Conference Agenda

The regime of Mátyás Rákosi, who served as the head of the Hungarian Communist Party from 1945 to 1956, has drawn scrutiny and ultimately denunciation from nearly all sectors of academic research. In music, the ban on works viewed by the Communist Party as socially, politically, or morally transgressive has been taken as incontrovertible historical fact and an indictment of the party’s politico-aesthetic program. The most egregious example cited of this practice was the case of The Miraculous Mandarin by Hungary’s preeminent musical ambassador Béla Bartók. Historians point to Géza Losonczy’s 1950 article “The Opera House Belongs to the People!” published in the party’s paper Szabad Nép––in which the author criticized The Miraculous Mandarin for its sexual depravity––as launching a campaign against Bartók and signaling the freeze of Hungary’s music culture, one that would take a revolution to thaw.

But closer examination complicates this account as well as the accepted notions of unbridled political terror and authoritarian artistic suppression during the early years of Hungarian state socialism. In this paper, I examine the limitations of the totalitarian narrative built up around the era’s musical politics through analysis of Losonczy’s article and the artistic policies it advances. I also draw from and contribute to the substantial literature on Bartók’s pantomime to argue that there was some validity to the Communists’ objections to the work. Doing so, however, requires delving beyond superficial communist propaganda to critically interrogate how race and gender structure the work and its violent denouement. This study thus advocates for a nuanced historical inquiry that problematizes some of the calcified Cold War conceptions that have erected (often artificial) binaries—such as art/propaganda, freeze/thaw, freedom/oppression, sanctioned/banned—that serve to delimit and police the discursive field of this charged period in Hungary’s history.

Hanna Arendt describes totalitarian organization and rule by analogy to the onion. She places the leader at the center of the structure, in a kind of empty space carved out and nurtured by a surrounding system of connective layers securing individuals and institutions in a single closed universe. Considered from the outside, the layers of the totalitarian onion project a façade of normalcy while, from the inside, they nurture and confirm the extremism of belief residing at its center. This talk considers the usefulness of Arendt’s model and of her critique of individual responsibility within the totalitarian state to understand the upending of operetta after the Great War.

I consider Franz Lehár´s last operetta Das Land des Lächelns (1929) with Arendt’s analogy in mind, teasing the outward pleasantness of the work apart from the protocols of racial hate underwriting its spectacle. These protocols, I argue, are of the work, even if their very existence and dramaturgical effectiveness have escaped musicological comment thus far. Notwithstanding, my purpose here is not to denounce Das Land des lächelns but, instead, to consider what we might learn from it about the upending of operetta by the project of fascism. The paper proceeds in two parts: first, I describe the exclusionary mechanisms shaping its dramaturgy and, secondly, I consider the ways in which actors and directors in the 1930s and 1940s lay claim to the prerogative of theatricality – of staging and of acting in and out of the stage – to destabilize these very mechanisms in performance. Bringing together known as well as new documentary evidence, I consider the theatrical and dramaturgical strategies employed separately by film director Max Reichmann in 1930 and by tenor Tomás Alcaide in Paris in 1939, and again in 1943-44, as they staged, performed, and negotiated the production of Lehár’s last work, respectively, in Berlin, Paris and Lisbon.

“The operetta currently popular in Italy is a defective industrial product,” wrote opera composer Giuseppe Mulè in 1926, “which has nothing to do with art.” Mulè was not alone. Throughout the 1920s—against the backdrop of a broader economic crisis afflicting Italy’s opera, theatre and cinema industries—a strident debate unfolded in the country’s broadsheets and specialist musical press, whereby the commercial orientation, sexualised antics, and jazz-influenced music of contemporary Italian operetta were held responsible for the public’s waning interest in the genre. Yet while this self-consciously elitist conversation appears in tune with the cultural politics of Italy’s then-novel Fascist regime, in practice the critics’ exaggerated hostility obscures the complexity of the cultural, political and economic transactions taking place between Fascism and the operetta stage.

This paper seeks to redress the balance by considering the singers, actors, musicians and other artists who mounted operetta on Italian stages. Drawing on a range of sources including L’Argante, the official newspaper of the operetta artists’ union (later the Fascist operetta artists’ syndicate), I explore how artistic workers navigated the multiple challenges facing the Italian operetta industry. Despite persistent calls for a government crackdown on the sector, Mussolini’s regime considered operetta to be an essential component of a well-regulated Italian theatrical ecosystem, as witnessed by the curious history of the Compagnia Lidelba (established 1927). Though fronted by the renowned soubrette Ines Lidelba, the Compagnia was a new venture: an artistic cooperative “guided” by the Fascist operetta syndicate and underwritten financially by key music publishers, intended as a more economically viable, socially responsible—and ultimately more Fascist—alternative to the typical operetta troupe led by a charismatic actor-manager.

Ultimately, I argue, the Compagnia was unable to halt the cultural forces that would, by the 1930s, push operetta inexorably towards the more populist rivista (revue). But the juxtaposition of class-bound perspectives inherent to the Compagnia’s story grants us better purchase on operetta’s political and artistic significance at this time: in so doing, it sheds new light on a genre in flux, and on the growing split, discursively and practically, between serious and popular domains of music-making on the peninsula.