Будапешт опера үйі және мағынасы

Opera house in Budapest, Hungary

The Hungarian State Opera is the national opera company of Hungary. Located in Budapest, it is a busy institution, with over 200 operas each calendar year, on top of extensive educational programs, ballet, and musical theatre. The company employs 150 singers, a 200 member orchestra, and a 200 member chorus. Performances take place in the Hungarian State Opera House and the Erkel Theatre. In recent years, the company has also courted controversy, both in choices of casting, and in succumbing to public pressure to end scheduled productions early.

The Hungarian State Opera, or the Royal Hungarian Opera, as it was known until 1945, was founded in 1884 in Budapest. The Opera House itself, however, was undersized in terms of the number of seats, leading to a shortfall in operating income within the first few years of the company's existence. The shortfall was made up by a significant annual gift from the King. It is suggested that this gift led to the government having an outsized say in all matters related to company operations.

The opera company today is guided under the leadership of Szilveszter Ókovács, who was appointed by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. The company has enjoyed significant investment from the Hungarian government in recent years, in the amount of hundreds of millions of dollars, including funds to renovate the Opera House for the first time since World War I. There has been much comparison drawn between the far right political leadership of Orban and Donald Trump in the United States, but one significant difference has been each of their approaches to governmental funding to cultural institutions. Whereas Trump attempted to significantly cut funding to the National Endowment for the Arts, Orban has both increased funding to cultural institutions, and also put in place handpicked leaders of those very institutions. The op ed was promptly picked up by other right wing media members, and a short while later the performances were cancelled. The opera company, however, claimed the cancellations were caused by a drop in ticket sales caused by the negative publicity, not the publicity itself. Their production moved the story from Catfish Row in Charleston, South Carolina, to an airplane hangar, reframing it as a story about refugees. In order to perform the opera in the manner they did, Hungarian State Opera, as part of the agreement with Tams Witmark, the licensor of the work, had to print "unauthorised [and] contrary to the requirements for the presentation of the work' on all of its marketing materials. The Hungarian State Opera did Porgy and Bess for nearly 150 performances in the 1970s with a mostly white cast, performing in blackface.