks to this effort to create an imperial patriotism, heroic stories of Hungarian history were represented and disseminated t­ hroughout the empire. “Not only rulers of bygone times such as Rudolf of Habsburg and Maria Theresa were included in the imaginary pantheon of the empire, but also Miklós Zrínyi and János Hunyadi. Via the Archiv and the Taschenbuch, several new themes and heroic stories of Hungarian history became disseminated throughout the empire.”21 The memory of Zrínyi and Hunyadi served both the purposes of cultural nationalism and the cultivation of state propaganda and patriotism, since these heroes were represented as protectors of Europe and Christendom against the Turkish Islamic invasion. In 1817 Hormayr recommended the use of historical figures who were loyal subjects of the Habsburg emperors and who had defended their rulers – as the famous phrase has it – with life and blood, “Vitam et sanguinem.”22 In the Habsburg Empire, 20 21

22

Károly Lyka, Magyar Művészet 1800–1850: A táblaíró világ művészete (Budapest, Singer & Wolfner, 1922), 42. Árpád Mikó and Katalin Sinkó, History-Image: Guide to the Exhibition of the Hungarian National Gallery, trans. Judit Pokoly (Budapest: Publication of the Hungarian National Gallery, 2000), 20. Erzsébet Király, “A nemzeti képzelettől a képalkotó nemzetig. Eszmék a Magyar művészet bölcsője körül,” in Nemzet és Művészet (Budapest: Magyar Nemzeti Galéria, 2010), 124.

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such figures of “dynastic heroism” were used in times of war or external threat to create a unity based on a sense of common destiny. The struggle against the Ottoman expansion or the Napoleonic wars were occasions for creating and strengthening a sense of social cohesion.23 The Golden Age, heroism, unconditional love of country, the defenders of Christendom (“propugnaculum Christianitatis”) – were tropes shaped by the literary works of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. In the beginning these attributes were reserved for monarchs, or for exceptional warriors like János Hunyadi, but later they were also applied to the entire country as a geographical-political concept (regnum, patria), and eventually they came to be used in a more abstract sense to denote the inhabitants of the country (natio, gens, populus).24 At exhibitions organized during the reform era in the first half of the nineteenth century, Hungarian topics begin to appear more frequently. Among the recurrent subjects in the late 1830s and ’40s was the figure of János Hunyadi, for example in the works of József Schmidt, The Death of János Hunyadi (1839) and Bálint Kiss, János Hunyadi after the Battle of Rigómező (1841).25 In the second half of the nineteenth century, especially after the success of Erkel’s opera, János’ son, László Hunyadi, became the chief protagonist of the historical imagination in art and literature. This dynastic patriotism turned into nationalism, and the focus shifted from loyalty to the ruler towards loyalty to the nation, the “remembering community.” Heroes like Zrínyi and Hunyadi came to be celebrated as exemplars of national courage. In the wake of the Napoleonic wars, when the Hungarian nobility rebelled against the absolutist rule of Vienna, anti-Habsburg legendary historical figures like the kuruc leader Ferenc Rákóczi or Imre Thököly were deployed to promote a new self-image of an oppressed nation longing for autonomy. With other heroes, like Bánk Bán or the Hunyadi family, their self-­sacrificing love for the country was combined with the new idea of ethnic affiliation, love for the nation, and responsibility for members of their own ethnic group. Thus Hunyadi’s death became even more touching for a nineteenth-century public because he was one of the “people”; he was the recognized leader of the “Hungarians.” The topics and characters were familiar, but the story changed: weak rulers, villainous schemers, and betrayed national heroes replaced the benevolent rulers and heroic loyal subjects. The public of the 1840s was familiar with 23 24 25

Attila Debreczeni, “Nemzet és Identitás,” in Nemzet–identitás–irodalom, ed. Péter Bényei and Monika Gönczy (Debrecen: Kossuth Egyetemi Kiadó, 2005), 223–25. Mihály Imre, Magyarország panasza (Debrecen, Kossuth Egyetemi Kiadó, 1995), 145–173. Gabriella Szvoboda Dománszky, “Nemzeti iskola – nemzeti művszet. Magyarok a Pesti Műegylet tárlatain,” in Nemzet és Művészet (Budapest: Magyar Nemzeti Galéria, 2010), 174.

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the heroic deeds of János Hunyadi, but was more interested in the injustice suffered by László. Fighting against oppression and social injustice became a new trope disseminated in literature, art, and political discourse. Erkel’s second opera, Hunyadi László, was immediately received and praised as the first genuine national opera imbued with “real Hungarian spirit.” Contemporary listeners regarded Hunyadi László as a national opera in spite of its musical eclecticism. The re-enactment of history evoked a strong emotional response and had an impact on the formation of a nineteenth-century national consciousness. The interplay between a synchronic and a diachronic level contributed to the reception of this opera as a national work of art. The ­diachronic level involved the revival of certain patterns of the past that had been remembered and preserved as national history down through the centuries by historiographers and artists. The synchronic level could be defined as the point of intersection with the contemporary aesthetic, social, and political discourses and practices that made history public and presented it as a national narrative shared by all the people belonging to a certain cultural community. The diachronic and the synchronic levels reinforced and legitimated their own systems by cross-referencing each other. According to the strongest national paradigm around 1840, represented by the liberals and radicals, the nation could be defined as a group of people sharing common traditions and common memories. A remembering community possessed a common historical narrative that created cohesion in the semantic systems of the nation. Therefore, stories could function as elements of nation-building only if they could address and advance the cause of national unity in a way that would be widely recognized. János Hunyadi and his sons were perfectly fit for this role. The Transylvanian Hunyadi family belonged to the middle nobility, and János had earned his title not by birth, but by military prowess. He was a hero of the people fighting for the people. After his death, his heir László should have followed in the footsteps of his father, but instead he had to perish because of a vile conspiracy and the immoral character of a weak king. His tragic fate symbolized the social injustice experienced by the Hungarians in the reform era. Allegedly, Erkel’s Hunyadi László originated by accident, when one day in Kígyó Street, in Budapest, the composer ran into his librettist Béni Egressy and noticed that he was carrying a roll of paper in his hands. In the words of Erkel’s biographer, Kornél Ábrányi, the composer asked Egressy where he was going, and Egressy replied that he had just left the house of the theater director András Bartay, who was not at home, but he had wanted to show him his latest work, a libretto he had written about László Hunyadi, since Bartay had been urging him to write an opera libretto on a Hungarian topic. Erkel looked

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at the manuscript and immediately realized that it was exactly the topic he had been seeking for years. He took the roll of papers from Egressy despite his protests, and told him that he could write a much better opera than Bartay. Egressy agreed, and within a few months Erkel had drafted a first version of the opera.26 Musical historical research has challenged this story and traced the origins of Hunyadi to more prosaic origins than the serendipitous circumstances described by Ábrányi. According to one expert on nineteenth-century music, Tibor Tallián, it is very likely that Erkel began composing the opera in 1841–42 and that he discussed the casting and the costs of the production with the theater director Bartay, who warmly supported the project also because the promise of a potential spectacular success brought back the diva Schodelné, with whom the theater negotiated a new contract.27 Indeed the Hunyadi became a resounding success, which strengthened the bond between the public and the theater. Therefore it is not surprising that the insurgents on the eve of the revolution of 1848 interrupted the play and demanded that the actors of the National Theater sing the well-known arias and choral excerpts from Hunyadi. After a performance thirty years later, during the period of the dual Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, one critic from the newspaper Pesti Napló (Journal of Pest) remembered that the first night of Hunyadi László “lit a spark in the heart of the people” who were avid for national spectacles. “In the 1850s, after the fall of the revolution and during the years of oppression preceding the Ausgleich, Hunyadi preserved and reaffirmed these national feelings. It was a bulwark against absolutism and the forces that sought to stifle even the Muses of the nation.”28 After the first night, critics agreed that Hunyadi was a great improvement in the Hungarian national operatic style over Erkel’s first opera, Bátori Mária. The combination of popular verbunkos music with the well-known story of László Hunyadi were expressions of national character in the opera. The feelings of national anger and disenchantment with the Habsburg monarchy were conveyed by the interplay of different layers of national history and cultural memory: the first level was the story of László Hunyadi; the second was ­Ferenc Rákóczi’s war of independence, represented by the verbunkos music that

26 Kornél Ábrányi, Erkel Ferenc élete és működése (Budapest: Schunda V. József, Zeneműkereskedő és Kiadó, 1895), 45. 27 Tibor Tallián, “Hunyadi László: Keletkezés, sujet, fogadtatás,” in “Szikrát dobott a nemzet szívébe”: Erkel Ferec három operája: Bátori Mária – Hunyadi László – Bánk Bán (Budapest: Rózsavölgyi és Társa, 2011), 222–23. 28 Pesti Napló, 25 February 1874, cited in Tibor Tallián, “Hunyadi László: Keletkezés, sujet, fogadtatás,” 242.

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b­ ecame popular in that period; and the third was the contemporary political opposition to Vienna that was well understood by the public. The conflict with the house of Habsburg, which was often portrayed as the oppressor of the sovereignty of the Hungarian nation, was a perennial topic in Hungarian cultural memory. The major roles were also well known from earlier literary works: the treacherous king, László V, who saw his power jeopardized by Hunyadi; the figure of the foreign schemer, Czillei, who misused the king’s trust in order to eliminate his rival, László Hunyadi; the Hungarian aristocrat Gara, whose thirst for power was so strong that he could sacrifice his daughter’s happiness and László’s life to acquire the rule of the country; and the national hero, László Hunyadi, who became a victim of his own hubris. The nineteenthcentury audience could recognize its aspiration for national independence in the interplay of historical layers, each of them referring to the same idea: freedom versus oppression, the ancient right of the Hungarian nation to sovereignty versus the autocratic rule of the Habsburgs. In spite of its many ­Italian, French, and German motifs it was regarded as Hungarian because the ­recurring verbunkos theme created a sense of cohesion. This structure was not so complex as one constructed with Wagner’s leitmotif technique, which mobilized musical memory and required a new mode of listening; n ­ evertheless, it was also based on the idea of creating cohesion and ­distinction by repetition. The multi-layered opera represented the historical myth of Hungarian freedom versus Habsburg oppression on both the musical and the textual level, creating a sense of narrative longevity recognizable as national history. The historical figure László Hunyadi (1431–57) was Count of Temes (now western Romania and northeastern Serbia) and governor of the Croatian lands, which in the fifteenth century belonged to the Hungarian kingdom. He was the first-born son of János Hunyadi (1407–56), who acquired the nickname “the scourge of the Turks” because of his significant victories over the Ottoman army. László’s mother, Erzsébet Szilágyi (1410–84) was an equally feisty, astute amazon who organized political campaigns and uprisings against King László V (1440–57) after the young Habsburg monarch broke his oath to protect her son and had him executed in Buda. To avenge her László’s death, she started a bloody war against the Transylvanian Saxons with the help of her brother, the nobleman Mihály Szilágyi (1400–60), who also played a vital role in helping Mátyás (Matthias Corvinus in Latin, 1443–90) attain the throne of Hungary. Mátyás is remembered fondly as “the just King” in Hungarian cultural memory, and numerous popular tales and literary works have preserved and shaped his memory as one of the greatest Hungarian kings. The major sources for the history of the Hunyadi family were the chronicles of Antonio Bonfini, a historian hired by King Mátyás, and Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, later Pope Pius ii, who was in charge of King László v’s education.

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The Hunyadi family occupies a unique place in Hungarian national memory because the figure of King Mátyás became folklorized already during his lifetime. The uncertain origin of Mátyás’s father was conducive to myth-making. According to the most widespread version of the legend, János was the illegitimate son of the Hungarian King and Holy Roman Emperor Zsigmond of Luxemburg (in German known as Sigismund von Luxemburg, 1368–1437) and a girl called Erzsébet Morzsinai, who later married Vajk Hunyadi (1374–1444). In some oral traditions Erzsébet Morzsinai is thought to be of Wallachian descent, and therefore Romanian history writing has also claimed János Hunyadi as a national hero.29 This explains why in the libretto of the opera Hunyadi János, the Hunyadi boys are described as being of “oláh” (“Wallach”) origin. Gáspár Heltai (1510–74), a sixteenth-century native German speaker, Transylvanian Saxon writer, and printing-press owner in Kolozsvár, published the Hunyadi legend in his Chronica az magyaroknak dolgairól (Chronicle of the Deeds of the Hungarians). Heltai learned Hungarian only in his late twenties, but he wrote and published only in Hungarian. For his chronicle, he used as a source the work of Bonfini, Mátyás’s historiographer; but Heltai’s renderings of the alleged romantic love affair between King Zsigmond and Erzsébet Morzsinai and the heroic deeds of János Hunyadi bear greater witness to his literary ­talent than to his historical accuracy.30 It is remarkable that the mythical figure of János Hunyadi has been preserved and perpetuated in Bulgarian, Romanian, and Serbian oral and literary tradition. Across the Balkans and in Hungary, Hunyadi was admired for his victories against the Ottoman army. He defended and liberated several castles that belonged to the Hungarian kingdom, and therefore he was held in high 29

30

Wallachia, between the lower Danube river and the southern Carpathian mountains, was traditionally a “buffer zone” between the Bulgarian Kingdom and the Hungarian Kingdom. In the thirteenth century it belonged to the Hungarian Crown, though the ­local powers challenged this status quo and rebelled against the Hungarian Kings by not paying taxes. Weakened by the Tartar invasion, the Hungarian Kingdom was defeated by the troops of Radu Negru (1269–?) and became a suzerainty. In the fourteenth century Wallachia again became a territory contested by the local rulers, the descendants of the Basarab family, and Hungarian kings who wanted to regain control over the suzerainty to secure their southern border. In the early fifteenth century the governors of Wallachia fought the Ottoman army, often in coalition with Bulgarian, Serbian, and Hungarian troops. Mircea cel Bătrân (also known as Mircea the Elder, who reigned from 1386 to 1418) defeated the Ottomans several times, but eventually accepted a peace treaty with the O ­ ttoman Empire in 1417, whereupon Wallachia became a Turkish suzerainty until 1859. Gáspár Heltai, Chronica az magyaroknak dolgairól (Koloszvár, 1575). Accessed at: http:// mek.oszk.hu/06400/06417/html/heltaiga0070001.html on 23 January 2017.

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esteem by both the people and the ruling class. But fame brought him jealousy and enemies. When János Hunyadi died, the country was in disarray, and his successor and first-born son, László, fell victim to political conspiracies. His second son, Mátyás, the elected king, was able to re-unite the country, and his reign came to be remembered as the Golden Age of Hungarian history. The opera begins at a historical moment when the country was in political turmoil. When Albert the Magnanimous (1397–1439) died after only two years as the first Habsburg king on the Hungarian throne, he left as successor a son who was not yet born, who would later be known as King László v of Hungary (or in Latin, Ladislau Postumus). At a time when the expansion of the Ottoman empire posed a serious threat, the Hungarian nobility could not agree to give power to an infant king. The diet of the country was divided between those who recognized the unborn baby as the future king of Hungary, and those who wanted to entrust the Hungarian crown to the young Polish king, Ulászló  i (1424–44).31 The latter party was in the majority and also enjoyed the support of the Pope, whose main concern was to secure Europe’s borders from the ­Ottoman army. On 1 January 1440 the diet of Buda elected Ulászló i King of Hungary. A few months later, a delegation made up of Hungarian barons and middle nobility went to Kraków to negotiate the terms under which Ulászló i could exercise his royal power in Hungary. This was the first time in Hungarian history when the low and middle nobility were a decisive factor in a royal election. Meanwhile, Elisabeth of Luxembourg, the widow of King Albert i, had the Hungarian crown stolen and arranged for the coronation of her son, László v. When the opposition heard about the ceremony, they declared the coronation of the Habsburg successor illegitimate. In the cathedral of Székesfehérvár a delegation of the supporters of Ulászló crowned the Polish monarch King of Hungary with a piece of ornamental crown taken from the cabinet holding the relics of King St. Stephen. Thus Hungary at that moment had two crowned kings, both of whose legitimacy was highly questionable. The bipartisan division escalated into a civil war in which the northeastern part of Hungary (today Slovakia) was under the control of Czech mercenaries hired by Elisabeth of Luxembourg and the nobleman László Garai (1410–59). The rest of the country was fighting the Ottomans along the southern borders, where János Hunyadi and his ­eldest son, László, distinguished themselves as excellent strategists and warriors, thus earning more and more fame and recognition among the nobility 31

This group even wanted the dead king Albert’s widow, Elizabeth of Luxembourg, to marry the fifteen-year-old Ulászló as a guarantee of legitimacy. She agreed at first, but later revoked her promise.

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and ­important lands and titles from the king. The Hungarian anti-Habsburg nobility tried to win back the northern territories controlled by the supporters and mercenaries of Elisabeth. This chaotic situation was unsustainable for all the parties involved. A settlement between Elisabeth and King Ulászló i put an end to the civil strife: according to their pact, Elisabeth’s daughter, the ten-yearold Anna, was to marry King Ulászló i, but because of the King’s early death their marriage never materialized. Ulászló i lost his life fighting the ­Ottomans in Varna, Bulgaria, in 1444. His body was never found. In 1444 János Hunyadi was elected a member of Hungary’s governing council and one of the five army chiefs of the country. In 1447 he was given the castle of Buda, and in 1448 he received the title of Regent of Hungary, but he never exercised his supreme power. In 1450, following an agreement with the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick iii (1415–93), János Hunyadi recognized László v as the lawful king of Hungary, and he also agreed to the marriage of his eldest son, László Hunyadi, with Mária Garai, the daughter of his enemy, the Habsburg supporter László Garai. Meanwhile the struggle for power continued. The young László v was in the custody of Emperor Frederick iii, who was not eager to set him free. In 1452 the King was forcefully liberated by his uncle, Ulrich Czillei (1406–56), who assumed guardianship over the child. In 1453 the thirteen-year-old boy was crowned king. Czillei was one of the main protagonists in this civil war. In order to become regent after János Hunyadi’s death, he needed to eliminate Hunyadi’s two sons, who could rightfully claim the position of their father. In 1456, the diet of Futak proclaimed Czillei Regent of Hungary, and László Hunyadi agreed to return the castle of Nándorfehérvár (Belgrade, today Serbia) to the young king. King László v journeyed to Nándorfehérvár in the company of Czillei and 4,000 mercenaries. Hunyadi, with his uncle Mihály Szilágyi, went to meet the King and Czillei and invited them to the castle, but their mercenary troops were not allowed beyond the gates.32 Once they arrived in the castle, Hunyadi killed Czillei. It is not clear whether the murder was planned by Mihály Szilágyi and László or whether it happened as the result of a heated argument between Czillei and Hunyadi.33 King László v, terrified by his uncle’s murder, pardoned László Hunyadi and appointed him army general of Hungary. A few days later in Temesvár (Timișoara, today Romania), the King promised Hunyadi’s mother, Erzsébet Szilágyi, under oath that he would not punish 32 33

The surrender of the fortress in Nándorfehérvár (Belgrade) is the opening scene of Ferenc Erkel’s opera, Hunyadi László. Sándor Szilágyi, A magyar nemzet története, Vol. iv, ch. 2 (Budapest: Athenaeum, 1896). Accessed at http://mek.oszk.hu/00800/00893/html/ on 20 January 2017.

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László and would protect the family. László Hunyadi accompanied the king to Buda, but upon his arrival there he was arrested and beheaded on 16 March 1457. His younger brother, the fourteen-year old Mátyás, was imprisoned. King László v died shortly afterwards. This story of historical instability and Renaissance feudal conniving was turned into a heroic narrative in the course of Romantic nationalism, and was shaped into a legend of national struggle against deceitful monarchs and scheming foreign oppressors. The plot of the opera is set in 1456, and the action unfolds in three locations: Nándorfehérvár in Act One, Temesvár in Act Two, and Buda in Act Three. László Hunyadi, his family and his supporters are idealized, and the King, Czillei, and Count Gara are presented as enemies of László, who, according to the opera, had the support of “the Hungarian people.” The complex historical situation is reduced to a melodramatic plot and simplified as a struggle between good and evil, nation and king, Hungarians and foreigners. The plot of the opera follows the well-known story of the Hunyadi family as preserved in Hungarian cultural memory. The faithful and honest László was betrayed by the weak and treacherous King László v, who was advised by the scheming and power-greedy Ulrich Czillei to eliminate László and make him the regent of Hungary. Though the King promised László Hunyadi’s mother that he would be the guardian of her son and would love him like a brother, he gave orders to arrest László on his wedding day. Gara, the father of Mária, László’s fiancée, became an accomplice in László’s incarceration. When Gara noticed that the King was infatuated by his daughter, he promised Mária’s hand to the King; like the ambitious Czillei, Gara also hoped to gain political credit with the King and become governor of Hungary. László’s mother makes the King swear not to punish László for Czillei’s murder, and Mária Gara was prepared to liberate László from the prison. Mátyás, László’s younger brother, appears only twice, and does not have a significant or active role in the story. Nevertheless, Mátyás represents the hope for a better future in the dramaticpoetic structure of the opera. Gara’s harsh, individualistic thirst for power and László’s hubris in trusting the King are presented as equally fatal mistakes. The tragic history of László Hunyadi was a favourite literary topic at the beginning of the eighteenth century.34 One of the first dramas written by the poet György Bessenyei (1747–1811) was Hunyadi László tragédiája (1772). An interest in national history was present in the Hungarian literary tradition long before Baron Hormayr’s call for the use of national subjects in arts. Béni Egressy was 34

Kerényi and Székely, ed., Magyar színháztörténet 1790–1873 (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1990), 47.

