Hungarian State Opera and More

The highlight of this afternoon in Budapest was the Hungarian State Opera. The opera house. Not the opera.

That was a rather ridiculous thing to say, wasn’t it? I wasn’t the only person in Budapest this afternoon. I’m sure different activities were highlights for other people. What I meant to say is that, of the sights I saw and activities I undertook, the Hungarian State Opera was the highlight for me.

The Hungarian State Opera is on the Pest side, close to my hotel. So I had to get back from the Buda side, where I was this morning.

The guidebooks I’m using on this trip both recommended it as a site to see. I read that, unless you go for an opera performance (not going to happen!), the only way to see the interior is on a guided tour. There are only two or three English tours a day, all in the afternoon. And, obviously, the tour can’t go into the auditorium if there is a concert or rehearsal on at the time.

At lunch, before I left Buda, I hopped on my phone and visited the Hungarian State Opera website.

(Important Note: Don’t ever literally hop on your phone. Ever. It might not survive. Those things aren’t indestructible, you know. If I ever lose access to my phone while travelling, I think I’d have to flag down a cab immediately, have it take me to the airport, and then try to get the next flight back home. If I’m unable to retrieve my luggage, well, so be it. Yes, I’ve become that dependent on my phone for travel.)

Where was I? Oh, yeah. I gently, ever so gently, withdrew my phone from my pocket, gingerly, ever so gingerly, lifted it in front of me, and lightly, ever so lightly, tapped the screen to call up the Hungarian State Opera website. I bought a ticket for the first available English tour that I had enough time to get to from where I was. That tour was at three o’clock.

That left some time before the tour, so I visited a recommended public square first. After the tour, I took in another recommended streetscape. Those three spots, and my hotel, are all within a few-block radius. So it wasn’t a particularly energetic afternoon.

Franz Liszt Square

The public square was Franz Liszt Square. The square is a rectangle that’s two short or one long block long (depending on which side you count the blocks). It’s one street wide. Not one block. One street.

The square is lush with lots of tall trees that almost fully shade it, except at one end, which is more open. There are lots of shaded benches. I sat a spell.

Some restaurants have tables on the sidewalk beside the square. I didn’t know that it was Franz Liszt Square at the time, but I had dinner at one of them on my first night in Budapest.

There are three statues spread out along the length of Franz Liszt Square. Only one of them is Liszt. His arms are spread, and his hands are raised expressively. His hands are somewhat out of proportion, on the large side, to the rest of his body. This, according to my walking tour app, represents his prolificness and proficiency at playing the piano.

Hungarian State Opera

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m the opposite of an opera fan. But I do appreciate beautiful buildings. The Hungarian State Opera fits that bill. It’s gorgeous.

The tour took me to the auditorium, as well as to some of the other rooms and hallways. The guide provided considerable information on the opera house’s construction and stories about it. I remember a little bit.

Construction of the Opera House started in 1875 and was completed in 1884. The city of Budapest provided the initial funding for its construction. However, it went way over budget, and they didn’t have the money to complete it themselves. Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary agreed to provide the additional funds.

According to the guide, Franz Joseph had one stipulation: The Hungarian State Opera couldn’t be larger than his Vienna State Opera House.

According to the guide, the story goes that when Franz Joseph arrived for the opening ceremony, he took a look around, particularly at the auditorium and said, “Well, this is indeed smaller than my Vienna Opera House, but I forgot to mention one other restriction. It can’t be more beautiful.”

(I paraphrased Franz Joseph’s words because, one, there’s no way I can remember exactly what the guide said. And, two, I don’t imagine he said it in English.)

By the way, they didn’t alter the Hungarian State Opera to make it less beautiful for Franz Joseph.

The interior and exterior were designed in a Neo-Renaissance style. Pretty much everything inside is lavish.

