In 2003, when Müpa Budapest was nothing more than a concrete shell, its architect Gábor Zoboki sat in what was to become the Béla Bartók National Concert Hall with conductor Ádám Fischer. “‘Gábor,’ he told me, ‘this is the Valhalla. We have to play Wagner here.’” In the decades that have followed, the yearly Budapest Wagner Days have become a major feature of the city’s musical landscape.
Zoboki had won a competition to design a new cultural centre to house their Ludwig Museum's collection of contemporary art. Zoboki was an architect by trade but a musician by inclination: his love of music started young and then burgeoned in the Dance House movement of the 1970s, when Hungarian folk dance venues became a focus of resistance to the communist regime's dominance of culture. He was taught piano by Magda Thománé Molnár, a pupil of Kodály’s, sang in choirs and then conducted them; he also composed. And he was convinced that Budapest needed a new concert hall.
“Everyone knows the Liszt Academy: it has a fantastic chamber hall for Viennese classical music, but it’s not compatible with Shostakovich or Bruckner or Mahler. And everybody knew that Hungary, the country of music, has never had a chance to build a hall where you could play Bartók’s Concerto.”
The Hungarian cultural authorities got rather more than they bargained for, as Zoboki lobbied tirelessly for the new arts centre to include a symphonic concert hall. He enlisted the help of top musicians such as Fischer, András Schiff and the influential Zoltán Kocsis, chief musical director of the Hungarian National Philharmonic. “An architect’s role is to push the decision makers”, Zoboki explains. “I worked for one and a half years to tell everybody that this 19th-century type of romantic music concert hall just has to be built in the neighbourhood of the new contemporary museum. And somehow, it was successful”.
Zoboki understood halls. For his graduation, he had done a long study (“which I wouldn’t like to torture you with”) of the inner workings of La Scala, Bayreuth and other great music venues of yesteryear. The single topic that still fascinates him most is how architecture, interiors and acoustics were done in the 19th century, and how this tradition might be followed into the 21st.
For Zoboki, everything in the design of a concert hall starts with its intended programming. “I did more than fifty interviews with musicians and all the stakeholders: Budapest Spring Festival leaders, culture ministers, choir leaders, everybody. Slowly, I could put together a programme. I emphasise this, because without a good programme, you can get a nice building which is never usable: there are a lot of examples in China or in Japan or even in Western Europe. If you have a city with two million inhabitants, how many seats in this type of concert hall will you need in the next 25 years? I started the design when we had a very clear music programme.” There were types of music that could not be performed in other venues in Budapest, for example the big organ symphonies of Saint-Saëns and Respighi: the new hall would need a big concert organ. During communism, the organs in Hungary’s churches and cathedrals had fallen into disrepair.
It was clear that the hall would need to serve many types of music with radically different requirements: “When Grigory Sokolov comes here, you also have to get an answer for a recital in the same room where Wagner fans would like to listen to Die Walküre.” So Zoboki set about asking as many musicians as he could find about what was required to produce a truly world-class hall. He spoke to Christian Thielemann (now Chief Conductor of the Staatskapelle Dresden). He visited Bayreuth, where Fischer was conducting a Ring and Parsifal. Zoboki reveres Fischer as “one of the greatest and most contemplative conductors – in his hands, Der Ring des Nibelungen is something which is not comparable with any other, Bayreuth, Paris or Vienna”, so when Fischer came to visit the hall and declared that it should be his Valhalla, it was a life-changing moment for Zoboki.
Doing Wagner, he knew, would need an excellent orchestra pit. The location of the pit under the canopy, one third of the way along the hall, has made opera-in-concert a far better experience than the typical concertante layout of an orchestra sitting behind the singers: “Turandot and Traviata are much better when the orchestra is in the pit because the sound is more balanced with the stage.” But the Béla Bartók National Concert Hall is not a conventional Wagner space, because Zoboki and Fischer’s intent was different from the Bayreuth ideal of achieving a wash of blended orchestral sound. Müpa is the exact opposite, he explains, with an “analytic” sound: “why you like to hear Wagner in Müpa is that you listen to all the notes which Wagner wrote, which is not normal in Bayreuth or in any other opera house.”
Unsurprisingly, the acoustic design was crucial. “Never say that acoustics today is a realistic science. The honest acousticians say that 50% of how a concert hall works is luck.” Zoboki counts himself as incredibly fortunate to have worked with the late Russell Johnson, whom he describes as a huge influence and “his second godfather”. He decries the typical conversations between “blind acousticians and deaf architects” where the former think only about acoustic elements and the latter only about aesthetics; his “professional marriage” with Johnson was ideal because “I am a musician and he was an architect.” For three years, the pair met every month, either in Budapest or in New York, working on every detail “from the piano lift to the pit arrangements from Figaro to Parsifal. Russell’s mania was adjustability: ‘Gábor, you have to understand that in 20 years, not as many Mozart concerts will be played in Budapest as in 2000’”.