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inspired by a later play which he saw performed in the National Theater in 1842: Lőrinc Tóth’s drama entitled Két László (Two Lászlós), which received a prize from the Academy of Sciences and was published in 1846 in a volume of “collected original Hungarian plays” edited by Ferenc Schedel.35 Unlike the source of Bánk Bán, the national drama by József Katona which has been performed regularly on the Hungarian stage to this day, Hunyadi László survived only as an opera despite its popularity in the theater in the early nineteenth century. In Két László (The Two Laszlos) the playwright Tóth emphasizes the tragic consequences of dissent and rivalry among the Hungarian nobility. The internal conflict in the royal court overwhelms the innocent King, who falls prey to the base influence of his uncle, Czillei, and his own weakness of character. The librettist Egressy modified the play and created a text which, according to the operatic conventions of his time, reduced the complexity of the action in order to maximize the dramatic effect of the opera. His version has fewer characters and a simpler plot than Tóth’s play. The opposition between the two Lászlós, Hunyadi and the King, becomes more vivid and is presented as a battle between good and evil. In Egressy’s version the King is not simply weak, but his major flaw is that he breaks his oath and with it his contract with the people, and therefore has no legitimacy to rule. While in Tóth’s play the King is hesitant and the spectators witness his worries and trepidations, in Egressy’s libretto there is not much room for the expression of doubts and the action unfolds with rapid intensity. Though the main lines of the play and the opera are the same, the opera has a cleaner structure with fewer subplots, and each act ends with a powerful scene that moves the plot further: Czillei’s death in Act i, the royal oath in Act ii, the wedding and László’s incarceration in Act iii, and finally László’s beheading at the end of Act iv. Unlike the last act of the play, where the beheading happens behind the scenes and the audience follows the events through the description of a character watching the decapitation through a window, in the opera the spectators are actual observers of the beheading: they are one with the weeping crowd, see the agony of László’s mother, and witness the cruelty of Gara, who has no mercy and orders the executioner to strike for the fourth time, though according to unwritten custom he should have stopped after the third unsuccessful blow. Thus the opera could be interpreted as the passion of László, and according to the logic of the age, the passion of the Hungarian people who are betrayed by a King. Gara and Czillei are schemers, but the King by breaking his oath becomes the main perpetrator 35

József Ujfalussy, “A ‘Hunyadi László’ és irodalmi előzményei,” in Zenetudományi Tanul­ mányok Erkel Ferenc és Bartók Béla emlékére (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1954), 220.

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of the decapitation. The final scene is a very potent image and spectators are left with no sense of catharsis. It is not the monarch’s foreign origin that costs László his head, but the King’s character, the fact that he forswears his oath and thus ceases to act like a king. László becomes the hero of the people, while the King becomes their enemy and oppressor. The spectators’ only solace is in their historical knowledge that László’s brother Mátyás survived the conspiracy and would eventually overcome the chaos to emerge victorious as one of the most beloved and glorified kings in Hungarian history. As he promises in his cabaletta in Act i, “when his arm will be strong enough to use a sword, / he will persevere and punish those / who offend against the law and the country.” Musically, the opera combines the genres of French rescue opera, which was popular at the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the Italian operatic tradition of bel canto and the emerging Hungarian musical drama expressed with verbunkos music and orchestrated versions of Hungarian folk songs. Since the story relies on dichotomies of “us” and “them” as reflected in the chorus divided between the Hungarians and the mercenaries in Act i, one might expect this division to be reflected musically as well, with verbunkos associated with Hungarian characters and some international musical style with the king and the other foreigners. However, this is not the case, and the King also sings in verbunkos style. The overture, which was composed in 1845, a year after the first performance, can be considered the first Hungarian symphonic poem, for it is a harmonius web of all the main arias and choirs from the opera. The verbunkos numbers create coherence. Echoes of the Rákóczi March can be heard in both the slow and the fast sections. The opening choir of the Hungarians and the renowned “Meghalt a cselszövő” are both written in verbunkos style. The King’s aria, inserted into the “Meghalt a cselszövő” chorus, is also a ­verbunkos, and fits in organically with the choral music. This might be interpreted as a symbolic musical representation of the King’s hypocrisy. He seems to be in tune with the Hungarians when he promises not to revenge ­Czillei’s death, but he never takes his oath seriously. The text and the music are in dramatic tension. King László v sings in verbunkos style: “You base rebel, / death calls for death! / Your deed will be met by / the executioner’s axe on your throat! / The blood which has been shed / can only be washed away by your blood. / Wherever you are: the judge’s sentence / shall find you!” This foretells László’s fate and death, though the Hungarians seem to trust the King at this point, for they cheer him in the final lines of the choir: “The schemer is dead / Long live our dear country and the wise and good King! / Long live László, long live King László! / Long live the sage and great King!” It is remarkable that the King should enter or leave the stage accompanied by verbunkos tunes. Gara, Mária’s father,

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who turns against Hunyadi and orchestrates his capture, also sings a long aria based on verbunkos music. Here verbunkos functions as a double symbol: on the one hand, it refers to Gara’s Hungarian aristocratic origin, and on the other it expresses his passionate desire to govern the country. Social differences are a major cause of the conflict between Gara and Hunyadi. Gara represents an eighteenth-century idea of the aristocratic nation in the opera, while Hunyadi, his father’s rightful heir, is the people’s choice to lead the country. Choirs play an important role in Hunyadi László, which opens with “the voice of the people” who forcefully refuse foreign rule and affirm their willingness to fight for the rights of the nation. “We shall not be faithful hounds / of the breed of Orphan László! […] No, we shall not surrender the castle!” This is an unambiguous declaration against King László v and his foreign mercenaries led by Czillei. The chorus is much more than simply an echo of the soloists. “The people” are regarded an independent character in the opera: they are against King László and the foreigners, but they also separate themselves from László Hunyadi and his political decisions. “Only László sleeps, / he will not listen to us, / and he believes his foe alone.” Unlike the naïve László Hunyadi, “the people” led by Mihály Szilágyi, László’s uncle, do not trust the King’s promise to protect Hungary. Therefore “the people” are the third dramatic force next to King László v and László Hunyadi. The chorus wants to stir up Hunyadi and encourage him to take their side: “The people, who suffered so much, await you, / listen how the earth quakes.” However, it is not László but his younger brother, Mátyás – the later King of Hungary, who was regarded as “the king of the people” because of his strict measures against the nobility – who responds to the people. He promises always to fight for them and protect them from foreign rule. This is a direct allusion to the Mátyás-cult of the nineteenth century, and the only optimistic voice in the whole opera. The “people” in Hunyadi Laszlo are the voice of the Hungarian nobility, which was not so strictly divided from other social classes as in Western Europe. They were “the nation”36 in the fifteenth century when the opera’s story takes place. In the nineteenth century “the nation” was defined not by ancestry, but by belonging to the same culture, possessing the same cultural heritage. This included not only the nobility but the bourgeoisie and the peasantry as well. However, the old notion of the nation based on the privileges of ancestry did not disappear. The struggle of the two competing national concepts in Hunyadi László also appears in the conflict between Hunyadi László and Gara. The chorus, speaking for “the people,” always supports Hunyadi in this contest, which suggests the supremacy of the more democratic concept. 36

For more details about the history of the Hungarian nation concept see Chapter 1.

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The only divided chorus section is in the first act, when the Hungarian soldiers are reluctant to admit the King’s men, his mercenaries, to the castle. This is one of the most dramatic scenes of the opera. When the choir of Hunyadi’s army asks the mercenaries who they are, they reply: “The King’s men, / foreigners in the service of Cillei”; and when they are denied entrance to the castle, these “foreigners” denounce Hunyadi’s men as “traitors.” An angry choral battle ensures, with Hunyadi’s army telling the “swaggering hordes” to “leave! Get out of sight! […] before we unleash dogs upon you.” Cillei’s men leave, vowing revenge: “Perish with your castle, stubborn Hungarian troops!”37 Another very impressive choral section occurs in the finale of the first act, when Ulrich Czillei has to face the fact that the people have discovered his letter of treason and in the heat of a quarrel they murder him. Not one individual kills Czillei, but a whole group: “the people” stab him several times with their spears. When the King comes into the room and sees his uncle’s corpse, he is so frightened that he promises not to avenge Czillei’s death on the Hunyadi family. Following his promise to the people, the chorus praises the generosity of the King in verbunkos style music. The interesting musico-poetical characteristic of this part is that the King joins the singing chorus, and sings in the same rhythm of verbunkos style that is reserved to express the “voice of the ­Hungarians.” However, the words of the chorus and the King’s song are in sharp contrast with each other: while the people celebrate the death of the schemer Czillei and hail the good-hearted King, King László is already planning ­Hunyadi’s punishment and execution: “You base rebel, / death calls for death! / Your deed will be met by / the executioner’s axe on your throat.” There is always a chorus whenever Hunyadi and the King meet. Hunyadi is surrounded and supported by the people. Even though the antagonistic tone of the people from the beginning of the opera is no longer heard, the dramatic conflict does not languish. It is imbued with the tension that lies between what the people believe on the stage – that the King is merciful – and what the people know in the audience – that the King together with Gara is plotting László’s execution. This discrepancy culminates in the wedding scene, which is interrupted by Gara and his men after the lavish csárdás dance passage. It is noteworthy that unlike Hunyadi, Gara is never supported by a singing chorus; he stands alone, without the support of the people. This might suggest that the old national concept – that of ancestry – represented by Gara has lost its dominance and public appeal. However it can still be overwhelmingly devastating. Gara is just as dangerous for Hunyadi – and thus for the people – as the King. 37

Dual-language text at www.ztl.hu/erkel/Hunyadi_Libr_HU_EN.pdf , accessed 5 February 2017.

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Most of the ideas brought to the stage in the choral passages were similar to the national demands of the 1840s. Anti-Habsburg feelings had a strong voice in the Hungarian public sphere at that time, and in spite of the censorship such allegories as the story of Hunyadi László could still be performed on Hungarian stages. The opera also introduced an idea that became a political demand only later: the union of Hungary with Transylvania. The chorus sings at the wedding: “Sing a fine song, / merry wedding guests! / Let it shake / the walls of ancient Buda Castle! / Awaken, gale, our murmuring Danube! / Carry down to Transylvania / the appeal of our song! / Today László and Mária / are made one / like this blooming, / brotherly country!” It was only in the twelve points of the revolution in 1848 that the idea of union with Transylvania appeared as an explicit political goal. Nevertheless, it was already circulating in cultural products. Three contesting concepts of the nation are in fact the central source of conflict in the opera: the King and his supporters form one group, Gara the second, and László and his supporters the third. Gara represents the view of the nation as ancestry. He does not like the King and is also concerned about the country’s fate, but he cannot accept Hunyadi as governor. Hunyadi, however, has the support of the people. He is the symbol of a national unity of social classes. The King is portrayed as a weak character who can be easily influenced. In the 1840s, Hungarians could easily recognize in the weak king László v their own Emperor Ferdinand v (1793–1875), who was protected by Metternich just as László v was protected by Czillei. The protection of the feeble monarch was in both cases only a maneuver to exert political power without hindrance. The opera had a significant impact on contemporary audiences not only because of its topic, but also because of the use of verbunkos style. Erkel’s music was just as effective as the libretto. An inexperienced and weak King, the villainous foreigner Czillei, and the Hungarian nobleman Gara, all brought about the tragic end of László Hunyadi. According to popular interpretations that are highly contested, a similar treachery, that of Count Károlyi, led to the suppression of Rákóczi’s war of independence. Internal conflicts and external forces led to the tragic end of both independence movements. This was the opera’s dénouement, as well as the end of Rákóczi’s war of independence, to which the verbunkos music alluded. The memory encoded in the music made it sound as if it would forecast the dénouement of the real-life events of 1849. The verbunkos music is transcended in the oath scene of Act ii by organ ­music and church chorals, suggesting that the King’s oath was sworn not to Hungarians but only to God; and the King’s breaking of his oath is thus not only a sin against the Hungarians but also against God. Church music has the same

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function here as the choral in the first scene in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger: it both creates and transcends the cultural community. Another crowd-scene in Act iii, the Nuptial Choir at the wedding feast of Mária and László, is in a dignified, fast verbunkos style and closes with a csárdás. The csárdás follows the traditional verbunkos style established by Bihari, Csermák, and Lavotta, with three slow movements, two fast movements, and a coda. In Act iii, László Hunyadi’s prison aria and the funeral march are good examples of the slow verbun­ kos, which was always associated with the expression of melancholy in music. Folk songs, or rather pseudo-folk songs, constitute the material for two of László’s arias, the love aria and the prison aria. The male choir commenting on Czillei’s death, and the slow section of the Trio and Andante in the duet between Mária and László, were both originally folk song material. The arias that imitate Italian style in Hunyadi László are musically sophisticated, but did not become as popular as the ones written in verbunkos style. The first such aria is Mátyás’s Cavatina in Act i after the opening choral. This is followed by duets between the King and Czillei, and then between Czillei and László. An international style is used for Erzsébet Szilágyi’s maids’ choir, the bride’s aria, the Cabaletta section in Mária and László’s duet, the King’s two arias (especially the splendid one in Act iii), Mária’s nuptial song, Erzsébet’s prayer in the final scene, and the storm music. The aria named after the French soprano Anne de la Grange, who sang Erzsébet Szilágyi on 18 July 1850, is one of the most difficult challenges in ­Erzsébet’s role. Erkel composed this part later, especially for La Grange. It is a mixture of nineteenth-century Italian style and reminiscences of Mozart. The aria of the Queen of the Night from Die Zauberflöte is clearly recognizable in the coloratura section and also appears in the orchestra as flute music. At the end of the opera, in the orchestral part of Erzsébet Szilágyi’s penultimate aria, we can listen to the 3+1 fast-fast-fast-slow motif from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, which Erkel would re-use in Bánk Bán, in the dialogue between Bánk and Queen Gertrude. French and German elements dominate the recitatives between the arias and dances. The structural principles of the closed scenes are reminiscent of French grand operas, but the content and the representation of the scenery remain Hungarian to the very end. Despite the remarkable part that international musical styles play in this opera, the verbunkos still dominates. In spite of his eclectic style, Erkel could create coherence and compose an opera that was recognized as undisputedly Hungarian by the contemporary audience. The lively modulations and the shifts of key are typical of the Romantic operatic style. The overture itself is a good example of these musical variations and transpositions. Another Romantic feature can be ascribed to the choirs

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in the opera, who represent the “voice of the people,” Hungarian as well as German. Erkel had to invite an army orchestra to help him out in the theater, so he wrote the opera for a medium-size Romantic orchestra in which the wind instruments – especially the flute and clarinet – have a remarkable role. There was a shortage of professionally educated Hungarian musicians, and wind instruments are especially important in military music. The horn and the trumpet also figure significantly in the opera, especially in the marches and the overture. The trumpet music of the “Hunyadi-motif” recurs throughout the opera. The delicate string sections require virtuoso players, especially for the constant quick transpositions between G flat major and E flat minor. Erkel later added instrumental and vocal parts to Hunyadi László. The overture he added in 1845 he rewrote in 1878. The Cabaletta with flute cadence was added to the part of Mária Gara in the wedding scene in Act iii. In the 1850 staging, at which the “La Grange” aria was sung by the soprano for the first time, the audience could also enjoy for the first time the ballet section in Act iii with the csárdás music. All these changes can be found in the piano score of the o­ pera edited by Aurél Kern and published in 1896. Ferenc Erkel’s two sons, the ­Wagnerite Sándor and Gyula, both conductors at that time, a­ ssisted Kern in his work. Gusztáv Oláh and Kálmán Nádasdy revised the opera in 1935. Vilmos Komor published the piano version in 1968 with a few minor musical changes, and this version has been performed on Hungarian opera stages for years. The revisions, which aimed mainly at scenic and dramatic “improvement,” had a negative effect on the musical coherence of the opera. Some parts became incomprehensible without the omitted sections. Right at the opening of the opera, for example, following the male choir of the Hungarians and Mátyás’s Cavatina, the choir asks Mátyás why he invited them to the castle in ­Nándorfehérvár. Mátyás then explains that his brother returned from the diet of Futak, where it was decided that he had to return to the King his rights over the fortresses in the country. Without these antecedents, the strong resistance of the Hungarians to László’s plan and Mihály Szilágyi’s advice not to let the King and his mercenaries into the castle seem puzzling and unmotivated. The German press received Hunyadi more enthusiastically than the Hungarian newspapers. The Ungarn published the very first review of Hunyadi on 29 January 1844, a highly appreciative piece that stressed the opera’s good qualities. The critic wondered, however, whether a music based on such closed forms as the verbunkos could ever become the basis for more complex musical constructions.38 A certain P. Weil praised the extraordinary talent of Erkel 38

“Der heutige Erfolg war mit einem Worte nur ein succès d’estime. […] Die Musikalische Bearbeitung betreffend, wird man wohl noch keine genaue, den musikalischen Gehalt

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in the Spiegel, another leading German newspaper of the time.39 As against these admiring reviews, many Hungarian newspapers were explicitly critical of H ­ unyadi, due to the extended “opera wars” and also to clashing concepts of the nation. As could be expected, the anti-opera and pro-drama radicals disliked Erkel’s work. According to the critic of Regélő Pesti Divatlap, everything was wrong with this opera: the composer was not talented enough, the libretto was awful, and the singers – except for Schodelné – were contemptible. The Regélő Pesti Divatlap, edited by János Garay (1812–53), was critical most of all of the historical figures singing on stage: “May we not condemn the fact that in this opera every serious subject is conveyed by singing? It contradicts the spirit of history that heroes like László Hunyadi should sing on the stage.”40 István Széchenyi’s journal, the Jelenkor, wrote on 4 February 1844 that “In this opera we still cannot perceive any ingenuity or talent that would be able to create a melodious work. […] A Mozart or a Bellini could have created a beautiful masterpiece out of this libretto!”41 There were, to be sure, more positive reviews in the Hungarian newspapers as well. One of these appeared in the Világ on 31 January: “This opera attracted the public. Except for the boxes, the auditorium was completely full. […] The work is permeated from the beginning to the end with original Hungarian spirit.”42 The other daily, Nemzeti újság, declared: “This is a brilliant opera both regarding its music and its libretto. Erkel excels as a great composer.”43 However, this article does criticise the behavior of the listeners: “The audience does not have a refined musical taste; that is why it was applauding all the time without a proper assessment of the actual der einzelnen Nummern bis in die kleinsten Details gewissenhaft abwägende und glücklich erschöpfende Beurtheilung fordern, doch müssen wir schon jetzt im Ganzen unsere vollste Anerkennung dem Fleisse, der Tüchtigkeit und der Geschicklichkeit des Compositeurs ausdrücken, in der er die Forderungen, die man an eine sogenannte ‘Nationaloper’ stellt, grossentheils zu befriedigen wusste.” […] “Es bleibt immer noch eine grosse Frage, ob die musikalische Sprache die in ihrem jetzigen ausgedehnten Wirkungskreise kaum noch einer Erweiterung hinsichtlich der Modulationen fähig scheint, auf den engeren Kreis eines particulären Dialektes beschränkt, mannigfaltigerer Accent fähig sei” (Barna, 206–07). 39 “Diese Hauptidee, durch frappante Episoden gehoben, diente dem ausgezeichneten Kompositeur als Folie zu einem originellen, echt nationalen Tongemälde, desgeleichen  die vaterländische Tonmuse noch keines produzierte – und das die Hoffnung auf einen umfassenderen Aufschwung unverfälschter, nationaler Tonkunst im Herzen eines jeden wahren Patrioten beleben muss” (Barna, 205). 40 4 February 1844. Ibid., 203. 41 Ibid., 204. 42 Ibid., 202. 43 Ibid.

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professional achievement of the aria singer.”44 The critic of the Spiegel also remarked that at the end of the performance the audience had called Erkel and the singers again and again to the stage with loud applause, but “unfortunately with ear-splitting shouts that are simply unfit for the atmosphere of a National Theater. The impartial listener can wholly agree with cordial vociferous cheers, but not with noisy outcries.”45 On 3 February 1844 Lázár Horváth Petrichevich published in the journal Honderű the longest Hungarian review of Hunyadi László. Though Hungarian literary historians consider Petrichevich a conservative writer for his dislike of Petőfi’s poetry, his musical taste was definitely more progressive than that of his contemporary literary critics. Petrichevich was among those few Hungarian intellectuals who recognised Erkel’s talent. He suggested: “Erkel laid the first pavement-stones on which in the future the Hungarian musical Valhalla could be built.” Further he appreciated that the music was appropriate for the spirit of the libretto and often even surpassed it. As regards the possibilities of an original Hungarian national opera, Petrichevich stipulated: “Only when our composers recognize that national music can draw only on the national past and on a national character fostered by this past will they be able to create true national music.”46 Hunyadi László could have been perceived as a national and not just as ­another Hungarian opera because of its multiple layers of complex ­semiotic systems, both on a musical and a textual level. It functioned as a cultural ­palimpsest. This complex semiotic operatic system could represent and construct the emerging national consciousness which eventually led to the revolution of 1848. In 1844, six months after the opera’s first performance, the leading poet of the age, Mihály Vörösmarty, published his drama version of the Hunyadi-story entitled Czilley és a Hunyadiak. In 1848, Sándor Petőfi wrote the poem A király esküje (The King’s Oath), in which the main character is not László Hunyadi but King László, who reneged on his oath. In 1853, in the bleak post-­revolutionary years, János Arany wrote a ballad entitled V. László, focusing again on the weak and perfidious king. It is worth noting how the dramatic accent shifted: before the revolution, the dramas focused on László Hunyadi’s tragedy and on the devious figure of Czillei. During the revolution, King László v became the central figure of the literary works. Following the bloody oppression of the revolution, Arany’s 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., 205. 46 Ibid., 209–10.

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b­ allad focused on the remorse and the horror of the traitor king for having killed the national hero. After 1848 the treacherous king came to symbolize Austrian repression. The Hunyadi-topic was very popular among nineteenth-century Hungarian painters. Witness Hunyadi László siratása (The Mourning of László H ­ unyadi, 1859), by Viktor Madarász (1830–1917); V. László eskűje (The King’s Oath, 1861) by Béla Vízkelety (1825–64); Hunyadi László búcsúja (László Hunyadi’s Farewell, 1866) by Gyula Benczur (1844–1920); or V. László (1870) by Bertalan Székely (1835–1910). A bronze statue by László Dunaiszky (1822–1904), Hunyadi László és Czilley Ulrik (1846), should also be mentioned as a representation of the Hunyadi-theme. László Hunyadi became a marker of national identity in the nineteenth century, linked to the other popular legend cycle about his brother King Mátyás, called by the people Mátyás the Just. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries King St. Stephen and Árpád, the leader of the nomadic Hungarians, had been popular topics in the arts; in the nineteenth century the Hunyadi-myths became the cornerstone of the Hungarian national narrative. Ferenc Kölcsey’s (1790–1838) poem Hymnus (1823), which Erkel set to music, contains the line “és nyögte Mátyás bús hadát Bécsnek büszke vára” (“and the proud castle of Vienna moaned under Mátyás’s army”), referring to King ­Mátyás’s siege of Vienna in 1485. This “glorious” past act was contrasted with the nineteenth-century situation, when Hungary was subordinated to ­Vienna. Not only glory or humiliation was at stake, but also independence or s­ ubservience. The mythic history of the Hunyadi family, which was a Hungarian success story in every respect, came to be seen as a classic example of resistance against the Habsburgs, and as an appropriate thesaurus of national heroes that could express and represent all the existing national paradigms in a more or less unified picture.