The main auditorium is rich with deep red and gold hues. Boxes of seating tiers form a horseshoe shape. And there’s orchestra seating on the floor. On the ceiling, there’s a giant circular painted mural. In the centre of the mural, there is a beautiful, large, heavy chandelier. It can be lowered all the way to the orchestra seating level to change lightbulbs.

At the back of the auditorium, at the very centre of the tiers of boxes, sits the royal box. There are no royals in Hungary anymore. Now, anyone can rent it for a performance. That is to say, anyone with a lot of money can rent it. The guide didn’t say the price, but she said you can share the price with other people to make it a little more affordable.

The halls and staircases are opulently decorated with marble, faux marble, and lots of gold colours. Some of that gold is real gilding. The guide said how many kilograms of gold there are in the gilding of the Hungarian State Opera, but I forgot. The twin stairways from the lobby are twisting, grand affairs.

There’s another staircase that climbs straight up to a lobby behind the royal box. At the top of those stairs, there is a huge floor-to-ceiling mirror. According to the guide, when royals walked up the stairs, as a matter of pomp, they didn’t look to their left or right or behind them. She said that the mirror was installed so that, when they climbed the stairs, the royals could see the grandeur of the staircase and the lobby at its top.

In this area, there is also a sumptuous salon that the royals used to entertain guests during intermissions. Today, it’s used for press conferences and other events.

We also saw some of the other ancillary rooms of the Hungarian State Opera. For example, the coffee hall, the bar and the smoking room. They were all decorated with large paintings, ceiling murals, chandeliers, and/or rich upholstery.

The smoking room probably merits some further discussion. It’s a long but very narrow room. Apparently, it wasn’t originally a smoking room. It was a gentlemen’s lounge. At the time it went coed, smoking was very popular, so they made it the smoking room. According to the guide, lovers used to meet in the smoking room because the smoke was so thick that they couldn’t be seen within it. I don’t know how much, if any, she was joking about that. Smoking is no longer allowed in the Hungarian State Opera. I don’t know what lovers do now.

When the tour started, there were enough people for the English tour that they split us into two groups. The two guides led us off in different directions to see the sights in a different order for each group. There was also a Spanish tour that went off in its own direction.

At the end of the tour, all three groups met at the top of a set of stairs. On a landing, two opera performers sang a ten-minute medley of excerpts from operas. The audience from the tours watched while sitting on the steps.

I tried taking a video of about five minutes of the performance in portrait orientation. For some reason, a lot of the video was blurry. And, in portrait orientation, much of the shot was the heads of the people sitting on the steps in front of me. I won’t post that.

However, I also took a video of about the last minute using landscape orientation. That turned out much better. (Still not great, but much better. Fortunately, my life does not depend on my videography skills.) That shorter video is below.

After the performance was over, so was the tour, and I left the Hungarian State Opera.

More pictures from inside the Hungarian State Opera:

Pest Broadway

My walking tour app calls the streetscape I mentioned above “Pest Broadway.” (I’m pretty sure that’s Pest as in a part of Budapest, not pest as in a destructive insect or vermin.)

As I mentioned above, it’s close to my hotel. I’ve walked past it several times during my time in Budapest. I just didn’t realize it had a name. And, to be honest, I don’t think it does. Neither of my guidebooks calls it Pest Broadway, nor do I think they even talk about the district. If they do, I missed it. (I’ve done that sort of thing before. So who knows?)

At the start of its entry on Pest Broadway, my walking tour app says, ‘Often described as “Champs-Élysées and Broadway rolled into one”…’

I’m not a gambling man, but I’d be willing to bet that the people who describe it as that have never seen the Champs-Élysées or Broadway. I’ve been to the Champs-Élysées a few times and Broadway two or three times, but neither of them for several years. Nevertheless, the intersection the app refers to as Pest Broadway doesn’t remind me of either. Not in the least. At all.

There are some nice stores and restaurants, a couple of theatres, and a weird statue. The streetscape is pretty in its own right, not devastatingly so, but pretty. But did I mention it’s not at all like either Champs-Élysées or Broadway.

And that wrapped up my day.