This is interesting...well, interesting to me. Maybe not anyone else, but hey, this is the only opera blog, so I've kind of got you over a barrel, don't I? You must listen! Well, so I check Operaonvideo every day to see what the latest additions are; sometimes I will find something interesting. And this is one such time!
This is a double bill of Hungarian operas, recorded in 2017, which were put online to celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of the opening of the first Hungarian stone theater. What's a "stone theater?" I don't know, man. A mistranslation, probably. All I know is that that's what this Hungarian website says when google translated into English. Anyway, I downloaded this, and it's a good thing that I did; usually when I download opera videos to make sure I'll have them, it's just paranoia; they're not going anywhere. But this time, it was very strictly up for only one day (which I didn't know at the time), making me feel vindicated.
Now, the video does have subtitles--and not burnt-in subtitles either, so you can auto-translate from the Hungarian. Or so I thought, but as it turned out, when I turned that on, most of them either weren't translated at all or were one hundred percent gibberish. So I looked in the subtitle file, and I quickly figured out the problem: the little introduction at the beginning, explaining where and when it was recorded, was indeed in Hungarian, which is presumably why it was set that way--but the actual operas are subtitled in Romanian. A person who doesn't know anything about these things might assume the two are similar, but they're not; Romanian's a Romance language (funny how that works), whereas Hungarian isn't even Indo-European. I took a look and found that Romanian is a "co-official minority language" in Hungary, so that might explain it...but then again, so is German, which has many more speakers in Hungary, so who knows. Seems very weird in any event.
But the good news is, google translate likes Hungarian a lot more than it does Danish. The subtitles to youtube videos are stored in .srt files. I'd never dug into these before, but on opening it, I found that it's just a text file that also specifies at what point in the video each line should be played, so it was easy to translate the whole thing with.
(Also, side-note, Romanian seems like a very interesting language: it has enough roots in common with other Romance languages that you can tell what it is easily enough, but the orthography and all the spiky diacriticals make it look more like a Slavic language. It seems to be on the border.)
Was that pretty boring, and self-indulgent? It was, wasn't it? Well, I'm not deleting it, but as your reward for wading through it, I'm going to make these extremely rare pieces exclusively available to readers of this blog, complete with English subs. They're a bit rough in places, I made some mistakes, but you can follow along easily enough. I really hate the idea of art just disappearing like that, so have fun.
...but will you have fun? That remains to be seen. József Ruzitska is a pretty darned obscure composer; you can find a short entry about him on German wikipedia, and that seems to be about all the information that exists. He was born in 1775, worked for a while as a conductor, wrote three operas, and then after 1822 vanished from the historical record. When he died, or even IF he died (he could be the world's first bicentenarian; YOU don't know) is a mystery. However, he was important in that he introduced this kind of historical opera to Hungary, having a big influence on Ferenc Erkel, who jumped into that milieu with both feet.
Béla futasa is set more or less in Crusader Times. Kálman is a noble, formerly a favorite at the court of the king, Béla IV, but now he's left and he wants revenge: his son had joined some sort of rebellion out of naivete and idealism (so he says), and in spite of him begging for mercy for him, Béla let him be executed. So now he's living out on his own, plotting vengeance, but also feeling ambivalent: can I kill him and cause chaos and suffering to the Hungarian people? Ultimately, the king comes to his castle, a fugitive from Batu Khan's Golden Horde. When Kálman reveals who he is and what he wants, he tells him that actually, his son committed suicide before he could be convicted. An emissary of the Khan appears and demands that he turn the king over, but his Hungarianness wins out, and they chase him off. Get the heck outta here, you emissary. And to make up for his son's death, Béla gives Kálman his own children to raise, which seems like a terrible idea that would be satisfying to nobody. Kind of a weird ending, really: it's about the nobility of the Hungarian spirit and all, typical patriotic thing, but the queen--at least in this production--is also shown to be devastated by the loss of her children, so...?
Well, notwithstanding the slightly weird ending, I liked this a lot; it's a rousing sort of thing. You can see why Erkel was impressed. It does have substantial spoken dialogue, which I didn't love--would it kill you to stick a li'l recitative in there?--but no biggie! I would definitely recommend this one.
As for the second piece here: Pikkó herceg és Jutka Perzsi, by Jézsef Chudy from 1793, is known as the first Hungarian opera. Unfortunately, it's lost, and as I understand it (if any of this is inaccurate, it's because it all comes from Hungarian auto-translations), the libretto only survives in palimpsest form from a later Singspiel that was a parody of the work. So this is an effort by Orbán (an unfortunate name to have, it seems to me, but hey, there are decent people named T**** out there) to sort of work backwards and retrieve the original to the limited extent that that's possible. Well, that's the idea. I don't think anyone thinks you can really do it very well.
Perzsi is a Tartar princess. She wants to marry Pikkó, a Kalmyk (if I'm getting that translation right), but no no, sez the Khan her dad. He has an advisor, Sibuk, who's some kind of wizard, and he comes up with the idea of telling Pikkó that Perzi isn't really his daughter so that she can't inherit and Pikkó won't want to marry him. This great plan fails, because he still wants to. He fights with the Khan and accidentally kills him; Perzsi takes poison. Pikkó does likewise (goofily visualized as a bowl of pills). It turns out, apparently, that the Khan really ISN'T her dad, and she and Pikkó are secretly siblings. Sibuk decides to summon a tougher wizard to bring them back to life, but nope, he sez, no can do. You have to go through the world helping people and doing good deeds. And that is IT.
I didn't like this very much. The music isn't terrible; I wouldn't say it sounds like the typical fare of the late eighteenth century exactly, but, you know, not bad, and there are some nice love duets. But man, I feel that if the goal was to make it less silly, that goal was not quite met. The whole thing about the lovers' parentage, and the whole business with the wizard--these feel to me like they would've been additions added to make it more jokey, and I found it very hard to take this at all seriously as a drama. The characters are not well-delineated. After watching Bella futása, it felt like an anti-climax, and if the idea is to celebrate Hungarian history, I feel it isn't really a success. Also, while it's fine to appreciate their musical past, let's always keep in mind that Hungary these days is extremely shitty. Not that as an American I really have much room to complain, but still. Yeesh.
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