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Actors Márton Lenvay as Bánk Bán and Róza Laborfalvi as Queen Gertrudis, from József Katona’s Bánk Bán, as performed in the National Theater, Pest, 10 November 1845. From the Collection of Theater History at the Hungarian National Széczényi Library, Budapest. Copper engraving by Alajos Rohn.

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The last scene from Ferenc Erkel’s opera Bánk Bán on the stage of the National Theater. From the Collection of Theater History at the Hungarian National Széczényi Library, Budapest. From Vasárnapi Újság (Sunday News), 15 September 1860, page 437.

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Actress Mari Jászai as Queen Gertrudis, from József Katona’s Bánk Bán, as per­ formed in the National Theater, Budapest, in 1890. From the Collection of Theater History at the Hungarian National Széchényi Library, Budapest. Photo by mór erdélyi.

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Bánk Bán Love, politics, and lust for power, against a lush medieval décor – the combination of these elements guaranteed the success of every opera in the nineteenth century. Operas with historical topics dominated the stages in Europe, and in those countries where nation-building was the chief public concern, history was deployed and understood as a political subtext and an allegorical expression of contemporary political struggles. In Hungary after the collapse of the revolution of 1848, during the “decade of silence” and retaliations, theaters remained places of protest, censored but at the same time tolerated by the Viennese authorities. Surprisingly, even operas that expressed radical criticism against the Habsburg rule could be performed. This is how Erkel’s Hunyadi László was regularly staged, and became, in the words of a critic in the Pesti Napló, “a stronghold against absolutism.”1 The Hungarian opera-loving public was eager to see a new opera by Erkel, but the composer lived in relative isolation in the 1850s. Though he performed his duties in the National Theater, he did not compose any significant opera for more than a decade. This long hiatus has been the subject of many musicological debates, but since Erkel did not leave a diary or reflect much on his creative undertakings in his writings, the cause of his long silence is not clear. One plausible explanation could be his struggle to find a suitable libretto, one that could compete with the quality of Hunyadi. Shortly after Hunyadi was staged for the first time, the news about “Erkel’s next opera entitled Bánk Bán” was spreading quickly in the newspapers.2 Even if Erkel thought of writing an opera about the tragedy of Bánk, it must have been one of his long-term projects, as there is no evidence that he actually started working on this piece until 1859. By the 1840s, the story of Bánk was well known to the Hungarian public, mainly thanks to the touring theater companies who popularized József Katona’s Bánk Bán all over the country. Though from 1851 until 1853 news was occasionally published about Erkel’s progress 1 Tibor Tallián, “Hunyadi László: Keletkezés, sujet, fogadtatás,” in “Szikrát dobott a nemzet szívébe”: Erkel Ferec három operája. Bátori Mária – Hunyadi László – Bánk Bán (Budapest: Rózsavölgyi és Társa, 2011), 242. 2 Miklós Dolinszky, “Bánk Bán: Keletkezés, sujet, fogadtatás,” In Tallián, ed.,“Szikrát dobott a nemzet szívébe”: Erkel Ferec három operája. Bátori Mária – Hunyadi László – Bánk Bán (Budapest: Rózsavölgyi és Társa, 2011), 364.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004347229_007

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with Bánk Bán, it is likely that the composer did not start working intensively on the opera until the late 1850s. He received a draft of the libretto from his trusted collaborator and friend, the actor Béni Egressy, whose early death in 1850 put a halt to Erkel’s plans. In September 1859 several newspapers claimed that Erkel had finished a couple of acts of Bánk Bán, and a year later the press was regularly releasing news about the various stages of the orchestration. By 1860, critics were guessing the day of the first performance. The expectations were so high that Erkel was pressured to show a sample of his opera, which he finally agreed to do at a public concert, with the help of the soprano Kornélia Hollósy as Melinda and the tenor Károly Kőszeghy in the role of Tibor. The resounding success of this preview only heightened the eagerness of the audiences for a new Hungarian opera, and the suspense of the expectation proved to be very effective advertising for Bánk Bán. The paper Hölgyfutár wrote in June 1860 that Erkel himself had confirmed that his Bánk Bán, the greatest new opera that was long in the making, would definitely be finished within a year. Indeed, the rumors proved to be accurate, and the first performance of Erkel’s Bánk Bán took place on 9 March 1861. After its first performance, Kornél Ábrányi, the critic of the musical journal Zenészeti Lapok, wrote that “Since the foundation of the Hungarian Theater, no opera was preceded by such high expectations as Erkel’s Bánk Bán. […] Erkel’s latest work shows that he had a good reason to keep his opera quiet, because he wanted to surprise his nation with a piece that will remain its eternal treasure.”3 Another critic and fellow composer, Mihály Mosonyi, also wrote a rave review about Erkel’s opera and argued that, although the Hungarian public had had to wait a long time for this musical drama, its patience was rewarded with a “truly excellent piece, one which will stand the test of time.”4 Indeed Bánk Bán became a canonical work and is still one of the greatest and longest-lasting successes in the history of the Hungarian opera. Between 1861 and 1884, the date of the opening of the Opera House in Budapest, Bánk Bán was performed 108 times, and József Katona’s play only 38 times. Gyula Bulyovszky (1822–83), the critic of the journal Nefelejts (Forget-menot), also wrote an enthusiastic review after attending a rehearsal of the opera before it was first performed: “This Bánk Bán, with its Hungarian music, its romantic and boisterous tunes, and its Hungarian character from the first note 3 Kornél Ábrányi, Zenészeti Lapok 13 March 1861, quoted in István Barna, “Erkel nagy művei és a kritika,” in Zenetudományi tanulmányok a magyar zene történetéből, eds. Bence Szabolcsi and Dénes Bartha (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1955), 216. 4 Mihály Mosonyi, Zenészeti Lapok 21 March 1861, quoted in Amadé Németh, A magyar opera története a kezdetektől az Operaház megnyitásáig (Budapest: Zeneműkiadó, 1987), 125.

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to the last, lives up to the spirit of Katona. […] Erkel conveyed in music not only the essential temperament of Bánk Bán, but also what the Hungarians always feel when Bánk Bán is performed.” He compared Bánk Bán with Hunyadi László and asserted that “the music in Hunyadi is more aristocratic, while the music in Bánk Bán is more folksy, because it borrows from folk tunes and folk music more abundantly than Hunyadi.”5 As a leading figure in the revolution of 1848, Bulyovszky must have remembered fondly the resounding success and political weight of Katona’s Bánk Bán, which was banned from the stage of the National Theater by the censors but was performed nonetheless at public demand on the eve of the revolution on 15 March. After the downfall of the revolution Katona’s play was again banned from the theaters for a decade, and was allowed to be performed only around 1860. If nothing else, this ban on the play helps to explain the long delay of Erkel’s much expected opera.6 Erkel’s masterpiece made the legend of Bánk popular again. The story of confrontation between “evil foreign powers” and “oppressed Hungarians” resonated even more strongly with an audience who remembered the traumas of the brutally crushed war of independence followed by a decade of police state terror. Bánk Bán as an opera evoked emotions of humiliation, betrayal, nationalism, and anger not only with its well-known plot, but also with Erkel’s verbunkos music and a libretto which combined Katona’s play with fragments from famous nineteenth-century Hungarian patriotic poems. If Hunyadi László “made the revolution,” Bánk Bán “made the nation.” It became a patriotic musical monument dedicated to the national struggle, and it has continued to fulfill this role to the present day. Bánk Bán is one of the most frequently played operas on Hungarian stages. Since 1987 Bánk Bán has been staged one hundred and thirty-nine times in various Hungarian theaters. In the past ten years, the play has been staged eleven times, and the opera version based on the drama seven times.7 Kornél Ábrányi, the first biographer of Ferenc Erkel, wrote that “In these difficult times, never and nowhere in the political world has any opera played 5 Gyula Bulyovszky, Nefelejts, 10 March 1861, quoted in István Barna, “Erkel nagy művei és a kritika,” in Zenetudományi tanulmányok a magyar zene történetéből, eds. Bence Szabolcsi and Dénes Bartha (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1955), 216. 6 For a thorough overview of criticism published after the first performance of Erkel’s Bánk Bán, see István Barna, “Erkel nagy művei és a kritika,” in Zenetudományi tanulmányok a magyar zene történetéből, eds. Bence Szabolcsi and Dénes Bartha (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1955), 211–33. 7 See the database of the Hungarian Theater Museum and Institute at: http://szinhaziintezet .hu/index.php?option=com_wrapper&view=wrapper&Itemid=754 , accessed on 18 December 2016.

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such an important role as has Erkel’s Bánk Bán.”8 However, the political relevance of Erkel’s Bánk Bán is neither unique nor extraordinary. In the nineteenth century, opera was a powerful medium for the expression of political ideas everywhere in Europe, and Hungary was no exception. One of the reasons why Erkel’s Bánk Bán could become so famous was the popularity of opera itself. As we saw in the previous chapter, the theater-going public preferred opera to prose theater. Though the liberal opposition argued that opera was a foreign art that did not further the cause of the Hungarian language, the public embraced the genre; it acclaimed Erkel as a national composer and Hunyadi and Bánk Bán as national operas.

The Plot of Bánk Bán

The plot of Bánk Bán is set in 1213 and revolves around the title character, Lord Bánk, who was in effect the Viceroy of Hungary when King Andrew  ii (1205–35) was away waging war. Bánk’s wife, Melinda, and his son live in Queen ­Gertrude’s court, which is described as a place of political and moral corruption. Queen Gertrude is Meranian (German) and is presented as a heartless ruler who is alien to the custom of the country and does not sympathize with her Hungarian subjects. Instead of protecting Bánk’s family, she is an accomplice in her brother Ottó’s plan to seduce Melinda, who tries to resist Ottó’s courting; but eventually he has his way by giving a love potion to Melinda and sleeping pills to the Queen, so that she is not aware of his vile deed. Bánk is called back to the royal court by Petur, speaking on behalf of a group of discontented Hungarian noblemen who are planning to organize a revolt against the Queen. Their foremost grievance is that the Queen does not care about the country and is only concerned with enriching her own foreign courtiers. When Bánk arrives at the palace, Bieberach, a scheming villain, informs him about Ottó’s plans with Melinda. Bánk is torn between his public and private problems, between the fate of his country on the brink of a revolt and his marriage that seems to be falling apart. Nonetheless, he tries to temper the mood of the rebellious nobility and warns them against killing the Queen. Bánk breaks into the Queen’s bedroom and demands that she explain why she did not protect Melinda. The Queen grabs a dagger to defend herself. Bánk loses control over his emotions and kills her on the spot. By the time King 8 Kornél Ábrányi, Erkel Ferenc élete és működése (Budapest: Schunda V. József, Zeneműkereskedő és Kiadó, 1895), 121.

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­Andrew ii returns from the war, it is revealed that Ottó gave sleeping pills to the Queen, so she was not directly responsible for Melinda’s misfortune. The King summons Bánk to the palace, and during their meeting Tiborc brings into the throne room Melinda’s lifeless body. She was killed when Ottó’s thugs set fire to Bánk’s house. When the King sees what has happened to Melinda, he pardons Bánk, whose fate has been punishment enough. The King’s last words are those of a statesman: the Queen died justly, before the Kingdom of ­Hungary perished. This melodramatic plot is neither historically accurate nor particularly original. The nineteenth-century Hungarian public was familiar with the story in the version by the playwright József Katona. More than fifteen percent of ­Katona’s text consists of unmarked “quotations,” most of which are translations from German.9 The remainder also draws heavily on well-known medieval Hungarian chronicles and other Hungarian sources recounting the story of Bánk. These works range from the period of the Reformation and eighteenthcentury Jesuit school plays to early nineteenth-century popular versions of the tragedy. Katona managed to integrate all these sources seamlessly into Bánk Bán, which, despite all the borrowings, does not seem a patchwork. Katona’s originality lies not so much in the plot but in the way in which he shapes his main character: he turns the flat figure of heroic chivalry plays into a round and complex protagonist. His contemporary audience, who were accustomed to German Sturm und Drang sentimental plays, interpreted the psychological complexity of Bánk as a dramatic flaw and a generic inconsistency instead of Romantic experimentation. Not until later would literary critics, like the famous nineteenth-century poet János Arany, praise the play for its “remarkably poetic” qualities and for its “captivating expression of dramatic emotions.”10 The murder of the Queen of Hungary was recorded in many almanacs at that time, but the details of the regicide have remained unclear to this day. Many saw the growing political influence of the Queen as a threat and were not pleased with her rule. It is not known exactly who assassinated the Queen; historians assume that she died as a victim of internal political rivalries in an age of unrest and complicated geopolitical orientations. Even the earliest medieval accounts are largely fabrications rather than accurate records of h ­ istorical

9 10

Ferenc Kerényi, “Katona József eredetisége.” In Kerényi, ed., Katona József: Bánk Bán (Budapest: Ikon. Matúra Klasszikusok, 1992): 11. János Arany, Összes művei, ed. Dezső Keresztury, vol. 10 (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1962), 275–329.

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facts. As varied as these early chronicles are, they all include the episode of the rape of the Palatine’s wife and they all refer to oral traditions.

Bánk Bán in the Hungarian Tradition

The story was evidently well known, and has been recycled many times over in Hungarian and in other European oral and written literary cultures. The Hungarian literary critic Ferenc Kerényi has summarized the history of Bánk Bán in a thoroughly annotated edition.11 The first written document to mention the tragic fate of Queen Gertrude was an Austrian epic poem from 1286. Both the fourteenth-century Chronicon Pictum (Illuminated Chronicle or Képes Krónika) and the fifteenth-century Chronica Hungarorum (Chronicles of the Hungarians) by János Thuróczy (1435?–1489?) were inspired by oral traditions. Instead of presenting the bare facts, the narrative of Antonio Bonfini, the chronicler of King Matthias Corvinus (1443–90),12 dramatizes the circumstances of ­Gertrude’s murder and for the first time depicts a theatrical conflict between the Queen and Bánk. In Bonfini’s history the King pardons Bánk for his deed, just as in the final act of Katona’s play. After Bonfini, a well-known humanist scholar whose works were translated into German and disseminated in various publications, the Bánk Bán story entered into European cultural memory. One of the best known German versions was written by Hans Sachs (1494–1576), the famous cobbler poet from Nuremberg. In this period the Queen is an accomplice in the rape and the readers’ sympathy is with Bánk and his wife. In all these versions Bánk is pardoned by the King, and in some versions he receives compensation for the tragedy he has endured. It is remarkable, but not surprising, that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of Hungarian literature the Bánk Bán story was preserved in Transylvania. After the battle of Mohács (1526) and the subsequent Ottoman occupation, the Kingdom of Hungary was divided into three parts, and only Transylvania managed to obtain independence from both the Ottoman sultan and the Habsburg court. Thanks to this independence, it played an important role in the preservation and cultivation of Hungarian culture. Bonfini’s chronicles were published in 1575 in Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca, Romania) by the press of the Protestant pastor, writer, and man of letters Gáspár Heltai (1510–1574?). Eight years earlier, in 1567, András Valkai (1540–87) had written a poem in the 11 12

Ferenc Kerényi, ed., Katona József: Bánk Bán (Budapest: Ikon. Matúra Klasszikusok, 1992). Mátyás Hunyadi is known as Matthias Corvinus in other languages because a raven (Latin corvus) appears on the family’s coat of arms.

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form of a history song which described the “German Queen Gertrude” as an accomplice in the rape with a dramatic depth of detail and poetic vision.13 Valkai feared that the independence of Transylvania would be endangered by the growing influence of the German Emperor, who at that time was also the ruler of the Kingdom of Hungary. Valkai’s poem can be interpreted on the one hand as a moral tale about marital fidelity and deception, and on the other as a political warning of the dangers of a foreign (German) ruler who is driven only by self-interest. From the start the poem focuses on the devious Queen who, to please her brother, plots to seduce Bánk’s innocent wife. In the last stanza, the speaker addresses “the Hungarians” and advises them to be virtuous and vigilant against deceptions such as those recounted in the poem. Valkai’s work was printed in 1574 in Kolozsvár and later the same year separately in Debrecen. It was reprinted six times in the course of the following twenty-seven years and became one of the best-sellers of Hungarian literature.14 According to the Hungarian music historian Bence Szabolcsi, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, during the chaotic political situation in the country, the oral and the written tradition, the high style and the popular ­register were mixed and not strictly separated.15 Though this was not a favorable period for the development of instrumental music, many people sang, and these songs played an important role in preserving the historical cultural memory of the fragmented nation. The singing tradition was embraced by both the church and the schools of that time. Bánk’s story circulated in various Protestant and Catholic school theaters.16 In the first half of the nineteenth century, besides József Katona, other writers also tried their hand at the Bánk story, but none of these versions became well known, and most were never even published because their authors deemed them too dangerous in the anti-German political climate of the age of nation-building. The most famous example was a version written by the first Romantic Hungarian poet, Sándor Kisfaludy (1772–1844). In 1808, in one of his letters to János Batsányi (1763–1845), an anti-Habsburg Hungarian poet with Napoleonic sympathies living in Austria, Kisfaludy remarked that he had 13 The history song (in Hungarian históriás ének) is a typical sixteenth-century Hungarian genre which flourished during the Ottoman occupation of the Kingdom of Hungary. One of the most important collections of these history songs was published by Gáspár Heltai in the volume Cancionale in 1574. This volume also included the lyrics of András Valkai’s song about Bánk bán. See Bence Szabolcsi, A magyar zene évszázadai (Budapest, 1961), 103–05. 14 Kerényi, Bánk Bán, 6. 15 Bence Szabolcsi, A magyar zene évszázadai (Budapest, 1961), 105. 16 Kerényi, Bánk Bán, 8.

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c­ onsidered writing a play about the palatine Bánk, but had abandoned the plan because he was afraid that the very topic might cause a scandal. According to the critic Rezső Gálos,17 Kisfaludy might have been influenced by the publication of the first volume of the history of Hungary, Magyar Századok, written by the Catholic cleric and poet Benedek Virág (1752–1830).18 In another letter from 1820, twelve years later, Kisfaludy acknowledged that he had actually completed a play based on the Bánk story, but the text was published only in a collected volume in 1892, long after its author’s death. There is no evidence that Kisfaludy ever saw or read Katona’s play.19 Two other dramas are known from around the time Katona published his play: József Elek Horváth (1784–1835) wrote a play about Bánk Bán in 1815, which survived thanks to the manuscript of a friend and was published more than a century later, in 1929.20 The Transylvanian Sándor Boér (?–1830s?), an ardent supporter of the Hungarian theater in Kolozsvár and translator of several German plays into Hungarian to enrich the repertoire of the Hungarian actors, also wrote a Bánk Bán play which was never published, and even the manuscript has been lost.21 Katona’s Bánk Bán inspired a whole generation of new writers who reworked the story of Bánk: in 1836 the playwright Ede Szigligeti (1814–78) wrote Dienes, a drama about Bánk, followed two years later by Imre Vahot (1820–79) with his play Zách-nemzetsége. Certain episodes from Péter Vajda’s (1808–46) novel Tárcsai Bende (1837) also draw on Bánk’s tragedy. The poet János Garay (1812–53) wrote a ballad about Bánk Bán in 1847 as part of his Árpádok cycle, which became very popular not just for its literary merits, but mostly because the Hungarian public was already familiar with Katona’s play, which was successfully staged several times in the National Theater in the 1840s.22 Sándor Petőfi (1823–49), the Hungarian national poet, also wrote a poem in the summer of the revolutionary year 1848. Aware of the anti-German atmosphere in the country, Petőfi presented Bánk’s story as an example of the historical struggle of the Hungarians against German oppression. “Bánk Bán” 17

18 19 20 21 22

Rezső Gálos, “Egy ismeretlen Bánkbán-dráma,” in Budapesti Szemle, ed. Géza Voinovich, vol. 215, issues 623–25 (Budapest: Franklin Társulat, 1929), 44. Accessed at http://real-j .mtak.hu/2502/1/BudapestiSzemle_1929_215.pdf on 29 May 2016. Benedek Virág, Magyar Századok. Accessed at http://mek.oszk.hu/04900/04919/html/ on 29 May 2016. Jenő Péterfy, Katona József Bánk Bánja (Budapest: Franklin Társulat, n.d.), 161. József Waldapfel, “Horváth József Elek és az erdélyi drámapályázat,” in Irodalomtörténeti Közlemények, ed. Elemér Császár, vol. 43 (Budapest: Pallas, 1933), 154. László Orosz, “Petőfi Sándor: Bánk Bán,” in Irodalomtörténet, Vol. 12. 62./ 3 (1980), 828. Ferenc Kerényi, “Petőfi Bánk Bánja,” in Petőfi Sándor, “Bánk bán” (Budapest: Magyar ­Helikon, 1979), 44.

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is not Petőfi’s best-known poem, nor is it his finest one. It reads like straightforward propaganda for the revolution of 1848: the Hungarian king is presented as a weak sovereign and husband dominated by his villainous German wife. Gertrude and her courtiers are constantly partying in the royal palace while the poor peasants are toiling in the fields and being exploited to pay everrising taxes. Petőfi compares the suffering of the peasants with the sufferings of Christ on the cross. The Hungarians are discontent and want to organize an uprising, but the palatine Bánk holds them back. Only after the Queen’s brother seduces his wife does he join the rebellious nobility, and together they break into the royal palace. They interrupt the Germans who are having a feast. When they see the angry Hungarians, the Germans become so scared that the wine turns to sour vinegar in their mouths. When the Queen asks what the “uninvited guests” want, Bánk replies that her entire German court are the unwelcome guests and that the Hungarians have come to reclaim their home. Bánk speaks on behalf of the “nation”: “the nation stands here / the offended nation / and the avenging God!” This is the final call for battle and the Hungarians start their massacre. Those who can flee the palace do so, and those who cannot escape are brutally murdered. Bánk kills the Queen by stabbing her many times with his sword, while the rest of the rebels are “clearing out” the “trash” from the royal court so that the country can become “clean” again.23 The message is terrible and the poem is written in a primitive folksy style, but it captures the way Bánk Bán’s story conveyed a revolutionary message to the restive Hungarian masses in 1848. By the time of the revolution, the story of Bánk Bán had become well known because of an ever-increasing interest in national history in scholarly circles and the press, and due to its popularization in the literary works of the time. Thus it is not surprising that on 15 March 1848 a revolutionary crowd demanded a performance of Katona’s Bánk Bán from the director of the National Theater, József Bajza (1804–58). As mentioned earlier, the actors could not finish the play because the crowd was too restless and wanted to sing the “Marseillaise” and the Hungarian revolutionary song, the “Rákóczi March.”

