Budapest’s Opera House completed years of restoration in 2022 and now stands in its original 1884 glory, one of the grandest and most elaborately decorated structures of the 19th century. With only 1,700 seats, fewer than the Vienna State Opera’s 2,200 or La Scala’s 1,800, it is an intimate theater with no bad seats and preternaturally transparent acoustics.
The connection between musicians and the audience in the Budapest theater has an immediacy that I have felt nowhere else in sixty years of opera-going, and the Hungarian Ensemble made the most of it.
Hungary has a grand musical tradition; its conductors bestrode the podiums of the world two generations ago. The Second World War and Soviet occupation took a heavy toll on Hungary’s musical capacity but failed to extinguish the distinctly Magyar dialectic of passion and intelligence that informs Hungarian interpretation at its best.
Conductor Levente Török gave an electrifying reading of Puccini’s score, a reminder that Puccini is too good to be left to the humdrum Italian music directors who usually take the baton in Tosca. The cast featured no names that would draw crowds at New York’s Metropolitan Opera or Covent Garden, but they all sang extremely well. More than that: They formed an ensemble and made the whole greater than the sum of the parts.
Mark Twain quipped that Wagner’s music is better than it sounds. The reverse is true of Puccini, who contributed four works to the standard operatic repertoire: His music is worse than it sounds. In the care of the right conductor, it sounds ravishing. Puccini used enormous skill in spinning out musical phrases to tease listeners’ expectations.
Timing is everything in a Puccini opera, and there is something to be said for a Mitteleuropäische interpretation. This style requires as much attention to metrical variation as Mozart. Puccini’s repertoire of musical tricks is smaller, but no less demanding; it’s harder for a comedian to make people laugh at a bad joke than a good one.
Puccini, moreover, was the least Italian of Italian composers. His mature operas – La Boheme, Madame Butterfly, and Tosca – borrow from late Romantic chromaticism, but always in the melodic service of the drama. The orchestra has its own contribution to the dramatic flow, in the fashion of the best film scores.
In his later works, Girl of the Golden West (1910) and Turandot (1925), Puccini drew on French Impressionism in an original way, slowing harmonic motion to create suspense. Maestro Török made the orchestra a full partner in the drama, in one of the best readings I have heard.
Zsuzsanna Ádám as Tosca has a beautifully produced dramatic soprano, and wielded it fearlessly in all registers. László Boldizsár as her lover Caravadossi has a dark-hued instrument with a sheen in the upper register. Peter Kálmán’s Scarpia was dark and menacing; the baritone is the best-known among the three leaders.
I didn’t hear a false note among the three leads, who are also persuasive actors, Ms. Ádám in particular. It’s quite possible to place superstar singers in major roles and produce dismal music; the major houses do it all the time.
And it’s most unusual to cast a major operatic production entirely with local talent. Classical music is the most globalized of businesses, throwing together musicians with vastly different training and traditions. The advantage, as the Budapest troupe demonstrated, is that musicians who trained in the same school and have worked together for years can mount large and complex works with the intimacy and precision of chamber music.
All of these virtues of the Budapest musicians played to the strengths of the house. The intimate setting and the forward position of the orchestra allow the singers to be heard without bellowing—although all the lead singers could summon operatic volume when required. Some moments that tend to be lost in the cavernous space of modern opera houses, for example, the lovers’ tiff and flirtation between Tosca and Cavaradossi during Act I.
In general, I dislike modern-dress productions of operas set in other centuries, but the Budapest “Tosca” is an exception. General Director Szilveszter Ókovács mixed images and themes from Hungary’s tragic 1956 Revolution into Puccini’s story, set in the Roman revolution of 1800.
The French playwright Victorien Sardou’s creaky 1887 melodrama, a vehicle for Sarah Bernhardt, was a huge commercial success, portraying Italian allies of the French Republic fighting against the clerical reaction. Puccini’s musical adaptation premiered in 1900 and survived Sardou’s long-forgotten play, which glorifies republican resistance to clerical reaction.
The plot is easily updated: A political prisoner escapes. A prominent painter hides him. The chief of the secret police tricks the painter’s jealous lover, the soprano Tosca, into helping him track the fugitive.
The painter is tortured within earshot of his lover, who in her distress reveals the prisoner’s location. The secret police chief offers to free the painter in return for the singer’s sexual favors; she murders him rather than submit. Her lover is murdered in turn, and Tosca kills herself rather than be captured when her crime is uncovered.
In the present Budapest version, the police wear modern uniforms and carry machine guns. The painter Cavaradossi is taken inside a tank to be tortured—a reminder of the Soviet tanks that rolled into Budapest to crush the rebellion. Rather than leap to her death, the heroine shoots herself offstage. Giant images of the 1956 rebellion are projected while the secret police do their dirty work.
I doubt this production would travel well, but it has deep significance for Hungarians, who have long memories and painful wounds. Washington encouraged the Hungarians to rise against the Russians with light weapons and stood by while Russian armor crushed the rebels.
It is a reminder of why Hungarians never will trust the United States. A prominent Hungarian diplomat who attended the same performance told me, “We expected you Americans to turn up, and you didn’t. We won’t forget that.” Puccini usually falls on the lighter side of operatic entertainment. This was an opportunity to take him in deadly earnest.
All of the Budapest Opera’s December performances and most of January are sold out, in contrast to the Metropolitan Opera, which now fills only 60% of its seats in a city four times the size of the Hungarian capital. Visitors should book tickets as far in advance as possible.
Asian tourists, who before Covid comprised a fifth of the Metropolitan Opera’s audience, do not appear to have discovered Budapest, although they have long flocked to the Vienna State Opera just two hours away. Vienna is a grand and venerable opera stage, but Budapest offers a different kind of experience.
East Asia is now the epicenter of support for Western classical music; I suspect that when Asians find out about Budapest, they will come in strength. Our experience of the classics degrades over time, and the Hungarian ensemble offers the closest thing to the original experience of 19th-century opera to be found in any theater I know.
David P Goldman is Asia Times’ Business Editor and Tablet Magazine’s classical music critic.