Dolinszky Miklós

Address Given at the Press Introduction of the First Volumes of the Edition of Erkel’s Operas
Miklós Dolinszky

Bátori Mária (1840) was one of the first romantic national operas in Eastern-Europe. Contrary to the widely held belief, contemporary critics expressed their appreciation even after the premiere of Erkel’s two other operas that had been played with prolonged success, and Erkel himself even quoted from this piece in the score of Bánk Bán. Nonetheless, Bátori Mária was definitively removed from the repertoire of the Hungarian National Theatre in 1860. This was due to the ever increasing radicalism of the demand for national music on the one hand, and to the change of taste that ensued from Wagner and Offenbach coming to the fore in Hungary on the other. Even so, the work fulfilled its mission: it proved that a national language was compatible with international musical idioms and the typical plots of opera as a genre.

Two Papers on Bánk Bán
Miklós Dolinszky

Torments of Bánk Bán
Bánk Bán, one of Ferenc Erkel’s two operas that have been repertoire pieces for almost a hundred and fifty years, was reworked radically in the 1930’s by the leading musicians at the Budapest Opera House and in Budapest has been performed exclusively in this adaptation ever since. By means of changing the tessitura, of dramaturgic rearrangement and of adding new musical compositions, practically a new opera was born under the aegis of the popular-realistic opera ideal, a genre which forms one of the missing links of the Hungarian opera history and whose original representatives (Simon Boccanegra, Boris Godunov, Khovanshchina, Prince Igor) were staged in Budapest during the very same period.
When as a result of the demand for the original form of Bánk Bán a CD recording was published in 1993, the score used for the recording were prepared exclusively on the basis of the autograph. Therefore, it was still not revealed that Bánk Bán had been revised by Erkel shortly after the first performance. The changes affected the orchestration, the layout and the prosody, and survived in score copies of the work that have never been studied before. Erkel’s sons had also contributed to the orchestration and the composition of the individual parts, and it turnes out that the composer’s interventions were mainly adjustments of these elements, from other hands than his own.

Pas de deux
It was well known at the time of the first performance that the composer of the divertissements of Bánk Bán had been one of Erkel’s sons. The previously uninvestigated autograph copies of the parts reveal that Erkel omitted the foreign dances of the divertissement soon after the premiere. He only retained the Hungarian Dance which he transferred to another part of the first act and changed into a two-part czardas that was more suitable for representing the national character of the opera. In order to achieve his goal, Erkel had to change the original Hungarian Dance radically: the Adagio was an all-new addition, while the Vivace was extracted from the original dance. This way the extremely popular divertissement is unveiled as the work of two composers; Erkel’s method further refines the image entertained by Hungarian musicologists of a composer making the most of his sons’ skills in the shaping of the scores of his works.