Bánk Bán’s Legend in the European Literary Heritage

Bánk Bán’s legend was recycled several times in various European literary traditions: in German literature, after the already mentioned tragedy of Hans Sachs, the most famous version was written by the Austrian playwright Franz 23

Ibid., 6–7.

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Grillparzer (1791–1872), who was commissioned by Karoline Auguste, the wife of Franz i, Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary, to write a play for her coronation as Queen of Hungary in Pressburg (today Bratislava, Slovakia) in 1825. According to his autobiography, Grillparzer immediately began reading chronicles about Hungarian history, but not until three years after the coronation, in 1828, did he finally find a proper subject: the story of Bánk Bán. The play was first performed in the Burgtheater in the presence of the royal family and it became a resounding success. The next morning the chief of police payed Grillparzer a visit and announced that the Emperor enjoyed the play so much that he would like to buy the manuscript for a significant sum. Grillparzer, as court archivist, knew that this was a subtle way to ban his play from the stage and prevent its dissemination in print.24 The play was considered dangerous even though Grillparzer viewed the legend of Bánk Bán from a different perspective; as the title – Ein treuer Diener seines Herrn – suggests, the Palatine was portrayed as a devoted subject loyal to an utterly dysfunctional and vile royal household. After his wife has been raped by the Queen’s brother and his brothers-in-law plan to take revenge. Grillparzer’s Bánk helps the whole royal family, including the Queen’s villainous brother Ottó, who raped Erny (the name of Bánk’s wife in Grillparzer’s play), to escape an angry mob through secret passageways. The Queen dies by accident because of a misplaced dagger intended to kill her brother. Erny commits suicide because she was hoping in vain that Bánk would punish the man who disgraced her. Not even a tragic personal drama can shake Bánk’s absolute loyalty towards the royal family.25 The representation of the corrupt royal family must have worried the king and the censor, but the character of the Hungarian palatine was a model of loyalty, compliance, and servility. A very different perspective on the story of Bánk Bán is presented in an English play called Elmerick, or Justice Triumphant, written by George Lillo (1691–1739), who is best known as the author of The London Merchant, one of the most popular plays of the Jacobean period. Lillo’s last drama, Elmerick, was first staged in 1740 and had several successful performances in the Drury Lane Theater, but it did not have an enduring afterlife. The tragedy revolves around the favorite topic of the eighteenth century: the figure of the good ruler and judicious statesman. Lillo transformed Bánk Bán’s legend into a political allegory of his time in which the Queen is officially executed at the gallows for her immoral behavior in order to protect the interests of the state. This ending reminds us of Katona’s last scene where the king famously concludes that “The Queen died justly, before Hungary would have perished.” 24 25

Kerényi, “Petőfi Bánk Bánja,” 30–31. Ibid., 31.

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Lillo doubled the seduction story: Queen Matilda (Gertrude in Lillo’s version) wants to seduce Elmerick (Bánk), and she helps her brother Conrade (Ottó) to seduce Bánk’s wife Ismena (Melinda) who, according to the conventions of the sentimental stage tradition, is seized by madness and dies of ­distress after the disgraceful incident. The death sentence of the Queen is a triumph for justice, as the title of the play suggests, because she humiliated the King, compromised the morals of the kingdom, embarrassed the Palatine, and caused the death of an innocent woman. The author emphasizes the fact that the Queen was not murdered by Elmerick/Bánk but lawfully executed in order to protect the interests and the moral values of the state. Elmerick’s deeds are always motivated by a strong sense of justice. As George Winchester Stone notes: “Elmerick is confirmed in his staunchness and through his invocation of spiritual powers welds the image of the moral hero to the overarching forces of the universe. Coming as it does, at a moment of crux, the image has static force. Indeed, one may say that it has the force of an emblem, an emblem of moral fortitude triumphant.”26 After the Queen’s execution Elmerick is tormented by his decision and wonders whether “This dreadful act merits reproach or praise”; but one of the lords comforts him, saying that though his deed was “astonishingly bold,” the Queen had her well-deserved punishment. Bathori,27 Ismena’s father, adds that “Yes, this transcends example! Gracious heaven! May I but live to see her brother thus!” The King’s last words also reassure Elmerick and the public that his deeds were justified and that he has restored the moral character of the state with his decision: “Our sorrows must be felt. Yet, O! brave Elmerick, / Let not the public suffer, thou’st done greatly. […] / The face of justice as she shines in heaven, / In native purity, unclouded splendor, / Alone can charm beyond thy virtuous daring. / That be thy praise – that I approve it mine.”28

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Bernard Beckerman, “Schemes of Show: A Search for Critical Norms,” in George Winchester Stone, Jr., ed., The Stage and the Page. London’s “Whole Show” in the EighteenthCentury Theatre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 223. Bathori’s surname is related to that of a historical Hungarian aristocratic family whose members were regents and kings throughout the early modern period of Hungarian and Transylvanian history. “Elmerick: A Tragedy,” In The Works of Mr. George Lillo with Some Account of His Life, Vol. ii (London: Printed for T. Davies, in Russell-Street, Covent Garden, Bookseller to the Royal Academy, 1775), 129–99. Accessed at https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=JeVYAAAAcAA J&pg=PA169&lpg=PA169&dq=%22The+Ample+POwer+I+hold,+each%22&source=bl&o ts=Hd6engpadN&sig=8LrN454GtS_lwBPmULktWN744VM&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKE wiO2ITYxtzNAhWYF8AKHckuAh8Q6AEIKDAD#v=onepage&q=%22The%20Ample%20 POwer%20I%20hold%2C%20each%22&f=false on 5 July 2016.

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The Austrian court library had a copy of Lillo’s collected works,29 and ­ rillparzer worked as an archivist at the royal court and was familiar with its G collection of historical plays, so it is quite likely that he was familiar with Lillo’s tragedy. Justice, honor, and loyalty play an important role in both plays, and the plots of Lillo and Grillparzer show striking similarities. Nonetheless, the emphasis in the two plays is different: while justice and good statesmanship are the focus in Lillo’s play, loyalty to the royal family (even if it is utterly corrupt) is the highest virtue in Grillparzer’s tragedy. Lillo’s eighteenth-century Bánk Bán suppresses his private grievances for the sake of the public good; his deeds are always ethical and propelled by a feeling of moral obligation to act in the best interests of his country. Katona’s nineteenth-century play will bring into relief the clash between moral duty and private injustice by introducing a Romantic Bánk Bán who constantly complains of being torn between his public function as regent and his private role as a humiliated husband. Another English stage version of the legend of Bánk Bán, Gertrude and ­Beatrice, or the Queen of Hungary (1839), was written by the Londoner George Stephens (1800–51), whose best-known work is The Manuscript of Erdély (3 vols., 1835). Surprisingly many of his works, including an opera, drew on topics from Hungarian history. The dramatic conflict in Stephens’ play revolves around the struggle for power. In the absence of the King, Queen Gertrude feels vulnerable and worries about the future of the country, which is in political turmoil. The rebellious and scheming Count Rodna, who enjoys large popular support, challenges the Queen’s legitimacy to the throne. The playwright endows Gertrude with many monologues and inner conflicts, though, like the other figures in the play, the Queen remains a flat character who does not develop in the course of the dramatic action. Bánk Bán is given a very small role, since during most of the play he is in captivity; the drama is driven by the flamboyant dialogues between Rodna (who wants to become the Palatine) and the Queen. As the title suggests, the protagonist of this play is not Lord Bánk Bán, but the Queen of Hungary. Next to Hassan, a Moor, Stephens introduces a number of characters whose names remind readers familiar with Hungarian history of actual historical figures: Ragotski (Rákóczi), Nadastis (Nádasdy), and Balassi. The references 29

The stamp of the Kaiserlich-Königlich Court Library of Vienna is visible on the title page of the copy available in a digitized version at the link mentioned in the previous footnote. This indicates that the book was already in the collection of the library when Grillparzer was working as court archivist and searching for a suitable topic for a play for Queen Karoline Auguste’s coronation. Therefore it can be inferred that Grillparzer was likely to have read Lillo’s play before he wrote his own Ein treuer Diener seines Herrn.

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to Hungarian history are frequent but far from accurate, and always colored with a vivid literary imagination. Unlike Lillo’s play, Stephens’ plot shows the influences of Sturm und Drang and Romanticism, and the actions of his characters are motivated by private interests and passions. In the last act the King returns to Hungary and summarizes the moral message of the play: “Heavenward aspire, where all goods dwell that is. / Aught else that fills the eye of this vain world / Avails not long. The wealth of Ind, what’s more, / Ye pure rewards of fine erected spirits, / Will presently pass away, as unregarded / As a scene shifted in our theater.”30 Hungary meant exoticism. In France the Catholic abbot and historian René Aubert de Vertot (1655–1735) wrote about the story of Bánk Bán (or Bancbanus in his version) for the first time in his Histoire de Malte. His main source was Bonfini, but he locates ­Gertrude’s country of origin in Moravia instead of Merania.31 The Abbé Vertot faithfully recounts the dramatic events in the Hungarian royal court involving the ravished wife of the Palatine and the tragic death of the Queen. H ­ owever, at the end of his story, he remarks that he also consulted other authors (among them a certain Duglos) according to whom the Queen was murdered by scheming Hungarian lords who were not pleased with the involvement of the Queen’s family in Hungarian politics. He also mentions that some authors contend that the Queen died before the King left to join the Crusades. These references to contested historical facts show that by the time of the Abbé Vertot objectivity and precision had become important goals in historiography, and also that in the eighteenth century there were authors who questioned the historical veracity of Bonfini’s chronicle. Louis d’Ussieux (1744–1805), another eighteenth-century French author, was inspired by the legend of Bánk Bán and published it as a separate story in the first volume of Le Décameron français (1776). Like the Abbé Vertot, he also locates the place of birth of the Queen’s family in Moravia instead of Merania. The name of the Queen in d’Ussieux’s work is Eléonore, her brother is called Berthold, and Bánk Bán’s wife is Mélinda, just as in József Katona’s play. In this play Berthold and the seduction scene are the central focus of the author, along with the Queen’s affectionate relationship with her brother, which is 30

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George Stephens, Gertrude and Beatrice, or the Queen of Hungary (London: C. Mitchell, 1839), 104. Accessed at: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=4PXWGHoQQVkC&printse c=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false on 6 July 2016. M. l’Abbé de Vertot, Histoire des Chevaliers hospitaliers de Saint Jean de Jerusalem, appellez depuis les Chevaliers de Rhodes, et aujourd’hui les Chevaliers de Malte (Paris: Rollin, Quillau, Desaint, 1726), 304–08. Accessed at: http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5494438h/ f360.item.r=Moravie.zoom on 8 July 2016.

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d­ escribed in great detail and in passionate language. Bancbanus (Bánk Bán) is enraged upon learning that his wife has been disgraced, and he seeks revenge to restore his honor. First he intrudes into the Queen’s room and stabs her in the chest with a dagger, and later he kills her brother Berthold in a duel near Constantinople. After many tragic peripatetic events the King pardons Bánk Bán for the death of the Queen and Berthold, sends Bánk Bán back to Hungary to represent his affairs there, and concludes the story by saying that the absence of the King can have fatal consequences for the people: “J’ai appris, mais trop tard, que l’absence d’un roi fut toujours funeste à son peuple.”32 The Bánk Bán story returned to German literature in the decades of the Austrian “enlightened despot” Emperor Joseph ii. The well-educated Emperor had a fondness for history, literature, and languages, and spoke excellent Latin, French, and Italian. In this period the legend was read as a story about a wise ruler who rises above his private grievances and by this noble act pursues the happiness and good of his people. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Bánk Bán’s story was a prolific source of material for German literature.33 ­Katona read one of these German novels in Hungarian translation, the version of a certain Müller translated by Csery,34 and he reproached the author for historical inaccuracy by pointing out that the Queen’s brother (who in these versions is called Otto) was not killed by Bánk Bán at Constantinople and that the Crusades in which the King participated happened later, long after the death of Queen Gertrude; but, as Kerényi argues, he missed seeing the dramatic opportunities offered to playwrights by the link between Gertrude’s death and the Crusades.35 In Italy, the native land of Bonfini, the Renaissance chronicler of Bánk Bán’s story, the legend was reworked into a short story by Tomasso Gargallo under the title Il Palatino d’Ungheria which he published in 1823 in Florence as the work of Boccaccio. The story became popular and was republished the

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Louis d’Ussieux: ”Berthold Prince de Moravie. Anecdote Historique,” in Le Décameron Français (Paris: Brunet, 1776), 168. Accessed at https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=jcw5A AAAcAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f= false on 8 July 2016. For a study of works inspired by the legend of Bánk Bán up to the time of Grillparzer and Katona, see the unpublished dissertation of Gábor Vázsonyi, “Quellen und Bearbeitungen des Bankbanusstoffes bis Katona und Grillparzer und die Dichterische Stellungnahme der Beiden” (Szeged, 1976). Accessed at http://doktori.bibl.u-szeged.hu/2096/1/1976_vazsonyi _gabor.pdf on 8 July 2016. I could find no biographical data about either of these authors. Kerényi, “Petőfi Bánk Bánja,” 28.

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­following year in Treviso and Milan. Its success attracted the attention of philologists who doubted the authenticity of the story and pointed out that its attribution to Boccaccio was a forgery. Gargallo relies heavily on the work of the Abbé de Vertot; in this version Bánk Bán becomes Bagdano and, following the French tradition, his wife’s family comes from Moravia and the Queen’s brother is assassinated near Constantinople by the grieving husband whose wife was disgraced.36 In one of his letters written in 1793, the young Hungarian soldier Ede Lakfalvy, from the city of Sopron, recommended Bánk Bán’s legend to Schiller and argued that the story could be interpreted as an allegory of the struggle for freedom and resistance against political oppression. Schiller did not take up this project, but we can be almost certain that he was familiar with Bánk Bán’s story, since he wrote an introduction for the German translation of the Abbé de Vertot’s book.

József Katona’s Bánk Bán

József Katona’s Bánk Bán originated as an entry for a competition calling for original plays inspired by historical topics.37 The contest was announced in 1814 in Kolozsvár in the first issue of the new literary journal Erdélyi Múzeum, edited by the poet Gábor Döbrentei (1786–1851). The winning play had to fulfill three criteria: it had to be written in Hungarian; it had to be original and not a translation; and, last but not least, its plot had to draw on some sort of historical topic, but not necessarily on Hungarian history.38 In the foreword written in 1819 for a new version of the play, Katona complained that he never heard back from the journal and had no information about the results of the competition. Apparently he was not aware of a report published in 1818, in the final issue of the journal, in which the editors explained that none of the submissions had lived up to the literary standards set by the committee, and therefore they could not announce a winner. They mentioned some of the dramas that they considered the best, but Katona’s 36 37

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Vázsonyi, 55. The first component of the rhyming title (Bánk) is a proper name, and the second component (bán) refers to a high administrative function equivalent to a palatine. Bánk was in effect the Viceroy of Hungary when the King was absent waging war. Erdélyi Múzeum 1 (Kolozsvár: Református Kollégium Nyomdája, 1814): 167. Accessed at: http://documente.bcucluj.ro/web/bibdigit/periodice/erdelyimuzeum/BCUCLUJ_FP _106354_1814_001.pdf, on 4 June 2016.

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play was not among them.39 There is no evidence that the jury ever received or read Katona’s play. Katona never saw the play performed in a theater, as its première in Kassa (Kosice, Slovakia) dates from 1833, three years after his death.40 Bánk Bán was published in November 1820 for a book fair in Pest by the publishing house Trattner, but the date on the cover was 1821, and the play was advertised as “the thing to read for next year.” However, the public was not very eager to read this historical tragedy. Only twenty copies were sold, and the publisher complained of the lack of interest in the work.41 Amid the political upheavals in Hungary in the early nineteenth century, the censor allowed the drama to be published but banned it from being staged, afraid that its critical tone against foreign rulers and its final scene of regicide might stir up revolutionary feelings in the audiences, as in fact did happen a few decades later. The manuscript was discovered only in 1907 in the attic of a farmhouse near Kecskemét, Katona’s city of birth, by one of the author’s descendants. It was established that the manuscript in question was not in Katona’s handwriting; only a few marginal remarks were added by the playwright himself. Critics now assume that this document was a draft read to the actor Miklós Udvarhelyi (1790–1864), who gave several performances in Kecskemét with his touring theater company in 1816.42 This and other versions of the original play were probably written by Katona’s friends to disseminate among actors and critics. The last and final version of the text (which, as said before, dates from 1819), was thoroughly rewritten by Katona himself after a friend of his, Boldizsár Bárány (1793–1860), provided the play with a remarkably detailed commentary, which, as critics agree, significantly improved the dramatic plot. József Katona was born in 1791 in Kecskemét, a provincial town in the middle of the large Hungarian plains southeast of the capital, famous mainly for 39

40 41 42

In 1818 the final issue of the Erdélyi Múzeum devoted sixty-two pages to the outcome of the drama contest. After a lengthy prologue about the current state of Hungarian theaters, the article reminded readers of the original call for history plays and how such an endeavor was part of a general effort to raise the national language and culture to the level of the most civilized nations in Europe. The article ends with an analysis of the three plays chosen as the best, but none of these were deemed good enough to win the prize. Erdélyi Múzeum 10 (Pest: Trattner János Tamás, 1818), 105–67. Accessed at: http://documente .bcucluj.ro/web/bibdigit/periodice/erdelyimuzeum/BCUCLUJ_FP_106354_1818_010.pdf on 04 June 2016. Ferenc Kerényi, “Petőfi Bánk Bán-ja,” in Kerényi, ed., Petőfi Sándor, “Bánk bán” (Budapest: Magyar Helikon, 1979), 39. László Orosz, A Bánk bán értelmezéseinek története (Budapest: Krónika Nova Kiadó, 1999), 19. Orosz, 14.

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a­ griculture and horse-breeding. After graduating from high school, Katona went to study law in multi-ethnic Pest, which in the first half of the nineteenth century grew into a bustling cosmopolitan commercial and cultural center. Soon after his arrival, he became infatuated with the theater and spent most of his time acting, writing dramas, and translating plays from German into Hungarian. The Hungarian theater Katona joined came to be regarded as one of the most important national institutions, a “the temple of the Hungarian language,” as it is still often called in common parlance. Actors were seen as the “servants of the nation”43 who advanced the cause of Hungarian language and history on stage, and also as missionaries working to achieve an ideal moral state – a concept promoted also by Schiller in his Theater Considered as a Moral Institution (1784) – by performing great dramatic art for the entertainment and improvement of the masses.44 As a law student in Pest, Katona also developed a fascination with history that remained a source of inspiration throughout his life. He was drawn not only to popular historiography, but also had a scholarly interest in studying and comparing original primary sources. When he gathered material for his plays, he conducted research in archives and libraries as thoroughly as if he were preparing to write a scholarly historiography of a certain era.45 Katona began his career as a playwright with translations and dramatizations from German by well-known authors of his time like August von K ­ otzebue or August Wilhelm Iffland. Between 1811 and 1813 he worked on nine plays, none of which were published during his lifetime. Though varied in genre and 43

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“The servants of the nation” (“a nemzet napszámosai”) is an expression coined by ­Gereben Vas, a popular nineteenth-century writer and journalist, in the title of his book A nemzet napszámosai (1857), which was a sociography of the life of nineteenth-century Hungarian provincial towns and a tribute to the traveling actors and theater companies. “Consider now, how religion and law are strengthened as they enter into alliance with the theater, where virtue and vice, happiness and misery, wisdom and folly are accurately and palpably led out before man in a thousand images; where Providence solves its riddles, untangles its knots before his eyes. […] The stage is, more than any other public institution, a school of practical wisdom, a guide to our daily lives, an infallible key to the most secret accesses of the human soul. […] Thus is the great and varied service done to our moral culture by the better-developed stage; the full enlightenment of our intellect is no less indebted to it. Here, in this lofty sphere, the great mind, the fiery patriot first discovers how he can fully wield its powers. […] The theater is the common channel through which the light of wisdom streams down from the thoughtful, better part of society, spreading thence in mild beams throughout the entire state.” – Friedrich Schiller, Theater Considered as a Moral Institution, Accessed at: https://www.schillerinstitute.org/transl/ schil_theatremoral.html on 27 August 2016. Ferenc Bíró, Katona József (Budapest: Balassi Kiadó, 2002), 51.

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scope, these plays all show that Katona was interested not so much in the life stories of remarkable individuals, but rather in the larger historical picture and in social justice. He was fascinated by how monarchs and great military leaders were affected by the political trends of their age (for example during the time of the Crusades and the Reformation) and how human passions interact with moral principles and ethical values, which was a popular topic in fiction and theater in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Between 1813 and 1815 he wrote six original plays, of which five are historical dramas and one is a comedy, a satire about petty rivalries in the theater, a setting Katona knew only too well as a struggling actor and playwright.46 He was only twenty-four when he wrote the first version of the play he is remembered by, Bánk Bán, but already in his earlier historical works he appears as a skillful dramatist and an accomplished amateur historian who is interested not only in facts but also in their impact on the lives of individuals (especially monarchs and leaders who made and shaped history) and peoples (affected by great changes in Ancient and Early Modern times). Katona ­followed the general development in the European theater of his time in his concern for the moral message conveyed by history and the lessons it can teach to posterity. As Erika Fischer-Lichte notes, Anyone who was anyone in Germany and France wrote historical dramas. It is therefore understandable that the poets of inner conflict, the prophets of the Byronic hero, also emerged as writers of historical drama and often realized the two themes in the same play. The most important condition a historical drama should fulfill when it was to be performed was that it should represent history as an all-embracing system and as a force which helps to define identity.47 In his plays Katona mixes the moralistic genre of the Enlightenment with the stage rhetoric and sentimental style of his age, and although the dramatic structure and rhetoric of these plays follow the Sturm und Drang conventions

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The plays were: Aubigny Clementina (1814), Ziska, Parts i and ii [Ziska, the leader of the Czech Hussites or Taborites] (1814), Luca széke [Luca’s Chair] (1814), Jeruzsálem pusztulása [The Fall of Jerusalem] (1814), A Rózsa [The Rose, a satirical play] (1814), and Bánk Bán (1815). Erika Fischer-Lichte, History of European Drama and Theatre (London: Routledge, 2004), 232.

