Eliconie

10 May - 10 June, 2017

At the end of the Hungarian Season, over the course of four weeks, between 10 May and 10 June, 2017, two centuries of Hungarian opera will be presented in a grand series that includes works by composers as early as József Ruzitska, as recent as Judit Varga and Levente Gyöngyösi, and all major Hungarian opera composers in between, as well as several indispensable choreographic works.
Beside popular Hungarian repertoire pieces like Háry János or Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, productions that had their premieres this season such as The Spinning Room, Love and Other Demons, or the two one-act pieces of Hungarian Late Night can be seen again. The festival will see the premieres of The Magic Cupboard, a comic opera by Ferenc Farkas, as well as the two earliest examples of Hungarian opera: Béla’s Flight by József Ruzitska has survived for posterity, while József Chudy’s lost opera, Prince Pikkó has been reconstructed by György Orbán.
For the 100th anniversary of the premiere of Béla Bartók’s dance piece, The Wooden Prince, Pál Frenák has created a new choreography that can be first seen on a gala night entitled The Wooden Prince100. Later, with a new Dance Suite by Zsolt Juhász and László Seregi’s classic The Miraculous Mandarin, it can be seen as part of the production Bartók DanceTriptych.
During the HungarianFest, several excellent pieces of contemporary Hungarian opera can be heard as concert versions: The Last Waltz by Iván Madarász, Le grande macabre by György Ligeti, Blood Wedding by Sándor Szokolay, The Stork Caliph by Levente Gyöngyösi, C’est la guerre and Lysistrate by Emil Petrovics, or Spiritisti, the opera by György Selmeczi that premiered in 2014 at the Opera House.
Many performances of the festival are aimed at the younger generations. Apart from the ever popular fairy tale opera, Leander and Linseed, and the family ballet, Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs, a children’s opera entitled The Stubborn Princess will enchant youngsters. The OperaAdventure series for secondary school students will have its ninth installment and 200 000th viewer with our national opera, Bánk bán.
On 10 June, the closing concert of the festival will feature international bass René Pape, who is going to make his Hungarian debut on the stage of the Opera House.

On the bicentenary of the world premiere of the play which would serve as the basis of the first surviving Hungarian opera, the 50th anniversary of Zoltán Kodály’s death and the 100th anniversary of the world premiere of Béla Bartók’s The Wooden Prince, the Opera has announced a Hungarian-themed season. To crown this, over the course of a few weeks, between 10 May and 10 June, 2017, two centuries of Hungarian opera will be presented in a grand series that includes works by composers as early as József Ruzitska, as recent as Judit Varga and Levente Gyöngyösi, and all major Hungarian opera composers in between, as well as several indispensable choreographic works. The operatic events of HungarianFest, predominantly made up of fully-staged dramatic performances, along with a smaller number of concert performances and a few film screenings of opera performances, will be recorded: the CD series will be bound together with an essay written by András Batta, professor of musicology and former rector of the Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music, and sent to public libraries and collections. This season will also be about remembering the Hungarian Revolution of 1956: HungarianFest will include exactly 56 works created by Hungarian composers and choreographers.

Hungarian State Opera
Andrássy út 22
H-1061 Budapest
Tel: +36 1 81 47 438
www.opera.hu

Erkel Theatre
II. Janos Pal papa ter 30
Budapest 1087
http://www.opera.hu/building/erkel-theatre