Completed in 1985 but begun as early as 1979, János Vajda’s Márió és a varázsló (Mario and the Magician) is over thirty years old, but it received its American première this week as the Hungarian State Opera and Hungarian National Ballet began their first ever tour of the United States. An important insight from Vajda nestled in the program notes helped contextualize the structure of the opera, especially musically: “I had to compose actual dance music… the more crudely the magician deals with the people, the more insinuating and likable the music should be.”
Based on Thomas Mann’s 1929 novella Márió és a varázsló is more monodrama than opera. The magician Cipolla dominates the story, seducing various members of his audience into revealing personal secrets, acting foolishly or dancing. In the end, a morose and reticent audience member, Mario, is singled out by Cipolla, who assumes the disguise of the woman Mario is in love with. Mario embraces her readily, but then, shocked that he has been duped, shoots Cipolla with a pistol, upon which the story comes to a close.
The most interesting element of the performance was, as implied by Vajda’s explanatory quip, not the singing or the acting, but the orchestral music. The score at first appeared to be modern and dissonant but became increasingly more tonal and “accessible” as Cipolla continued his performance, suggesting that Cipolla was (deceitfully) engendering a world of familiarity. Balázs Kocsár and the orchestra pulled off this effect quite well, with the upbeat waltzes and quasi-Wagnerian climaxes sounding almost more authentic than pastiche. Another point of interest was the curious and modern-inflected variety of individual audience members (a slight deviation from Mann’s original): an alien sat quietly on one side of the stage, Simpsons-like caricatures dotted the other side, and everyone pulled out phones resembling old Nokias to do calculations during Cipolla’s arithmetic trick.
After a brief intermission, came Bartók’s only opera, A kékszakállú herceg vára (Duke Bluebeard’s Castle). Péter Galambos’ elaborate yet economical set design – in particular, a large reddish chamber with numerical and symbolical inscriptions peppering the walls – at first seemed to foreshadow an equally lush set for each consequent chamber in Bluebeard’s castle, but when the torture room and armory were depicted solely by the singers' descriptions alongside small punctuations by the lighting illuminating different areas of the room, it became clear that not everything would be shown literally. Even the “keys” to the successive doors were not shown, supplanted instead by a black file folder mirroring the subtle corporate aura of Bluebeard’s suit and the loose papers littering the room.