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of the German Ritterdrama,48 their conceptual poetics and scenic organization convey a Shakespearean world view. Though its beginnings were not auspicious and it risked being forgotten, Katona’s play was saved for posterity thanks first of all to the persistence of the actors who chose Bánk Bán for their benefit performances,49 and later to a patriotic public who regarded the play as a political allegory and often demanded its performance. Critics and literary scholars began to appreciate the drama only later. From the 1860s onwards, when the strict censorship imposed in the 1850s (following the suppression of the war for independence) finally became more tolerant, three scholars chose Bánk Bán as the subject of their inaugural speeches at the Hungarian Academy of Arts and Sciences. The poet János Arany (1817–82), the literary critic Pál Gyulai (1826–1909), and the playwright and translator Károly Szász (1829–1905) all regarded Katona’s play as worthy of close scrutiny, and they all agreed that the play was unique of its kind, shared a number of aesthetic qualities, and was one of the milestones of Hungarian dramatic literature. Eventually only Gyulai held his oration at the Academy about Bánk Bán, and in 1883 he published a monograph on József Katona. It had taken almost a century for the play to become part of the Hungarian literary canon.

Bánk Bán in Katona’s Œuvre

Katona was not attracted to the tribal Hungarian past, and did not try his hand at writing a play based on the settler Hungarians, who kept many ­early ­nineteenth-century poets and writers under their spell.50 Instead he was drawn to the period of state formation under King Saint Stephen the First, who introduced Christianity and built up a prosperous and stable kingdom in the middle of Europe. He translated a long drama in six acts about Saint Stephen, Stephan, der erste König der Ungarn, written by a German actor living in Pest, 48 The Ritterdrama as a genre became popular at the end of the eighteenth century in Germany after the success of Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen (1773) and Schiller’s Die Räuber (1781). They had many epigones who chose knightly or heroic topics and focused on spectacular stage effects and exaggerated emotions to entertain audiences who were tired of the classic, conventional French theater. 49 Ibid., 24. Actors were sometimes invited to choose a play and a role for a benefit performance from which they could use the profits to supplement their salaries or offer a large part of their income to a charity. 50 Bíró, Katona József, 58.

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Franz Xavier Girzik (1760–1813). It is not known why he chose to translate this play; some scholars assume that he was asked to translate it for the Hungarian theater company, who planned to celebrate the opening of the first permanent German stone theater in Pest with a piece about King Saint Stephen in response to the German company’s performance of Kotzebue’s Ungarns erste Wohlthäter with Beethoven’s accompanying music in 1812.51 However, there is no evidence to support this view. It is more likely that this translation was inspired by Katona’s general interest in early medieval history and state formation in a period of great political turmoil. Katona’s legacy contains detailed descriptions of the Hungarian crown and of the symbols and regalia of the coronation. The conversion of the tribal leader Vajk to Christianity, and his taking the name of King Stephen the First, became a token for political stability in the region, though Katona did not pay much attention either to the violence with which the new religion was enforced, or to the ensuing civil war in the country. King Saint Stephen represented the transition from a tribal to a national consciousness, and by his conversion, he not only united the peoples living in the country but also integrated the Hungarian nation among the other nations of Europe. A play celebrating state formation, political maturity, a universalist Christian world view, and an equal standing with other European nations was more appealing for a playwright raised in the literary tradition of Enlightened patriotism than the heritage of the tribal Asian past. In the summer of 1813, the year he finished law school, Katona said farewell to the stage in the role of King Saint Stephen. According to the rules of his time, a practicing lawyer could not act on the stage.52 All the plays he finished in 1813, Augbiny Clementia, Ziska, and István, a magyarok első királya (István, the first king of the Hungarians) revolve around the topic of social unrest and disobedience. He was especially interested in fanaticism, the political and social consequences of zealous historical figures, and the restoration of peace and stability after radical disruptions of social order. Augbiny Clementia is set in the period of the “good” King Henry iv of France, who 51

The German theater in Pest was commissioned by the Austrian Emperor Francis i in 1808 probably to counterbalance the rising Hungarian nationalism and to reinforce the ­Austrian presence in Pest, which was becoming the commercial and cultural capital of Hungary in that time. Like his predecessor Emperor Joseph ii, Francis i saw the theater as an important institution for asserting political power and cultural dominance. By the time the German theater was built in Pest there was a permanent Hungarian acting ­company – the one Katona joined under the pseudonym “Békési” – that since 1790 had also been consciously cultivating the Hungarian language and shaping Hungarian national consciousness through stage performances. 52 Biró, Katona József, 62.

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became king in an era ravaged by religious wars between the Catholic League and the Huguenots. Katona’s source for this play was a popular French short story in German translation. According to the literary critic József Waldapfel, the original French source was a story about Bánk Bán by the already mentioned Louis d’Ussieux published in Le Décameron français. If Katona did not read the story in French, he probably read it in a German version adapted by the playwright and music critic Johann Friedrich Rochlitz (1769–1842), Goethe’s friend and the founder of the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung (1798– 1848).53 In the French original the focus is on Clementia Augbiny, the loyal lady who heroically defends her castle against the old Marshal de la Châtre, who switched sides and joined the Catholic league. In Katona’s play Clementia is a flat character, a symbol of self-sacrificing loyalty rather than a complex fleshand-blood figure; the real protagonist of the play is the Marshal de la Châtre, who is torn between his sense of loyalty to the rightful king and his passions and religious convictions. Finally the conflict is resolved when “the good king” Henry iv neither pardons nor punishes the old Marshal, but makes peace with him. Katona’s play focuses on the figure of the Marshal, his fanaticism and inner struggles, and poses a more general question about the role of religion in society. The conflict between state and church, moderation and fanaticism, is resolved in a spirit of tolerance and enlightened ­political compromise by King Henry iv. Because of De la Châtre’s fanatic C ­ atholicism the country almost succumbed to anarchy. The situation is saved by the King who rises above sectarian division, unites the people under his crown, and proclaims toleration as a guiding principle of his reign. The attitude of the monarch anticipates King Andrew ii’s final monologue in Bánk Bán, where the King does not seek to avenge the murder of his wife and punish the rebels, but instead looks ahead and wants to restore peace and stability in the country. Ziska is set in fifteenth-century Bohemia and also focuses on the religious fanaticism of the Hussite movement and their clash with the official state powers.54 The writing of Ziska was preceded by extensive historical research. 53 54

József Waldapfel, “Katona első történeti drámái,” in Irodalomtörténeti Közlemények vol. 43 (Budapest: Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, 1933), 81, 84. The Hussites were a community of Christian Protestants in the Kingdom of Bohemia in the fourteenth century. They were the followers of Jan Hus (1369–1415), who was tried for heresy and sentenced to death by the Council of Constance for his radical views. After his death the Hussite Wars (ca. 1420–34) broke out and the movement split into several sectarian factions. One of the most puritanical groups was the Taborites, who established their own headquarters near Prague and called it Tabor. Jan Žižka (ca. 1360–1424), the leader of this faction, is remembered as a successful military leader and the inventor of field artillery before the age of tanks.

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The works Katona names as sources for his play are not novels or dramas, but historiographical references: among other documents he cites L.F. Schulz’s ­Interessante Erzählungen und Anekdoten aus der Geschichte des Österreichischen Kaiserstaates (1808) and the Epitome Historica Rerum Bohemicarum (1677) by Bohuslaus Balbinus. Here for the first time he not only translated or dramatized an existing work, but shaped the historical material in his own way. This heightened appreciation of historicism and the creative freedom of consciously using historical sources for his plays would reach its apogee in Bánk Bán. Jeruzsálem pusztulása (The Destruction of Jerusalem) also depicts a period of anarchy, civil war, and the struggle against oppression. Katona’s source for this play was the Bellum Iudaicum of Flavius Josephus. As in the case of Ziska, he molded the historical material freely, but like Josephus, he also emphasized the role of the over-zealous and fanatical Jews which eventually led to the destruction of the city. Next to the human aspect, Katona also accentuates the theological dimension of the war: God stands above history and can equally empower empires and nations or deprive them of dominance. Josephus is one of the characters in Katona’s play, and his monologue about the position of God plays a pivotal role in the logic of the drama. God is indifferent to the sufferings and tragedy of mankind, which are largely self-inflicted. This tragic view of history is actually the underlying message of the play. The heroic struggle of the virtuous woman, Berenice, is the human realm that is visible to the spectators; but the underlying force that influences history is the unpredictable and disguised principle of God’s will. Individuals are free within the limits of history, and their response to the perpetually changing historical circumstances is a test of their character. These thoroughgoing philosophical questions are the backbones of ­István, Augbiny Clementia, Ziska, and Jeruzsálem pusztulása, and although the dramatic structure and rhetoric of these plays follow the Sturm und Drang ­conventions of the German Ritterdrama, their conceptual poetics and scenic organization convey a Shakespearean world-view. In his plays Katona mixes the moralistic genre of the Enlightenment with the stage rhetoric and sentimental style of his own age. Having worked for a theater company for years, he was well read in the dramatic literature popular in his time and studied the current theatrical techniques. Even though none of his plays were published in his lifetime – with the sole exception of Bánk Bán in 1820 – and he never saw any of his plays performed on stage, he was nonetheless a welleducated playwright by 1815, when he drafted the first version of Bánk Bán in response to the call for original historical plays announced by the journal Erdélyi Múzeum.

Bánk Bán



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Bánk Bán the National Play

The original version of Bánk Bán draws strongly on the Ritterdramen, and the play had more weaknesses than strengths, as Katona’s friend and critic Boldizsár Bárány pointed out to him. Katona gracefully and gratefully accepted the criticism and thoroughly rewrote his play in 1819 before it appeared in print the following year. This second version of Bánk Bán still bears signs of sentimental drama, but both its scenic structure and the complex depiction of the title character are inspired by the Shakespearean tradition. Katona was not drawn to sentimental plays about suffering virgins, evil fathers, virtuous women, ­villainous rulers, or good knights fighting bad knights. Though this sentimentalism did not vanish entirely from Bánk Bán, it was no longer a prominent feature. Already in the plays he wrote before Bánk Bán, the real protagonist was history, and the way people react to history shapes their characters in the play. Bánk Bán combines a moral allegory about a good ruler typical of the Enlightenment, a Romantic Ritterdrama, and a modern historical play inspired by the Shakespearean tradition where none of the characters are entirely good or evil. The audience witnesses the dramatization of passions clashing with reason, and the conflict of interest of different individuals who pursue the good of their own people and not only (or not at all) their own personal glory. As in Jeruzsálem pusztulása, the future of the nation is at stake in Bánk Bán. There are two dramatic layers in the play: a national level (materialized in a conspiracy against the foreign Queen who did not act as a good ruler; instead of working for the good of the country, she favored her own relatives and was emotionally attached to her own Meranian kin), and a personal level ­(scheming to seduce Bánk’s innocent and virtuous wife, Melinda). The personal and the political conflicts are tied together from the very beginning when the rebels choose “Melinda” as their secret password. Melinda’s seduction by Ottó, the Queen’s brother, symbolizes the political desecration of the country. Bánk’s wife was invited to the court under false pretenses, since the Queen wished only to satisfy her brother, who was in love with Melinda. She did not particularly encourage Ottó to act on his desire, but she did not stop him either. When she realizes that Melinda is resisting Ottó’s courting and that he cannot accept defeat, Gertrude asks him to leave the court. However, with the help of Bieberach, a strolling opportunistic knight, Ottó plots to pursue Melinda further. Bieberach is a false friend: while he gives Ottó two potions, a love potion for Melinda and a sleeping potion for the Queen, he also tells Bánk about Ottó’s secret plan. Bánk was called back to the palace originally by the scheming rebels to advise them on their plot, which he consistently opposed.

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Nonetheless, once at the court, he has to face an unexpected private drama. Neither the political conspiracy nor Melinda has his undivided attention, and his mind is torn between the two dramas. From the first moment of his arrival at the Queen’s palace, Bánk wishes to see things clearly. As the literary critic Pál Pándi observed, references to “vision,” “seeing,” and “eyes” are present throughout Bánk’s monologues and in other characters’ descriptions of Bánk.55 Finally, just before he kills the Queen, he is convinced that he sees the situation clearly: as he tells the Queen, “I was also blind in your court; but now I can see.”56 The actions of most characters in the play are motivated by national interests or patriotism (with the exception of Bieberach, Ottó, and Isidora, the lady at the court who is in love with Ottó). Petur, the Lord of Bihar county, gathers with Bánk and the rest of the rebellious nobles to discuss their grievances against the Queen, whose policies have made life in the country unbearable for the poor and who has deprived the nobility of their positions by giving offices to her own kin. The rebels also accuse the Queen of having sent the King abroad to wage wars for more territories so that she can satisfy her greed and exert power at home while the King is away. “She laid her hands on our property and gave it to her own kinsmen, and she took away the bread from the poor Hungarians which was eaten by the armed Meranians.”57 Petur winds up the rebels by reminding them of Gertrude’s insatiable hunger for power: “Why does he [the King] give in to the ambition of a woman, and to Kálmán, his son, so that he would gain a horn or a drum – and he chases Miciszlavic from Galicia?”58 or “What was the sin of Miciszlavic Miciszláv, that this vain Meranian woman covets his lands?”59 or “You gained Poland and perhaps you’ll lose Hungary instead?”60 Petur’s words about the Queen’s haughty behavior are confirmed by her ­interactions with her courtiers and with Bánk. The claim that she simply profits from Hungary but does not care about the wishes or needs of the people must have struck a chord with the public of Katona’s time, since the Emperor 55 56 57 58 59 60

Pál Pándi: Bánk Bán-kommentárok (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1980), 14. “Vak voltam én is udvarodban; de már látok.” József Katona, Bánk Bán (Budapest: Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó, 1985), 179. “Tulajdonunkat elvevé, od’adta a hazájabéli / cinkossinak, s kihúzta a szegény / magyarnak a kezéből a kenyért, s azt / megette a meráni fegyveres.” Katona, Bánk Bán, 82. “Hogy enged egy asszony kevély áhítózásinak / s Kálmánnak, a fiának, hogy dobot, / vagy egy kicsiny kürtöt nyerhessen – űzi / Galíciából el Miciszlavict?” Katona, Bánk Bán, 83. “De a szegény Miciszlavic Miciszláv / mit véte, e meráni büszke asszony / hogy tartományait kívánja el?” Katona, Bánk Bán, 79. “Polyákországot elnyerted, s tán a magyart / veszted helyette el!” Katona, Bánk Bán, 177.

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Francis i had not summoned the national diet of the Hungarian Estates for many years, ruling instead by absolutist decree. During the French-Austrian wars the Hungarian Estates had supported the Emperor, but after the Peace of Schönbrunn in 1809, which led to a brief period of ceasefire with the French, it became painfully clear that the empire was in a financial crisis. To alleviate the economic situation, the Emperor devalued the currency and increased taxes, including export duties on Hungarian products. For Hungary this meant that the relative prosperity achieved during the war began to decrease rapidly, which affected all levels of Hungarian society. In addition to these harsh ­fiscal measures, the Emperor also strengthened the censorship because he was afraid of revolutions.61 In the first and third acts of the play, Tiborc, a former peasant soldier who had once saved Bánk’s life in battle and served the King loyally for decades in his army, complains about being destitute and on the verge of starvation. He came to the palace to steal bread for his family, and he feels utterly humiliated by his situation. His complaints must have touched nineteenth-century Hungarian audiences who could easily draw parallels with their own time and recognize the political allegory. This poverty was in stark contrast with the lavish life of the royal court. The Queen gives a party in honor of her scoundrel brother, Ottó, but the people in the countryside are living in abominable conditions. “Tiborc: She has fancy marble palaces built, while we are freezing in our wooden cottages. Bánk: May she be accursed!”62 Then Tiborc continues his monologue in the same vein, contrasting the Queen’s life with that of o­ rdinary Hungarians. Bánk, who is already furious with the Queen for aiding and abetting Melinda’s seduction, sympathizes fully with Tiborc, and this enflames his hatred for the Queen still more. At the beginning of Act iii he wanted to save Melinda and Hungary from devious foreign oppression, but by the end of the act he realizes sadly that he is too late and that Melinda has already fallen prey to Ottó. After his conversation with Tiborc he decides to focus all his attention on saving his country. Petur, and the discontented noblemen who would like to persuade Bánk to lead their conspiracy against the Queen, also blame the Queen for ignoring the ancient rights of the Hungarian nobility and for not consulting with them about important policies. 61

István György Tóth, ed., A Concise History of Hungary (Budapest: Corvina-Osiris, 2005), 338. 62 “Tiborc: Ő cifra és márványos házakat / építtet; és mi – csaknem megfagyunk / kunyhónk sövényfalai közt – Bánk: Átkozott!” Katona, Bánk Bán, 114.

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Petur: She has to reinforce our ancient rights and freedom (codified by our first saint King);63 if she can show how the curtailment of this liberty would improve the happiness of my country, I would gladly give up my rights: but until this is the custom, in this century, Árpád’s blood, Hungarian feeling, and the good of Hungarians shall flourish, and I will cry: Hungarian, strike the face of those who harm what’s yours.64 The audience could recognize yet again the similarities with their own circumstances. In 1811 “Metternich advised that the Emperor suspend the H ­ ungarian constitution. Francis rejected the diet’s proposal on language and financial questions; after the diet rose, he commenced ruling the country through decrees.”65 Francis did not respect the Hungarian Constitution and the Estates; and his failure to deal with a looming financial crisis, the underdevelopment of the country, and the ever-increasing censorship led to popular resentment. Bánk Bán was a compelling literary representation of these contemporary ­political problems. The Hungarian characters give voice to the deep dissatisfaction of the people on all levels of society, from the lowest to the highest class, from the peasantry to the aristocracy. Bánk sympathizes and agrees with the grievances of the conspirators, but he rejects the idea of regicide for two reasons: the Queen is the representative of God, just like the King, and killing the Queen would only result in more bloodshed and civil war. Bánk hopes for a peaceful political solution to the problems. “Bánk: Wouldn’t a revolt lead to the massacre of our own brothers and many innocent people? […] Shall I join this group of villains? Shall I help shed innocent blood? And shall I contribute to the suffering of my poor

63

This could be a reference to the Golden Bull (1222), the Magna Carta of Hungary which granted special rights and freedoms to the Hungarian nobility, though chronologically it does not fit the story of the play, because the Golden Bull was issued ten years after ­Gertrude’s death. Nonetheless it was a very important document that was frequently cited by the nationalist nobility’s resistance movement and would have been well known in Katona’s time. The anachronism would not have worried a nineteenth-century audience eager to cheer every nationalist manifestation on stage. 64 “Petur: Meg kell erősítenie régi (szent első királyunktól kitett) szabadságbeli / ­jussainkat; vagy ha megmutatja, hogy a hazám boldogságán segít / ezen szabadság eltörlése – egy szót / se szóllok: ámde míg ez a szokás, / e század, Árpád vére, a magyar érzés, magyar javak virágzanak, / mindaddig azt fogom kiáltani: üsd az / orrát, magyar, ki bántja a tied’!” Katona, Bánk Bán, 84. 65 Tóth, ed., A Concise History, 338.

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Hungarian country for our freedom?”66 Bánk admits that it is not a crime if the Queen thinks first of her own kin, since this is a natural behavior: “Bánk: Can we hold it against her that she loves her own kind more than she loves the Hungarians? – If one of you could become a German king, wouldn’t you also favor the Hungarians even there? Rebels (grumbling thoughtfully): Yes, that is true.”67 These words reflect a growing ethnic nationalism that merged with patriotism by the beginning of the nineteenth century, as the sense of collective identity came to be defined more and more by language and a sense of shared history. In Act ii Bánk expounds his nativist definition of the nation, but he is not willing to compromise the stability of the state and accepts the authority of the King and Queen. He tries to stop Petur bán and his group of malcontents from murdering the Queen. In Act iv, however, after he has heard Tiborc’s complaints and becomes convinced that the Queen was directly involved in the seduction of his wife (in Act v he discovers that this was not the case) he loses his temper. In his long and intense conversation with the Queen, who holds him responsible for coming to the palace without notice and intruding into her chamber without invitation, Bánk turns the tables on the Queen and starts interrogating her in the same violent tone. What follows is a typical example of theatrical stichomythia: Bánk and the Queen turn each other’s words around and take them as pretexts for a new attack. When she demands respect, Bánk reminds her that actually he is the regent in the country; he represents the King in his absence, and therefore at that moment he is the King of Hungary. “Bánk: A word! Sit down! It’s useless to cry for help, because nobody will come in here; Bánk Bán, the King of Hungary, commands you.”68 Gertrude is amazed and frightened by his attitude. Bánk continues to reproach her about the poor state of the country and the suffering of the people: “Everywhere in the country I have met with sorrow and despair. The people curse you and your countrymen. […] With one voice and one heart, all Hungarians cry out: 66

“Zendűlésbe nem / fog-é kiömleni az ártatlanok-, / a felebarátjainknak vére is? (…) És tagja légyek e rossz társaságnak itt én is? Ártatlan vért ontani / segítsek? És abban eszköz legyek, hogy / jajgasson a szabadságunk miatt / szegény magyar hazám?” Katona, Bánk Bán, 85. 67 “Bánk: Vétkűl tulajdonítsuk azt neki, / hogy a felekezetét jobban szeretné, / mint a magyarságot? – Ha a németek / között közűletek király lehetne / egyik, nem elsőbb volna-e előtte / még ott is a magyar? Békétlenek (gondolkozva, dörmögve): Hisz az való.” Katona, Bánk Bán, 86. 68 “Bánk: Egy szót! – Ülj le! – Hasztalan kiáltsz te most, / mert nem szabad bejönni senkinek / is; úgy parancsolá Bán bán, Magyarország királya.” Katona, Bánk Bán, 177.

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‘During the course of a few wretched years the Hungarian laws are dangling over our Hungarian fatherland like a list of offences on the neck of a pilloried criminal.’”69 Bánk’s loyalty shifts from being a representative of state power to speaking for the suffering people. At a time when the Hungarian Constitution was suspended and the privileges of the Estates curtailed, these ideas certainly appealed to the audiences. The nation in Bánk Bán meant not only the nobility, but a broader concept that encompassed the peasants and the common people as well. In accordance with early nineteenth-century nationalism, the nobility in the play seek not only the restoration of their own freedom but also the happiness of every citizen. The play can be interpreted as a dramatized version of contemporary political ideas and national struggles staged against a medieval backdrop. Katona was aware that the censors might read his play as a political allegory, so in the manuscript of his first version he often mentions his sources. For example, on the margins of Tiborc’s long monologue about the gruesome state of the country Katona wrote “Webers Sagen,” referring to the popular Sagen der Vorzeit by Veit Weber, the pseudonym of Leonhard Wächter (1762–1837). Ferenc Bíró argues that the function of this remark was not philological pedantry but a kind of warning that although the words uttered by Tiborc might sound harsh, they had already appeared in print in German.70 Though of different social standing and motivation, both Tiborc and the noble rebels want to relieve suffering, rid the country of oppression and regain their old rights, and liberate the country from the hands of the Queen. According to comments in newspapers about the performance of 1839, the audience cheered and applauded when Tiborc finished his monologue about the grievances of the people. The floor and the balcony of the theater were full, but the aristocratic boxes were sparsely populated. Count István Széchenyi attended the performance and disliked it thoroughly. He remarked in his diary on 23 February that it is “inconceivable that the government allowed such nonsense to be performed. This is a bad and dangerous tendency.”71 This example supports Loren Kruger’s argument about the complex relationship between national theater and mass politics. According to Kruger, “The impact of the carefully orchestrated mass spectacle is considerable, but it has historically not 69 “Bánk: Egy szájjal, egy lélekkel azt kiáltá / minden magyar hozzám: ‘Egy egynehány / keserves esztendők alatt magyar / törvényeink magyar hazánkon úgy / fityegnek, amiképpen egy pellengéroszlopra / állítotton mocskos tettinek / táblája.” Katona, Bánk Bán, 178. 70 Bíró, Katona József, 106. 71 István Széchenyi, Napló [Diary] (Budapest: Gondolat, 1978), 880.

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obliterated the persistently mixed reactions of a variety of audiences, whose multiple responses resist unilateral absorption into the trance of power.”72 Bánk’s brothers-in-law, Melinda’s brothers Mikhál and Simon, also dream about a redeemed homeland: they are Spanish aristocrats who lost their country to the Moors. While fleeing the country Mikhál’s son was assassinated. Though they are grateful and loyal subjects of the Hungarian king, they hope to go back home one day to their liberated native land. The memory of the old homeland and the dream of liberation is a recurrent topic in the play whenever Mikhál and Simon appear on the stage. Simon joins the Hungarian rebels, but his older brother Mikhál disapproves and would like to stop the regicide because murdering the Queen is inconceivable in his world governed by the codes of chivalry. Queen Gertrude also refers very often to the honor of her father Berthold and her Meranian people, which is jeopardized and compromised by her morally weak brother, Ottó. In her heated dialogue with Bánk at the end of Act iv she grabs the dagger to stab Bánk when he curses her and the country where she was born. When she is about to stab Bánk she shouts “Wretched man! Don’t you dare to offend my country!”73 Throughout the play Queen Gertrude identifies emotionally with the Meranians, which, as mentioned above, Bánk does not hold against her. She regards Merania as “her country,” and she expresses many times how much she despises and distrusts the Hungarians. One of the most often quoted lines from the play is from the beginning of Act iv, where a courtier shows Gertrude a letter about the unrest in the country and the Queen remarks: “they are just mosquitoes, and all we need is a net.” She underestimates the threat and thinks that she can solve the problem by simply shielding herself and the court from the rebels. She has no sympathy for the complaints of Mikhál, who tries to explain to her the reasons behind the spreading protests and to reveal to her the suffering and discontent of the Hungarians. When she learns about the conspiracy against her, she sends Mikhál to jail and orders arrest warrants for Simon and the rest of the rebels. She rules by decree and force, not by consultation with the Estates. Her entire attitude in the play embodied for nineteenth-century audiences everything that in their eyes was wrong with the Habsburgs: oppression, self-interest, disregard of the will of the Estates, brutal force, and arrogance.

72 73

Loren Kruger, The National Stage: Theatre and Cultural Legitimation in England, France, and America (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 7. “Hitvány! Ne bántsd hazámat!” Katona, Bánk Bán, 184.

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The Queen in the play appears as a self-centered tyrant who is only concerned with her own position and the status of her Meranian kin. She curses Ottó for having damaged the reputation of the Meranians. “Cursed be the Meranian kid who was born to shame me!”74 Queen Gertrude’s character could remind contemporaneous audiences of the inexperienced, insecure, self-obsessed, and brutal Emperor Francis i, who created a police state in the Habsburg Empire. Devoid of political vision, he relied entirely on his confidants. […] Being an industrious clerk, he wanted to keep all questions affecting his empire in his own hands; he wanted to know about everything. […] Instead of adapting, modernizing and closing the gap, the main principle of the empire and Hungary became preservation and isolation in the lengthy period that followed. […] Pub meetings were called “conspiracies” and as such were considered high treason, the penalty being lengthy imprisonment or even death. The highest dignitaries of the kingdom were replaced because of their participation or sympathy with national movements in the previous years.75 The Queen is the reification of these problems; but there is no unanimously accepted solution. Bánk kills the Queen in a momentary fit of temper and loss of control, and the dénouement of the play in Act v does not suggest that his deed will solve the country’s problems. As a result of the regicide, Petur bán, the leader of the conspiracy, is captured and killed. His mutilated body is exposed as a deterrent to future rebels. Melinda dies in a fire set at Bánk’s estate by Ottó’s arsonists, who were hired to avenge the Queen’s murder. Her body is carried by Tiborc to the palace, as her last wish was to be taken to Bánk. The Queen and Melinda lie side by side before the throne as two innocent victims of Bánk’s passionate crime. In the end Bánk loses everything: his honor, his wife, and his friend. He says that “There is no other loser in the world but I. There is no other orphan but my child!” The King contradicts him by saying to himself: “Isn’t there? – Only now does he feel the taste of my bereavement. He is a happy man! He can relief his grief by giving free flow to his anger; / I have to keep silent, – I am the King. […] I am like God, I just have to be; / but I cannot be a human being.”76 The fact that the public has access to the King’s 74

“Legyen / örökre átkozott az a kölyök, kit / gyalázatomra szűlt Meránia!” Katona, Bánk Bán, 182. 75 Tóth, ed., A Concise History, 335. 76 “Bánk: Nincs a teremtésben vesztes, cask én! / Nincs árva más több, cask az én gyermekem! Király (magába – indulatoskodik): Nincs? – Mostan érzi veszteségemet. / Ő boldog

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inner thoughts hidden from the characters on stage shows that Katona’s royal figure is not just a mask, but an actual individual. The medieval concept of the monarch clashes with the Romantic individual who tries to overcome his passionate nature with moral judgement and reason. The King does not want to punish Bánk, because God already gave justice: “God, your punishment was terrible! / I do understand you well; you took the scepter from my hands; / – I adore you! – Thus I couldn’t punish him myself – (to himself) – I would not have dared – / Hungarians! The Queen died justly – / Before Hungary was destroyed.”77 The sympathy of the audience should actually be with the King, the only character in the play who controls his passions and whose actions are morally justified in all circumstances. This message would have been clear to an eighteenth-century public and would have conformed with their expectations about the morally elevating and educating function of the theater. A nineteenth-­century audience, during the time of rising nationalism, was eager to witness the production of emotions on stage. The cathartic relief of the play follows not so much from what happens to the individuals on stage, but from the final words of the King about the fate of the country: had the Queen not died, Hungary would have been destroyed. The whole of Bánk Bán, but especially Act v is polyphonic. The characters not only interact with each other, but also give voice to their inner thoughts in soliloquies (marked with to him/herself or aside) which are heard only by the spectators but not by one another. For example, in the closing scene both Izidóra and Mikhál say, referring to Bánk Bán, that “He is free!” Izidóra is angry and sad that Gertrude’s murderer can just walk away unpunished, but Mikhál is surprised and pleased that his brother-in-law is free, which means that his family will not be persecuted. Tiborc is the only person who dares to ask the King to have mercy and not to punish Bánk, because his family needs his help. Tiborc, the common man, the peasant, can be seen as the “voice of the people” in the play. Through him the public knows that the sympathy of the people in the country is with Bánk and that “the people” see Bánk as their benefactor and protector. The King does not answer Tiborc’s request directly, but he does

77

ember! Enyhülést szerezhet; / szabad folyáson úszhat a dühe: / hallgatni kell nekem, – király vagyok. […] Isten vagyok csak lenni kéntelen; / azonban ember lennem nem szabad.” Katona, Bánk Bán, 225. “Irtóztatóan bűntettél, Istenem! / jól értelek; kivetted a kezemből / pálcámat; – én imádlak! – Így magam / büntetni nem tudtam – (magában) nem mertem is – / Magyarok! Előbb mintsem magyar hazánk – / előbb esett el méltán a királyné!” Katona, Bánk Bán, 228.

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so indirectly by navigating the emotions in the closing scene towards reconciliation and peace. In the final scene, the only words addressed to the spectators and not just “to himself” or to each other are those about the future of the country. Regardless of the tragedy, the King asserts that the Hungarians have a noble heart and it is a pity that Gertrude could not come closer to them. The final and most important message is that the country’s future is secure after the divine and social order has been restored. This idea that, regardless of the lives and deeds of individuals, history has its own course and ultimately is governed by dispassionate and impartial rules, was a message that Katona believed in and was experimenting with in all his plays written in 1813–1814. Bánk Bán is an eclectic play in which the genres of Bildungstheater, Ritterdramen, and the Romantic Shakespearean scenic theater merge in a unique and masterful way to create a modern historical play. When Katona published the play in 1820 the public was not yet ready for a modern scenic theater and expected a more classically structured play. By the time the actors began performing Bánk Bán and popularizing it in the 1830s and 1840s, the classical ­Bildungstheater aspects of the play had already become outdated. For decades the play fell into this gap between the old and the new, and had almost disappeared when it suddenly became a national symbol on the eve of the revolution in 1848. The year of the revolution and the subsequent banning of the play from the stage turned Bánk Bán into a national drama.

Dramatic Art in Hungary

Katona himself was very disappointed by the deep silence surrounding Bánk Bán and gave up writing plays completely. He turned his attention towards the social history of Kecskemét, his home town. He wrote a social-geographical scholarly article about the region of South-East Hungary and a theoretical essay about the poor state of dramatic production in Hungary.78 In this essay he addressed the question Why can theatrical art gain no foothold in Hungary? and he identified several factors which in his view made the development of an original Hungarian dramatic art difficult if not impossible.79

78 79

“A kecskeméti pusztákról,” in Tudományos Gyűjtemény (1823/4), 50–58. “Mi az oka, hogy Magyarországban a Játékszíni költőmesterség lábra nem tud kapni?” in Tudományos Gyűjtemény (1821/4), 3–22. Accessed at: http://real-j.mtak.hu/1952/1/Tudo manyosGyujtemeny_1821.pdf on 28 July 2016.

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One was the lack of a Hungarian theater; he offered the German community as a contrasting example, who in order to please the public began ­performing comedies and attracted Hungarian audiences to their theater. By the time the Hungarians realized that they should also have started a theater for popular genres, audiences were already used to the German theater, and Hungarian artists were either intimidated by the more advanced and polished German dramatic art or too proud to imitate them. Compared to the German theaters, most Hungarian performances seemed primitive and weak. Even if the ­Hungarian actors would have liked to learn from their German colleagues, passive observation does not have the same effect as active practice. Then he argued that the theater is the most suitable medium for educating the public, and it was very sad that the Hungarian actors were treated like beggars in the country. There were a few good playwrights but there were not enough actors, and the ones who did choose acting as a profession soon become discredited by a society that did not value the profession of entertainers. The precarious lives of traveling actors were a great impediment to the development of a Hungarian theater. A higher social standing, more appreciation by the general public, and a permanent building would help the cause of Hungarian dramatic art. Many other luminaries of Hungarian literature and culture were astonished by the dominance of German theater in the cities, even among the Hungarian public. When the celebrated actress Déryné arrived in Pest in the early 1810s she was shocked by the supremacy of the German language in Pest and Buda. Ferenc Kazincy and Gábor Döbrentei expressed surprise that in Transylvania members of the government had boxes in the German theater. The preference of the aristocracy was decisive for the development of the Hungarian theater: the first two decades of the nineteenth century were a period in which the nobility’s enthusiasm for Hungarian theater subsided, while the growing number of middle-class intelligentsia and craftsmen could not fully finance theatrical enterprises.80 A second reason cited by Katona was national vanity: Hungarian audiences only appreciated works that praised Hungarian virtues and showed a positive image of the nation on stage. Superficial nationalistic bragging was hampering true dramatic art. The third problem was the lack of Hungarian plays in print. Katona compared the Hungarian situation to the German print market and bitterly concluded that there were many mediocre and bad plays available in German, while Hungarian publishers were not willing to publish even the best 80

Ferenc Kerényi, A régi magyar színpadon 1790–1849 (Budapest: Magvető, 1981), 95.

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plays. The fourth impediment was the censorship, which expected playwrights to reflect the moral codes and etiquette of the present in their historical plays and not to depict medieval cruelty or other historically accurate behavior on stage. A fifth reason was the lack of professional criticism. The sixth and final reason he mentioned was the lack of decent royalties for playwrights. This essay reads not only like a criticism of the contemporary state of Hungarian theater and Hungarian society, but also like a justification for his personal decision to abandon the stage for the sake of his job as chief prosecutor in his home town of Kecskemét. There he lived a quiet life as a civil servant, and died of a heart attack in front of the city hall in 1830.

The Legacy of Bank Bán

Though he remained unnoticed and unsuccessful during his lifetime, posterity rewarded Katona after his death. Bánk Bán was made famous by the theater, and it became a national play thanks to the benefit performances of the best actors of the nineteenth century.81 The first record of a Bánk Bán performance is from 1833, when Miklós Udvarhelyi, a leading actor of that time and Katona’s friend, chose it for his benefit performance in Kassa.82 Two other actors also chose it for benefit performances in the following two years: Gábor Egressy in Kolozsvár in 1834, and Kántorné, the diva of the age, in the Castle Theater in Buda in 1835.83 Theater performances kept the play alive in the 1840s and then, when it was demanded by the revolutionary public on 15 March 1848, it became unquestionably the Hungarian national play. After the revolution it was banned for ten years which, as Zoltán Imre argues, only reinforced the link between the revolution and the play. After the ban was lifted the play became a national lieu de mémoire of the Hungarian revolution and became inseparable from the idea of passive resistance against Habsburg rule. Before the Ausgleich, the ­compromise with Austria in 1867, and also during the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy, a performance of Bánk Bán was not just a theatrical interpretation

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Ferenc Bíró, “A Bánk Bánról,” in Irodalomtudományi Közlemények 1–2 (2000), 24. Jenő Péterfy mentions in his book from 1883 that according to the reminiscences of the nineteenth-century writer and literary critic Imre Vahot there were two earlier performances: in 1826 in Pécs and 1828 in Kassa; but there are no further records or traces of these performances. See Péterfy, Katona József Bánk Bánja, 172. Kerényi, “Petőfi Bánk Bán-ja,” 39.

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of the text but a ritualistic preservation of Hungarian cultural memory and a tribute to the revolution and the war of independence.84 A second phase of canonization began in 1861 with the opera by Ferenc Erkel and a libretto by Béni Egressy. The opera used mostly verbunkos music, which by that time came also to be seen as a symbol of anti-Habsburg resistance that amplified the effect of the historical allusions associated with the story. By Erkel’s time it was not the meaning in the text but the symbolic meaning of the play that triggered a strong emotional response from the public. The third stage in Bánk Bán’s elevation to the literary canon occurred from the second half of the 1860s until the late 1880s, when a number of famous poets and critics like János Arany and Pál Gyulai subjected the play to scholarly scrutiny and many of them concluded that it was the best work ever written by a Hungarian playwright. Later in the twentieth century, most famous Hungarian literary scholars wrote about Bánk Bán, and it became part of the official school curriculum. In the aftermath of the Hungarian revolution of 1956 the play once again came to be seen as a symbol of national struggle against oppression. It was performed in most provincial theaters, in Pécs, Győr, Eger, Miskolc, and Szolnok. During the state terror following the revolution Bánk Bán was not officially banned, but it was also not performed. For example, in Szolnok it was first performed after 1960, and in the Hungarian theater in Kolozsvár the play was first staged in 1971 after a gap of more than a decade.85 The play is still part of the school curricula and is performed more or less regularly on Hungarian stages. In 2008 the National Széchényi Library commemorated the 175th anniversary of Katona’s Bánk Bán on stage with a digital virtual exhibition.86 Such open and accessible tributes in cyberspace and similar digital commemorations and reinterpretations can help to keep the author and the play alive for twenty-first century audiences whose lives are spent increasingly in “public cyberspace” and whose first source of information and entertainment is the internet. In 1928, two years before the centenary celebrations of Katona’s death, Bánk Bán provoked a heated debate in the Hungarian parliament after the director of the National Theater, Sándor Hevesi (1873–1939) proposed to modernize the 84 85 86

Zoltán Imre, “(Nemzeti) kánon és (nemzeti) színház – Vita a Bánk Bán 1930-as centenáriumi Mise-en-Scène-jéről,” In A színház színpadra állításai (Budapest: Ráció, 2009), 81. László Orosz, A Bánk Bán értelmezéseinek története, 85. Bánk Bán Mozaikok, digital virtual exhibition of Katona’s Bánk Bán. Hosted on the website of the National Széchényi Library: http://regi.oszk.hu/hun/kiallit/virtualis/bank/index1 .htm. Accessed on 29 July 2016.

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text of the play in order to make it more accessible for the public. The language of the play is indeed archaic, but it was archaic even for Katona’s own time, as the playwright did not try to follow the trend of the language reformers and did not look for Hungarian neologisms for the historical discourse. At the same time, he was also not intentionally conservative in his choice of words and expressions. He simply did not pay much attention to the contemporary debates about literary language, which probably also contributed to the initial failure of his play.87 Following Hevesi’s proposal, many famous writers and men of letters voiced their opinions about the play and its status in the Hungarian cultural canon.88 Soon it became clear that modifying the text would be seen as a sacrilegious act; one member of parliament, Gábor Jánosi, expressed his disgust at the “rotten age” when some people would even dare to think of changing such masterpieces. According to Jánosi it would be better never to perform Bánk Bán at all than to change a single letter of the text.89 Only one of the bestknown poets of the twentieth century, Gyula Illyés (1902–83), dared to rewrite the archaic language of the text and tried to illuminate some vague passages by inserting short explanations in the text that would make it easier for the public to follow the story. The opinion of the critics was divided about the success of Illyés’ alterations, but in general they did not like them.90 Theater directors have traditionally struggled with Bánk Bán, but the body of criticism accompanying the sacred status of the text has been a great obstacle to innovation and parody.91 Some critics think that the original version is outdated and almost impossible to perform in the present, because the historical references and the assumed collective knowledge are not readily available to the average theater-goer. Others argue that the scenic structure of the play makes a modern staging impossible, along with the fact that Katona leaves so much to the imagination of the spectators regarding the almost incomprehensible motivations of the characters. The visual records of Bánk Bán’s theatrical heritage have also been an important factor in the process of the play’s canonization in Hungarian cultural memory. The material iconographic culture surrounding Bánk Bán has shaped and defined its meaning as a national play. Theatrical images are an invaluable source of information about performance history and also its larger cultural

87 Péterfy, Katona József Bánk Bánja, 167. 88 É.Á., “A Bánk bán-vita,” In Irodalomtörténet 2 (1928), 330–41. 89 Zoltán Imre, “(Nemzeti) kánon és (nemzeti) színház,” 71. 90 Orosz, A Bánk Bán értelmezéseinek története, 100–05. 91 Angéla Csipak, “Az ‘átigazított’ Bánk Bán,” in Hungarológiai Közlemények 13/49 (1981), 551.

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historical context.92 The costumes the actors wore on stage and the gestures and physiognomies with which characters were immortalized have left an indelible mark on the cultural memory of the nation. These images join with other representations of historical figures in nineteenth-century visual art to form an imaginary national gallery which immortalizes the figures of the drama in the public imagination. As Christopher B. Balme suggests, it would be worth examining the extent to which “such images [can] be regarded as ‘evidence’ or as ‘eyewitness’ accounts of theater practices,”93 and how such “visual conventions” have shaped acting styles and the perception of the “theatrical” or the performative aspects of the “national” through different historical periods. In 1930, the year of the centenary celebrations in Kecskemét, Katona was ­exhumed and reburied in an honorary grave and commemorated with a ­statue.94 This act of exhuming and immortalizing is at the same time symbolic of the fate of his Bánk Bán: excavated from nineteenth-century dramatic productions, it was preserved and eventually celebrated as a literary monument of the nation. Like national monuments in public spaces, it is elevated on a pedestal and stands above everyday culture; its presence goes unnoticed, and though it is a marker of Hungarian culture, each new generation faces the challenging task of making it a part of the culture. The emblematic performances during the period of nineteenth-century nation-building shaped the meaning of the play. Manfred Pfister argues that “The collective nature of the reception of dramatic texts, however, is itself a historical and sociological constant.”95 Whenever national sovereignty was felt to be threatened, Katona’s play was revived as the symbol of national resistance against oppression. As a text, Bánk Bán has become a sacred icon of the Hungarian literary canon, and as a theater play it continues to re-enact the performance of the nineteenth-century idea of the nation.

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An image gallery is available on the page of the virtual exhibition of the National Széchényi Library: http://regi.oszk.hu/hun/kiallit/virtualis/bank/lapok/tabla.htm. Accessed on 29 July 2016. Christopher B. Balme, The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Studies (Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press, 2009), 103. Dr. Lajos Bartucz, “Katona József földi maradványainak exhumálása,” In Katona emlékkönyv, Ed. Iván Hajnóczy (Kecskemét: Első kecskeméti hírlapkiadó és nyomda, 1930), 56– 67. Accessed at: http://www.sulinet.hu/oroksegtar/data/megyek_oroksege/Bacs_kiskun_ megye/pages/Katona_emlekkonyv/008_katona_maradvanya.htm, on 29 July 2016. Manfred Pfister, The Theory and Analysis of Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 36.

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Bánk Bán the National Opera

Egressy modified Katona’s drama substantially. He left out some of Katona’s characters, and he inserted into his libretto several popular poems by Mihály Vörösmarty, for instance Petur’s drinking song in Act i, or in Act ii echoes of Vörösmarty’s poem “Szózat” (Appeal) set to music by Egressy in 1843. However, the libretto as we know it today preserves only five percent of Egressy’s text. In 1940 Kálmán Nádasdy revised it, just as he had done five years earlier in the case of Hunyadi László. Nádor Rékai also adjusted the music, and this is the version we hear on the latest recording of the opera-film directed by Csaba Káel in 2001. Fortunately, the facsimile edition of the piano version, published in 1908 by Rózsavölgyi & Co., has recently been re-printed, and this gives us an idea of the original version. Erkel wrote a seven-page manuscript about the structure and composition of Bánk Bán – an exceptionally rare document, the only analysis that Erkel ever wrote about his operas. It dates from early March 1861, which means that it was written before the opera’s first performance. Erkel may have written it at the request of János Pompéry (1819–1884), the editor of the journal Magyarország. This is the only document to help us reconstruct Bánk Bán’s original staging; it also reveals Erkel’s intentions as a composer and his ideas about music in general, which helps us to place him in the epistemic system of nineteenthcentury Hungarian national thought and music. Erkel calls the music of Bánk Bán’s prelude “antique style.” This reveals how verbunkos was perceived by the nineteenth-century public: as antique, ­something very old and typically Hungarian. Though it dates only from the eighteenth century, its rhythms can already be found in earlier Hungarian dance music. The second conclusion we might draw from Erkel’s remark is that he imagined this prelude in the style of Gluck’s operatic preludes. Looking back at thirteenth-century Hungary, in the prelude Erkel, with great mastery, combined the baroque style with the verbunkos. The choir of the Queen’s courtiers originally sang a drinking song in A major at the beginning of Act i. In the version performed today, this “Örömkönnyek ragyogása” (Tears of joy) choral is positioned after the drinking song of Petur. The shift resulted in a logical dramatic contrast: the two choruses constitute an impressive tableau-like dialogue between the foreigners and the Hungarians. The choir of the Hungarians follows Petur’s declamation about the unfortunate state of the country. This begins in A minor and modulates towards the end with the refrain in A major. The ensemble of Queen Gertrude, Melinda, Ottó and Biberach starts in E minor in “contrapuntal style” and modulates into E major, which Erkel calls a “brilliant style.” This is followed by the duet sung by

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Melinda and Ottó, which begins in A major in “French style” and later imitates a “grovelling Italian style” ending in a furioso in D minor. In the next scene we see Bánk singing in a “grave” C minor; the later Cavatina, in which he remembers his happy days with Melinda, is in A sharp major, but the concluding ­“furiosissimo” is in C minor. Biberach, “the other Iago,” starts in andante sostenuto, in the “dolorous style” of G minor, which modulates to the even “more sorrowful style” of B minor, and then into the “duetto furioso” or “Garibaldi style” of D flat major. This is followed by a Cabaletta in “real Hungarian style” in G major with a quick, passionate tempo. This is where Erkel originally inserted a ballet scene in “foreign style” and a Hungarian csárdás dance, which he calls “my own hallmark.” This structural position of the dance, which we can also find in the piano version, was justly criticized by many contemporaries who felt that the dance arrests the rhythm of the action and should be repositioned somewhere else. Erkel finally found a perfect solution: the dance in E major is positioned after Bánk’s conversation with Petur, who convinces Bánk that the cause of the rebels is righteous. Since this “conversion” gives the Hungarians a reason to celebrate, the csárdás section seems a logical choice. However, this csárdás is not a dance of joy, but rather a danse macabre. Just as Petur’s drinking song is in his own words not a happy cheering but a “bitter song” (“de keserű legyen!”), the csárdás is a dance of death: “három tánc a halálig!” (three dances before death). Erkel called the finale of Act i, an ensemble of Melinda, Ottó, Petur and Gertrude, one of the best pieces in the opera. The foreigners’ and Hungarians’ choruses join this ensemble, which makes it particularly dramatic: the choir of the courtiers reassures the queen, “Oh, our Lady, mercy is with you only!” while the choir of the rebels sings “Fair Melinda, don’t be sad!” The ensemble starts in F minor and modulates into F major, a key associated with the rebels. Erkel rightly considered this finale a masterpiece; it could have been presented with great dramatic effect on any grand opéra stage. It can be also perceived as one of the most beautiful operatic representations of nineteenth-century Hungary, bearing witness to the clashing polyphonic voices of the nation. The second act begins with an aria sang by Bánk in a “grievous style” in C minor, one of the most famous arias of Hungarian opera: “Hazám, hazám te mindenem” (My homeland, my homeland, my everything!). The rest of the second act is dominated by impressive duets. Tiborc appears on the stage; in a long recitative he informs Bánk of the miserable fate of the Hungarian peasants. In the end they join in a duet in verbunkos style. Erkel considered this also as “one of the best numbers in the opera.” It is certainly one of the most remarkable duets in Hungarian style, comparable to Mária’s and László’s duet in Act iii of Hunyadi, or the duet of Bánk and

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Melinda towards the end of Act ii in Bánk Bán. Before the latter duet we hear a lyrical passage and witness her mental breakdown: “Bánk fogd föl a nyilat” (Bánk, ward off the arrow). This is followed by Bánk’s famous curse. Before the scene in the Queen’s chamber, slow verbukos music dominates the score, both in an instrumental section and in Melinda’s and Bánk’s final duet in A major, composed in a “pure Hungarian style till the end of the duet.” The composer draws our attention to the many “exotic instruments: viola d’amour, the Hungarian cimbalom, and the English horn. As Melinda begins to sing, “Ölj meg engem Bánk” (Kill me, Bánk), the music modulates to C major, which, together with C minor, becomes associated with the grievous scenes, especially those of Bánk and Melinda, throughout the opera. C minor dominates the duet of Bánk and Queen Gertrude, “the gravest and most tragic scene of all” (Erkel). The music of this part contains a reminiscence from Beethoven’s Fifth, the famous short-short-short-long, 3+1 motif, but Erkel does not mention it in his manuscript. The scene ends with a preghiera in Bánk’s Hungarian-style aria, which was originally followed by the King’s arrival but cut from the later version. Act ii ends with Bánk’s aria. Act iii opens with a lyrical prelude in which the cimbalom plays a central role. Erkel’s contemporaries regarded this instrument as typically Hungarian, and it was popularized in articles in the Zenészeti lapok (Journal of Music). Erkel does not discuss this act in detail, mentioning only the storm scene in which Melinda jumps in the Tisza river with her child. Bánk Bán contains more lyrical passages than Hunyadi László, as well as longer recitatives and instrumental interludes. In the orchestration the greatest innovation is the ­introduction of the cimbalom, which gives an additional Hungarian tint to the music. String instruments have the most important role in Melinda’s arias. Although Erkel’s analysis of the opera makes no mention of it, the music occasionally refers to folk songs. One of the most obvious examples is Bánk’s aria in Act ii, “Hol van homlokod liliom virága?” (Where is the lily flower of thy forehead? / Where is the shining chastity …?), about which Erkel notes only that it is characterized by a “pure Hungarian style.” The other folk-like melody appears in the aforementioned danse-macabre csárdás of Act i. Erkel complained that he would have needed three times as many singers in the choir of the last scene, but he was very content with Bánk’s performance. The King’s aria “Vérlázító e bűnös pártütés” (This sinful treason is revolting) in Act iii is written in Italian style, and concludes with one of the most popular scenes, the “tetemrehívás” (ordeal of the bier). Many contemporaries linked Bánk Bán to the ballad Zách Klára, which had already been canonised in Hungarian literature before Erkel’s time and also involved the motif of the ordeal of the bier. According to popular belief, if a

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murderer approaches the victim’s body, the corpse begins to bleed. Bánk Bán also employs this ancient practice that had become a popular Hungarian literary topic. However, before Bánk is confronted with Gertrude’s corpse, Tiborc appears and confronts him with the dead bodies of Melinda and her child. While Katona ends his Bánk Bán with the King’s pardon (“rather than our ­Hungarian homeland, the Queen was destroyed”), the opera omits the pardon and leaves matters open. The opera’s ending may support Gyulai’s inaugural interpretation of Katona’s work: Bánk Bán shows what happens to a country torn by internal conspiracies and violence. The opera does not encourage optimism: Melinda, whose fate is associated with the country’s destiny, is a victim like the Queen. Bánk was unable to save his wife and his country. He becomes a tragic hero in the sense of the ancient Greek tragedies: he fails because of a tragic flaw. But against whom is this flaw directed? It seems that everyone is hurt: the King, the Queen, Melinda, and the entire country as well as Bánk himself. Before the final unmotivated praise of God there is no forgiveness, only Bánk’s bitter and ironic remark: “King … your vengeance is complete ….” Erkel justly calls the style of Act iii “requiem-like.” It is foreshadowed in the macabre csárdás dance of Act i that ends with the verse “Three dances before death.” Mosonyi wrote the most careful review of Bánk Bán, in the Zenészeti lapok. He praised Erkel’s opera because of its national style and for its overall artistic craftsmanship. Mosonyi criticized only the recitatives, which in his view were not refined enough. This was to be expected from the Wagnerite Mosonyi, who preferred a declamatory style to Erkel’s Italian style. Mosonyi admired the singers and the orchestra, as well as the lavish stage scenery of the first staging, but he wanted to hear more Hungarian songs (magyar nóta), since he felt they represented the real national music. Erkel’s article and Mosonyi’s commentary suggest that Erkel actually did not intend to write an opera in a Hungarian style. However, the intonation of most of the passages and the plot itself definitely endorsed the interpretation of Bánk Bán as a Hungarian national opera next to Hunyadi László. Erkel fashioned the different historical layers and their representations, transmitted by several media and various cultures, into the epistemological climate of his time and enabled them to function in the Hungarian national context of 1861. In Bánk Bán, except for the chorus of disgruntled noblemen led by Petur bán at the beginning of the opera, most of the crowd scenes have a scene-­setting function. The only action chorus is set between two lavish scene-setting passages at the beginning of the first act: the opening verbunkos after the overture and a csárdás dance following the male chorus and Petur’s drinking-song. The beginning of the opera is quite similar to Verdi’s Rigoletto: the story opens with

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a decadent palace scene. People are drinking and dancing when Lord Petur ­appears and expresses his discontent with the queen and her courtiers. He sings a convivial song which is a mixture of the Duke’s two famous arias from Rigoletto, “Questa O Quella” and “La donna e mobile.” However, the joyous conviviality is imbued from the outset with a tint of tragedy and fatality. When Petur enters the palace with his cortege of Hungarian noblemen he creates dramatic tension by dividing the crowd on the stage into “us” and “them.” “I cannot restrain my rebellious self… /…/ Look how merry they are! /While Magyars robbed of everything / Are dancing at the end of slave chains /Foreigners are calling the tune… / Our queen gives them power and money, / And we are outcasts / On the land of our ancestors.” Then the chorus repeats the last two lines of the aria, in order to emphasize the main idea of the aria and to enhance its dramatic tension: “And we are outcasts / On the lands of our ancestors.” By repeating the words of the soloist the chorus suggests that “the people” take his side and share his feelings completely. Even though there is no chorus of “the other side” on the stage, still the divided chorus impression is created by the tension between Petur’s men and the courtiers dancing in the palace. The chorus of the discontented nobles sets up a third point of division when they are perplexed at hearing that Petur wants to share his plot to overthrow Queen Gertrude’s rule with Bánk, the viceroy of Hungary. In spite of the chorus’s cautious warning, Petur is prepared for everything and convinces the people that only a total combat against the Meranian court could restore the ancient rights of the Hungarians. The chorus asks Petur to sing a drinking song: “A drinking song, Petur, a drinking song!” Petur in his reply alludes to the title of Vörösmarty’s poem ­(Bitter glass) by saying: “Drinking song? You can have it … but it will be a bitter one.” We might presume that Vörösmarty’s poem had already been circulating among the public as a song – because both Vörösmarty’s works and drinking songs in general were very popular96 – before Erkel’s Bánk bán and he might 96

The drinking song as a genre has always been present in world literature. Its earliest written forms are preserved in Alkaios’s, Anakreon’s and Horatio’s poems. From the Middle Ages we can mention the collection of songs entitled Carmina Burana as a par excellence example of drinking songs. Later, in the Baroque period the revival of Anakreon’s poetry gave a new impetus to this genre. In Romanticism it was also a popular genre because of its folk-like reminiscences. In Hungarian poetry it has been one of the most important poetic genres throughout the ages. Some famous examples of drinking songs are the following: Balassi Bálint (1554–94) Borivóknak való; Csokonai Vitéz Mihály (1773–1805) Szerelemdal a csikóbőrös kulacshoz; Bacchushoz; Orczy Lőrinc (1718–89) Szerelem és bor; Kazinczy ­Ferenc (1759–1831) Bor mellett; Kölcsey Ferenc (1790–1838) Bordal; Bajza József (1804–58)

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have embedded it in his opera with only slight modifications. However, today this poem is mostly known from Erkel’s opera. Petur’s drinking song is quite similar to the Duke’s two famous arias – ­“Questa o quella” and “La donna e mobile” – from Rigoletto. In Petur’s words, “If you set your man’s soul / Upon a lady, and she / Lightly tears up / Your salvation; / Carrying smiles in her deceiving eyes / And damned tears, / The former raising your desire, / the latter wounding your heart; / Consider it and drink: / The World will end one day, / Vanishing like a bubble; / What will remain is just the air / What will remain is just the air / Drink!” Then the chorus joins in and sings after every stanza as a refrain the last few lines: “Consider it and drink: / The world will end one day / Vanishing like a bubble / What will remain is just the air / What will remain is just the air.” The “bitter” humour of the song takes a more optimistic turn in the second stanza. The attention shifts from deploring the infidelity of women towards the urge of men to create and achieve something great and to fulfil one’s life mission. “If sorrow and wine / In your mind combine / It will slowly emerge / That life is but an image / Think boldly and great / And put your life upon it: / He who does not despair / Will never be lost. / Consider it and drink: / The world will end one day / But as long as it stands and lives, / it rests not, for better or for worse / It rests not, for better or for worse / Drink, drink!” The chorus repeats the refrain and ends it with a lavish orchestral crescendo. The male-female opposition is carried over into the next section, where the predominantly female chorus sings a song praising the queen. “Tears of glittering joy appear in our eyes when we see our queen; / Beautiful ladies, gallant gentlemen, / Let’s sing the praise of the crown!” Queen Gertrude becomes a symbol of the feminine character of the “foreigners,” which is contrasted with the masculinity of the Hungarians. The courtiers’ chorus and the pure men’s chorus represent and amplify the voices of the two parties. The only exception is Melinda, Bánk’s wife, whose name the Hungarian rebels use as a “password,” and whose fate becomes the symbol of the country. Queen Gertrude violates the nation’s rights, while her brother Ottó violates the sanctity of marriage by raping and disgracing Melinda. In the dialogue between Petur and Bánk the female-male opposition is extended symbolically when Petur asserts: “Our manly necks (i.e., the Hungarian nation) will no longer / Bend to Gertrude’s will… / Her ugly sin cries to heaven…” A divided chorus after Bánk and Petur’s dialogue reinforces the dramatic tension between Gertrude and Petur, when the women’s chorus hails the Queen with “Our Queen of Hungary! Long live!” Borének; Vörösmarty Mihály (1800–55) Fóti dal; Keserű pohár; Petőfi Sándor (1823–49) Ivás közben.

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while Petur’s men enthusiastically repeat Petur’s last words about overthrowing the Queen: “We will do it!” There are two moments when the two choruses merge in a musical concordia discors. The first occurs in the first act when the courtiers’ chorus and the discontented nobles chorus both sing “Long live!” But while the courtiers mean “Long live the Queen!” the discontented nobles respond to Petur’s cry: “Magyar freedom! / Long live!” A csárdás dance follows this scene, which is far from being convivial. The other moment when the two divided choruses meet is in the finale, when the two choruses sing in unison the final words of the opera: “Great is the power of God! / Let the dead rest for ever, oh God! / And receive the soul of the deceased!” It might seem like a reconciliation, but the courtiers’ chorus is mourning the death of the Queen while the chorus of discontented Hungarians is grieving for Melinda, the symbol of the country. The patriotism of Hunyadi László turns into nationalism in Bánk Bán. The presence of Tiborc, a peasant, and his account of the poverty and misery of his family works as a catalyst to change Bánk’s attitude towards Gertrude. He is ready to join Petur in his plot to overthrow the Queen. It is also the symbolic moment of transfer from the old concept of the nation (represented mostly by Petur and the malcontents) towards the concept of nationhood in which the “folk” are an essential part of the nation. In József Katona’s drama Bánk Bán (1819) the peasant Tiborc was already presented as a member of the nation. Katona’s drama played a significant role in shaping and spreading the new national consciousness and preparing “the voice of the people” for revolution. On 15 March 1848 a large crowd gathered in the National Theater demanding both to see a performance of Katona’s Bánk Bán and to hear the chorus from Erkel’s Hunyadi László, “The schemer died,” which became one of the most popular revolutionary songs of 1848–49.

Conclusion

The Opera Chorus and the Voice of the People The singing chorus was one of the most important factors in transforming the opera into a virtual public sphere. “The chorus was a group of actors who could represent ‘the people’ as a mass – exactly what the drama of liberalism required – their voices organized, as only music could organize them, into sustained, unified, and commanding utterance that expressed their identity, independence, unity, and importance.”1 The chorus was the great advantage of the opera over the spoken theater, which could only represent dramatic conflicts as the struggles of individuals, while the opera could bring crowds onto the stage who could let their voices be heard as an organized mass of people. It was this concordia discors embodied in the chorus that actually elevated the opera into one of the most popular artistic genres of the nineteenth century. The voice of “the people” gradually came to dominate both the political scene and the operatic stage. In the eighteenth century, the chorus was not a regular feature of the opera houses. The sole exception was the Paris Opéra (the Académie Royale de ­Musique), but at the other opera houses in Paris – the Opéra-Comique and the Comédie-Italienne – there were strict rules about the use of the chorus. Even on the stage, the authorities controlled crowd scenes of a political nature. They censored the “voice of the people.”2 But beginning with the French Revolution, in Paris and everywhere in Europe, the demand for choruses witnessed an unprecedented growth: scenes depicting political struggles became the rule rather than the exception in opera. In the eighteenth century, social tensions were presented as conflicts between individuals (e.g. the conflict between Figaro and Count Almaviva in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro); but in the nineteenth century they were shown as public conflicts between rulers and their subjects, or as clashes between two cultural communities with different religious or ethnic backgrounds. Beethoven’s only opera, which today is usually performed under the name Fidelio, usefully illustrates this ideological and structural change. Its original title was Leonore, and Beethoven rewrote it several times, leaving to posterity

1 James Parakilas, “Political Representation and the Chorus in Nineteenth-Century Opera,” 19th-Century Music 16:2 (1992), 184. 2 Ibid., 185.

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four overtures and three versions of the same work. But are they variations of the same work or three different operatic conceptions of the same story? Fidelio/Leonore is a typical rescue opera, which became a very popular genre after the French Revolution. It was performed in Vienna in 1805 in the Theater an der Wien. Ironically the rescue opera came at just the right moment. As the date indicates, at that time the Habsburg capital was occupied by the Napoleonic army. Since the bourgeois and aristocratic theater-goers had fled the city, on the opening night the audience was composed mainly of French officers. The opera was not a failure, but Beethoven’s friends nonetheless persuaded the composer to revise it. By 1814, when the opera was performed again in Vienna at the Kärtnertortheater, Beethoven had written two new overtures for it, and had also made substantial changes in the length and plot of the opera. One of the most significant alterations concerned the finale. In Leonore, when Florestan is released from the prison at the end of the opera he sings a love duet with his disguised wife, Leonore, about fidelity, love, and freedom. In the final liberation scene of Fidelio, all the political prisoners are freed and a chorus dominates the stage. The accent had shifted from the private drama to the public problem of political injustice and liberty. Freedom was already an important aspect of Leonore, but because of the circumstances of its performance – with French officers in the audience – it could not have a direct effect. But in 1814, after the defeat of Napoleon, the final liberation scene of Fidelio provoked strong emotions in the Austrian public and made the opera an immediate success. The chorus at the end of the opera was an important rhetorical vehicle contributing to the triumphant reception of Fidelio. One look at the table of contents of a cd containing “famous opera choruses” will show that almost all the titles are from nineteenth-century operas. Even though eighteenth-century operas also contained memorable ensemble sections (e.g., the famous “Viva la liberta!” from Don Giovanni), these never functioned as autonomous pieces in music history. While an ensemble was merely the closing section of an act or scene in early operas, the final chorus came to embody the dramatic and musical culmination of a nineteenthcentury opera. The chorus attained the same function and importance as the arias. Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov (1872), for example, consists exclusively of vast choral scenes. The increased use of choruses triggered other alterations as well. Instead of an ensemble of singing characters, masses of people populated the stage in a chorus, which also required adjustments of the scenery and structure. The small-scale and rapid episodes of Mozart or Pergolesi gave way to the huge choral tableaux which dominated the operatic stages of the nineteenth century.

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The history of nineteenth-century opera begins with the growth of the chorus. In Nineteenth-Century Music, Carl Dahlhaus distinguishes two types of chorus: the so-called scene-setting or “picturesque” chorus and the action chorus.3 The picturesque chorus served as a musical extension of the stage décor in the opéra comique, to which it added a decorative element of “local color.” In contrast, the action chorus in serious grands opéras was crucial for the dramatic plot. These action choruses – as Philip Gossett also argues – “developed a musical personality, acquired a dramatic force, became, in short, a people.”4 To identify political representation entirely with action choruses would miss the significance of the picturesque chorus, which was actually much more pervasive in the operatic literature of the nineteenth century. Village festivals, folk rituals, weddings, and monumental dance scenes all appeared on the stage, and they were more than simple markers of geographic or cultural settings. The folk scenes and picturesque choruses representing conviviality and folksiness were important dramatic tools, for example, in Weber’s Der Freischütz (1821), Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar (1836), Smetana’s The Bartered Bride (1866), or Borodin’s Prince Igor (1890). At a time when culture was a matter of politics and politics a recurrent element of culture, the slightest allusion to local color immediately assumed a political dimension. A third type of chorus that became common in the nineteenth century was what one might call the divided chorus. In order to dramatize the conflict between two peoples or two nations, more than one chorus was needed, sometimes involving more than one soloist or protagonist. For example, the antagonistic Egyptians and Ethiopians in Aida – or the Jews and Babylonians in Nabucco – are represented by at least two solo protagonists belonging to opposite camps. In The Flying Dutchman (1843), Wagner also made use of such a divided chorus to express the different characters of the Dutch and Norwegian sailors, while the separate male and female choruses also accentuate the conflict based on gender issues (between Senta, Daland, Erik, and the Dutchman). The chorus became such an important structural element of operas in the nineteenth century that even when a solo part was performed, the soloist was the representative of a group, and spoke in the name of the people. The rulers no longer stand above ordinary people, neither morally nor politically. Instead of the eighteenth-century absolutist king, the post-Revolutionary “citizen king” appears on the stage, using his power not to dominate but to serve his people. 3 Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1989), 124–34. See also Parakilas, 189–90. 4 Gossett, Philip: “Becoming a Citizen: The Chorus in Risorgimento Opera,” Cambridge Opera Journal 2 (1990), 44, 48.

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The conversion from an absolutist perspective on power to a democratic one is represented in Verdi’s Nabucco by the figure of King Nebuchadnezzar, a tyrant who turns into a servant of God and his people. Public and private issues intermingle and create dramatic conflict when the protagonist/soloist is also the representative of a people. In Bellini’s Norma (1831), for example, the Gallic high priestess’s amorous liaison with the Roman Consul Pollione causes discontent among her people. In Aida, the lovers – the Ethiopian princess, Aida, and the Egyptian captain, Radames – have to face the criticism and ostracism of their people. Nevertheless, love usually conquers all, and overcomes even national differences. However, both in Norma and in Aida the couples can find peace and happiness only in death. Love might guide the lives of the individuals, but the masses are dominated by the passion of patriotic love and national pride and stand ready to oppress the individual will. A paradoxical situation arises: in spite of the emphasis given the specificity of a particular nation, the cultural practices required for nationhood were generally present everywhere in Europe and used almost the same techniques. As John Neubauer points out, most national operas were dependent on foreign ideas and aesthetic currents.5 In spite of the explicit claims made by artists and critics about national authenticity and purity, in reality the nineteenthcentury national canons are European hybrids. It is not the national “essence” of the music, but its practice and performative nature that unifies people and propels national sentiments. The hugely popular choral movements (Liedertafeln) in the nineteenth ­century – especially on German territories – re-enacted the huge choruses seen on the operatic stages. But singing had already played a significant role in the turmoil of the French Revolution,6 as well as later in the European revolutions of 1848 in East-Central Europe. Benedict Anderson argues that modern nation states were characterized by unisonality, a term he uses to describe the way in which certain songs (e.g., national anthems) embody the nation when sung together by the people.7 Such choruses were the bedrocks of national unisonality. Choruses provided the “background music” for a period defined by Rousseau’s ideas about the connectedness of language and music, and by Herder’s argument that Volkslieder expressed the “real voice of the people.”8 ­Nationalism 5 John Neubauer, “Zrinyi, Zriny, Zrinski,” Neohelicon 29:1 (2002), 231. 6 Laura Mason, Singing the French Revolution: Popular Culture and Politics, 1787–1799 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996). 7 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York & London: Verso, 1983, 1991), 145. 8 Ibid., 42.

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cannot be separated from music as something extramusical from an ideal musical essence. Nationalism was the context of these musical pieces, an essential part of their semiotic network, shaped by the dynamic relation between creation and reception. Carl Dahlhaus argues that “the national side of music is to be found less in the music itself than in its political and sociopsychological function.”9 He surveys national operas from Paris to Russia and maintains that national operas could convey the national ideology better than symphonies because of their textual component, the libretti. The libretti were usually based on already well-known dramas – especially tragedies – that were recycled on the operatic stage and thus gained new meanings and functions. However, the music was the component that attracted the audience to the theater and served as a force of cohesion, since opera-goers were eager to sing and thus to disseminate these operas. The singing public and melodious operas canonized most effectively the idea of the nation. Philip V. Bohlman traces the origins of the nineteenth-century concept of national music back to the epic and ballads. The epic – according to Bohlman – is the story of the proto-nation and the chronicle of a nation’s history. The ballads speak of individuals and events that together constitute a national mosaic. Both types appear in songs that fascinated Enlightenment thinkers such as Rousseau, “because they perceived ways in which the origins of nations paralleled and were articulated by the origins of song.”10 Rousseau saw a strong connection between language and music. In his view speech created different musical structures, and “already by the mid eighteenth century these differences were explicitly national.”11 In songs and through the cult of singing promoted by nineteenth-century choral movements, the practice of national music established its cultural and social position and became intertwined with politics. Philip V. Bohlman distinguishes national music from nationalist music. National music is a historical development, while nationalist music is generated by a top-down political will. “Nationalist music serves a nation-state in its competition with other nation-states and in this fundamental way it differs from national music.”12 Songs also occupy a central position in Richard Taruskin’s ideas about the roots of nineteenth-century national operas and the concept of national ­music. 9 10 11 12

Dahlhaus, Carl: Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1989, 1997), 217. Bohlman, 41. Ibid., 42. Ibid., 119.

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He emphasizes the role of the romantic Lied and its characteristics of Empfindsamkeit (personal expressivity) and Volkstümlichkeit (folksiness). Taruskin claims that in the Lied the romantic “I” is united musically with the romantic “We.”13 This “we” was, however, pre-eminently represented in choral music, whose function and importance Taruskin compares to the “continent-uniting music of the medieval Christian church.”14 Romanticism made the notions of art and the nation sacred. In an age when the nation was defined as a cultural community, the colossal choral movements and opera choruses can be seen as re-enactments of national rites, so that the chorus perpetuated and strengthened the cultural and social functions of both music and the nation. Napoleon and the mob of the French Revolution were products of the same age, and the rise of the chorus and that of the individual soloist were parallel phenomena. Their ideal co-existence was temporary, and towards the end of the century the individual genius began to seek seclusion from the crowd, while the crowd began to act as an alienated individual. National operas can be regarded as a hybrid genre mixing features of grand opera and Singspiel. On every level – the stage décor, the structural organization of the acts, the libretto and music – national operas are a mixture of “high” and “low” culture, élite and popular entertainment. The thirst of the public for operas was insatiable, and the new interest in local culture and history could be popularized very effectively on the operatic stage. Despite the presence of popular elements in Erkel’s Hunyadi and Bánk Bán, these operas present an image of the nation that is essentially aristocratic. Most of the action unfolds in royal courts or aristocratic castles, and most of the characters belong to the nobility. Nonetheless the conflict in the operas is not between the nobility and the common people or peasants, but between members of the ruling class with different ethnic backgrounds. The nineteenth century was also the age of the cult of passion. ­Passionate love – usually with a tragic outcome – and the fates of tragic heroes had been the recurring clichés of grand operas. In the nineteenth century these were either replaced or combined with patriotic love. In Donizetti’s Lucia di L­ ammermoor, it is the family and the individual’s thirst for power that require sacrifice and not the nation or “the people.” Even though Edgardo in the final act laments his fate at the graves of his ancestors, the past is invoked only as a dramatic tool to accentuate his personal pain and loss in the present. In most of Donizetti’s operas we witness private tragedies and the dramatic fates of 13 14

Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, Vol. 3, The Nineteenth Century, (­ Oxford – New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 119–20. Ibid., 162.

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individual heroes. A substantial change can be noticed in the subsequent generation of Verdi, where the private lives of the protagonists are linked to the fate of their people. Private and public concerns are strongly intertwined in Verdi’s Nabucco, I Lombardi, Attila, Don Carlos, or Aida. There is a turn from the hero as an individual towards the hero as a public figure. The fates of individuals – as presented in Händel’s Giulio Caesare, or Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia or Maria Stuarda – becomes an issue of public interest in most nineteenth-century grand operas. This switch is obvious in Bellini’s Norma, in most operas by Verdi, but also in Auber’s La muette de Portici or Gustavo iii, in Halévy’s La Juive, or in Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots. History is no longer only the life story of the rulers, but also the story of the masses ruled by outstanding individuals. Grand opera thus contributed to national operas with the clichés of dramatic theatrical effects: the interest in passion, in heroes and in history. The Singspiel, which was primarily a German musical genre, brought to the stage of “élite” entertainment the world of the common people: folk mythology, folk tales, fairy tales and everyday scenes from village life. This began with Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte and continued through Marschner’s Hans Heiling and Lortzing’s Die Jagd and Undine up to Weber’s Der Freischütz. The Singspiel’s awareness of folk culture later inspired the authors of national operas as well. Thus, on the one hand, national operas focused on history, on the figures of well-known heroes – often of mythical grandeur – from local or national history,15 and on the dramatic conflicts between private problems and the public issues known from grand operas. On the other hand, they used the folk-like scenery and mythical world-view of the Singspiel tradition as well as the life stories of the “common” village people. In most cases these class differences are intermingled to create the peculiar world of the national operas. The voice of the people is represented by a soloist protagonist – the hero representing “the people” – and a chorus – as an independent actor of the story. If national heroes function as musical statues in national operas, the chorus has the role of a musical tableau. Wagner criticized grand operas for relying on “effects without cause.” However, he dismissed the fact that conveying effects was a core poetical principle of grand operas just as the musical representation of affects was a creative force in eighteenth-century opera seria. The huge tableaux – as in Boris Godunov – were not a sign of the composer’s incompetence, but were rather a poetic vehicle. 15

Even though this could be a complicated topic in cases where several nations claim the same historical personality as their own; see John Neubauer, “Zrinyi, Zriny, Zrinski,” Neohelicon 29:1 (2002), 219–34.

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Another aspect of the chorus is its connection to liturgical rites. In operas such as La Juive, Les Huguenots, or Boris Godunov, because of their religious references the choruses are directly linked to the tradition of church music. Grand operas establish the poetics of secular rites by using the chorus to convey­political ideas. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, religious conflicts combined with social struggles could move crowds, both in reality and on the stage. In the nineteenth century, the fight for national freedom and national identity replaced the religious wars in their ability to mobilize “the people.” Michael P. Steinberg distinguishes between the function of the chorus in such nineteenth-century liturgical or semi-liturgical works as Brahms’s ­German Requiem or Verdi’s Requiem and the choruses in contemporary national operas. He argues that the expression “voice of the people” can be adequately used for the former genre, because these requiems, in spite of their national aspects – Brahms wrote a “German” or Protestant mass and Verdi wrote a semi-liturgical requiem as a commemoration of the great Italian novelist and national hero, Manzoni – could still preserve the voice of the individual and have preserved their actuality ever since precisely because of their human and supranational character. In contrast, the choruses of the national operas represent “the voice of the nation.”16 However, such a sharp distinction between nineteenth-­ century ideas of the “voice of the people” and “the voice of the nation” is difficult to maintain. The concepts of the “folk,” the “people,” and the “nation” were used almost as synonyms. The “amour sacré de la Patrie” – sung in Auber’s La muette de portici – or the semi-religious psalm-like choruses from Nabucco (“Va pensiero”) and I Lombardi (“O Signore, dal tetto natio”) – were received with a secularized religious enthusiasm and veneration. Such “sacralized” images of the nation, and the rites of the new religion of nationalism, penetrated each and every aspect of the nineteenth century. The voice of the people became the voice of the nation, and the voice of the nation became the voice of the people. “Opera, established as a rite, can now celebrate a communal identity and make musically manifest the destiny of a people.”17 One of the lessons taught by the French revolution was that the crowd, “the people,” can influence political and social issues. Even if the people do not agree on everything – as we have seen in Hunyadi László and Bánk Bán – they are nevertheless able to exchange ideas, and they can be literally and symbolically in the same space: in the national public sphere. However, this public 16 17

Michael P. Steinberg, Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and Nineteenth-Century Music (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006), 163–92. Peter Conrad, A Song of Love & Death: The Meaning of Opera (Minnesota, Graywolf Press, 1996), 133.

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sphere is far from being a monolithic entity. The people can have their say by a bottom-up movement in political issues which earlier were decided by the top-down acts of a king, a military leader, or a high official. As a place for the representation of political ideas, the village market becomes as important as the palace or the church. The institutions that before the nineteenth century were more or less isolated begin to open up to the public. These changes could take place because of an active transfer between the different social classes. As the bourgeois intelligentsia gained interest in the culture of the “folk,” the “folk” was also influenced by the aristocratic and middle-class culture. However, one should not overestimate either their earlier – cultural and social – isolation, or the freedom of the nineteenthcentury “open society.” There had always been some kinds of cultural exchange between the different social classes, but the frequency, the mode, and the impact of cultural transfer across class lines was unprecedented in the nineteenth century. The most important sites of transfer were cultural institutions. Institutionalized singing – whether in opera or choral societies – played a leading role in creating and maintaining sites of transfer between two cultures, or between culture and politics. Music could spread ideas more effectively than pamphlets or political orations, and songs could give a common voice to the people.

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Index Ábrányi, Kornél 80–82, 91–92, 112–114 Alexander Leopold, Archduke 62 Anderson, Benedict 4–5, 158 Applegate, Celia 22 Aranka, György 36, 44 Arany, János 106, 115–116, 145 Aristotle 10 Arminius 21 Arne, Thomas 18 Aspden, Suzanne 18–19, 21 Auber, Daniel 14 Bach, C. P. E. 29 Bach, Johann Sebastian 31 Bajza, József 1, 47, 74, 76, 119 Balme, Christopher B. 147 Bánk Bán 7, 10, 48, 67, 78, 86, 87, 90, 93, 103, 111–116, 118–120, 122–126, 128, 129, 131–133, 136, 137, 141, 142, 144–148, 150–152, 154, 160, 162 Bánk Bán 37, 114, 116, 119, 125, 129, 133, 148 Bartay, András 91–92 Bartók, Béla 11 Bátori Mária (Erkel) 68, 71, 77, 86–88, 92 Beethoven, Ludwig van 14, 43, 57, 69, 72, 79, 82, 103, 130, 150, 155–156 Béla futása (Ruzitska) 46, 67–68, 80, 88 Bellini, Vincenzo 72, 82, 105, 158, 161 Berger, Stefan 5 Berlioz, Hector 57, 84–85 Bessenyei, György 34–36, 54, 97 Bíró, Ferenc 36, 127, 129, 138, 144 Boér, Sándor 54, 118 Bohlman, Philip V. 2, 30, 159 Bonfini, Antonio 93–94, 116, 123–124 Borodin, Alexander 31, 157 Bourdieu, Pierre 19, 85 Brahms, Johannes 57, 162 Breuilly, John 5 Brooks, Peter 27 Bulyovszky, Gyula 112–113 Burney, Charles 18 Chudy, József 62, 64–65 csárdás 58, 83, 101, 103–104, 149–151, 154

cultural memory 7, 22, 83, 92, 93, 97, 116–117, 144, 146 Czillei, Ulrich 87, 93, 96–103, 106 Dahlhaus, Carl 3, 157, 159 Déryné (Róza Széppataki) 46, 48, 50–51, 56, 66, 68–70, 77, 82 Döbrentei, Gábor 39, 73, 87–88, 125, 143 Donizetti, Gaetano 82, 160–161 d’Ussieux, Louis 123–124, 126 Egressy, Béni 52, 77, 86, 91–92, 97–98, 112, 144–145, 148 Eichner, Barbara 21 Erdődy family 43, 60, 62, 65 Erkel, Ferenc 10, 11, 24, 54, 67, 68, 70, 71, 73, 74, 77–83, 86–92, 96, 102–107, 111–114, 145, 148–152, 154, 160 Esterházy family 43, 60 Everett, William 23 Fekete, Ferenc 45 Feldman, Martha 20 Fischer-Lichte, Erika 38, 53, 128 Francis I, Emperor 63, 134, 140 Fulcher, Jane 20 Garai, László 95–96 Garay, János 105, 118 Gargallo, Tomasso 124 Geertz, Clifford 6 Gellner, Ernest 5, 8 Glinka, Mikhail 23, 30, 157 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 38, 129, 131 Grange, Anne de la 103–104 Grillparzer, Franz 38, 119–120, 122, 124 Grimm, Friedrich Melchior 24 Gypsies 57, 59, 66–68, 80 Gyulai, Pál 129, 145, 151 Habermas, Jürgen 3 Hafner, Philipp 62–63 Halbwachs, Maurice 9 Händel, Georg Friedrich 161 Hastings, Adrian 6

174 Haydn, Joseph 43, 57, 60 Heinisch, József 67–69, 80 Heltai, Gáspár 94, 116 Herder, Johann Gottfried 25–26, 36, 39, 158 Hevesi, Sándor 145–146 Hibberd, Sarah 19–20 Hobsbawm, Eric 5, 79 Hormayr, Joseph 89, 97 Horváth, József Elek 106, 118 Huebner, Steven 20 Hugo, Victor 17, 31 Hunyadi family 7, 10, 24, 70, 77–79, 83, 86–107, 111, 113, 114, 116–117, 149–151, 154, 160, 162 Hutchinson, John 4 Illyés, Gyula 146 Imre, Zoltán 77, 79, 87, 90, 118, 144–146 Jeruzsálem pusztulása (Katona) 132–133 Jesuits 41–42, 58, 115 Joseph ii, Emperor 22, 26–27, 34, 40, 59, 61, 124 Kármán, József 35 Katona, József 37, 48, 54, 67, 83, 84, 111–113, 115–120, 122–148, 151, 153, 154 Kazinczy, Ferenc 36, 44, 48, 77, 152 Kedourie, Elie 5 Kelemen, László 38, 41, 44–45, 54, 62–63, 66 Kerényi, Ferenc 38, 39, 41, 45, 48, 49, 51, 53, 58, 59, 65, 66, 69–71, 83, 97, 115–118, 120, 124, 126, 143, 144 King, Margaret 15 Kisfaludy, Sándor 117–118 Kölcsey, Ferenc 107, 152 Kossuth, Lajos 77, 90 Kótsi Patkó, János 45, 54, 61 Kotzebue, August von 38, 67, 72, 88, 127, 130 Krause, Christian Gottfried 29 Kruger, Loren 138–139 László v, King 93, 95–97, 99–100, 102, 106 Leerssen, Joep 4–5 Leopold i, Emperor 63 Leopold ii, Emperor 62–63 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 39, 52 Lillo, George 120–122

Index Liszt, Franz 43, 57, 79 Lortzing, Albert 30–31, 161 Lukács, Georg 27–29 Maria Theresa, Empress 26, 34, 43, 58, 69, 89 Martinovics, Ignác 63 Mátray-Rothkrepf, Gábor 73–74, 77, 80–82, 88 Mátyás i, King (Matthias Corvinus) 54, 59, 93–95, 97, 98, 100, 103–104, 107, 116 McLuhan, Marshall 16 McVeigh, Simon 19 Metastasio, Pietro 42, 58 Metternich, Klemens von 102, 136 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) 38, 42 Moniuszko, Stanisław 24 Mosonyi, Mihály 55, 82, 112–113, 151 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 31, 60–61, 66, 72, 82, 87, 103, 105, 155–156, 161 Munkácsy, János 47, 76 Nádasdy, Kálmán 104, 122, 148 Nagy, Lázár 46–47 Napoleon 25, 27–28, 39, 156, 160 Neubauer, John 32, 158, 161–162 opera war 1, 25, 70, 77, 82 Pacha, Gáspár 68 Pály, Elek 66 Péczeli, József 35–36 Pergolesi 24, 156 Perinet, Joachim 63–64 Petőfi, Sándor 83, 106, 118–120, 124, 126, 144, 153 Petrichevich, Lázár Horváth 106 Pfister, Manfred 147 Piarists 42, 58 Pikkó Hertzeg és Jutka Perzsi (Chudy)  62, 64–66 Prinz Schnudi und Prinzessin Evakathel (Hafner) 62, 64, 66 Rákóczi, Ferenc 7, 58–59, 63, 83–84, 90, 92, 99, 102, 119, 122 Rákóczi March 7, 83–84, 99, 119 Reddy, William M. 84

175

Index Reynolds, Susan 6 Ricoeur, Paul 8 Ritterdrama 67, 129, 132–133 Roshwald, Aviel 7 Rossini, Gioachino 25, 70, 72, 82 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 24–26, 30, 158–159 Ruzitska, József 46, 67–68, 80, 88

Tallián, Tibor 24, 87, 92, 111 Taruskin, Richard 29–30, 159–160 Ther, Philipp 23 Tóth, Lőrinc 97–98, 135–136, 140, 152

Scheer, Monique 85 Schiller, Friedrich 17, 25, 28, 31, 37–38, 54, 125, 127, 129 Schinkel, Karl Friedrich 14, 17–18 Schodelné (Rozália Klein) 50, 75, 77, 82 Scott, Sir Walter 31 Sehy, Ferenc 63 Semper, Gottfried 17–18 Shakespeare, William 31, 38–39, 54 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 17 Shils, Edward 6 Simonides of Ceos 24 Singspiel 21, 27, 30–32, 62, 64–66, 88, 160–161 Small, Christopher 13 Smith, Anthony D. 4–6 Steiner, George 17 Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) 25 Stephen i, King Saint 95, 107, 129–130 Stephens, George 122–123 Sturm und Drang 53, 115, 123, 128, 132 Szabolcsi, Bence 57, 62, 64, 87, 112–113, 117 Szalkay, Antal 62–63 Szász, Károly 42, 129 Széchenyi, Count István 48–50, 86, 105, 138 Szilágyi family 40, 51, 93, 96, 98, 103–104

Valkai, András 116–117 Van den Berghe, Pierre 6 verbunkos music 57, 58, 62, 65, 68, 80, 83, 86, 88, 92, 93, 99–104, 113, 145, 148, 149, 151 Verdi, Giuseppe 14, 20, 151, 157, 160–162 Verseghy, Ferenc 65, 69 Vertot, René Aubert de 123, 125 Virág, Benedek 36, 118 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) 34 Vörösmarty, Mihály 47, 83, 106, 148, 152–153

Udvarhelyi, Miklós 46, 126, 144 Ulászló i, King 95–96

Wagner, Richard 18, 20–22, 24, 31, 93, 102, 157, 161 Weber, Carl Maria von 14–15, 19–20, 66, 82, 157, 161 Weber, William 19 Wesselényi, Baron Miklós 44–45 White, Hayden 2–3 Ziska (Katona) 128, 130–132 Zrínyi, Miklós 89–90