Inside Outside (12 page)

I was not the first to discover consolation in art. But the consolation opera offered at that time was spurious and unhealthy. It led me into a world of showy glamour where romantic images and the warm sonority of the music—though I suspect that most of the performances were second-rate—acted as powerful drugs and distractions. Because we lived in such a feverish, hectic and provisional world, because we were waiting to enter into a state of permanence and normality, the sensuous images of opera came, quite insidiously, to represent the normality we were anticipating. Perhaps I should not admit it, but ever since those days a part of my imagination has whispered to me (despite the mockery of my rational self) that somewhere in the world there might exist a place where a forlorn maiden stands beside a moonlit tower, listening to her lover's heartrending song, while, in the distance, the solemn chant of monks declares that the hour of his death is near. My wife and sons often remind me that whenever I arrive in a European city, the first thing I do is to find out what is on at the opera.

We lamented the absence of opera during our early years in Sydney. Needless to say, the regret was purely hypothetical. Had we found that superb theatre among swaying palms, we would not have been able to afford the price of admission. But the longing was, of course, deeply symbolic. The opera, with its brilliant lights and its elegant audience murmuring politely before the curtain rose, became an emblem for a lost paradise—one we had already lost when we sat in our box surveying the rows of bull-necked Russians spread out before us. And consequently I have been searching for that paradise ever since. A few years after we arrived in Sydney my father took me to the gods of the old Theatre Royal, or perhaps of the more plebeian Tivoli, to hear a performance of
Tosca
by a touring Italian company. I later learnt that some of the performers we heard that night were among the best stock-singers of the time—certainly not the luminaries of the international festival circuit, but probably far superior to the war-wearied hacks Budapest was able to muster in 1946. My response was, nevertheless, one of bitter disappointment. Where were the massive walls of the fortress? Where was the dome of the basilica, or the twinkling in the sky? A shaking canvas flat with a few clumsy brush-strokes to represent huge granite blocks was no substitute for the reality—far more real than anything else in my experience—which I had seen come to life on the vast, noble stage of
our
Opera House.

I have visited, since that time, many of the world's great opera houses, and have heard singers who have already become legendary. I have been present when Schwarzkopf made everyone's heart break at the end of the first act of
Der Rosenkavalier
. I witnessed the young Sutherland's triumph as Lucia. I have heard Nilsson and Windgassen burning with passion in the second act of
Tristan and Isolde,
and the great Hans Hotter in one of his last appearances as Wotan. I fell under the sweet spell of de los Angeles as the dying Mimi. I have heard some of the world's most renowned operatic conductors, and seen the work of many brilliant directors and designers. Yet on none of those occasions, whether in London, Milan, Vienna or Bayreuth, was I able to recapture the excitement of those nights at the opera when, as a wide-eyed child, I was seized by the enchantment of dangerous illusions and treacherous conjuring tricks. Perhaps only a child may experience such things. Nevertheless memories of that state of ecstatic trance into which I fell on most of those nights are inseparable from the fact that they were lost when we embarked on our attempt to establish a new life under different skies. It is an experience I am still searching—in vain, I know—to recapture.

When I returned to Budapest after that long absence, I anticipated my usual habits by arriving armed with a ticket to the opera. I had arranged in Vienna, where tickets for the Budapest opera are obtainable for next-to-nothing in order to provide a source of hard currency for Hungary's fledgling free market economy, to attend a performance of
Tannhäuser
on the night after my arrival. At first, the Budapest of 1990 bore little resemblance to the city I had left all those years ago. There were no bomb-sites or craters; trams and buses ran efficiently and taxis were plentiful; the supply of electricity was strong and constant. True, it was a drab and dirty city under a gloomy winter sky. If you looked hard enough you could discover bullet-holes on the façades of many buildings. The smells wafting out of various apertures in the streets did not inspire confidence in the sewerage system. It was all a far cry from the glitz of a Vienna enamoured of its affluence, its shops bursting with Christmas luxuries, its citizens, clad in smart loden-cloth and sporting cocky little feathered hats, drinking mulled wine at open-air booths. This, by comparison, was the grimness of the Third World.

Yet, as I discovered again the once familiar places, as the map of the city which had lain buried in my memory all those years rose once more to the surface of my consciousness, I began to recognise something not at all unlike the excitement of that hectic time in 1946 when the city was beginning to wake from the nightmare of war. This was, after all, the first year of yet another new world for Hungary. The forgetful slumber in which it had languished for almost as long as I had been living in Australia was beginning to pass. Once again, you could see people selling things almost everywhere you looked—‘genuine' Russian army hats, statuettes of Lenin (which, no doubt, you could deface at will), embroidered tablecloths (‘I need medicine for my blind mother, noble sir'), devotional images, fob-watches with the emblem of the Soviet railways on their lids, enormous flat-irons—anything and everything was for sale in the ferment of a newly-born free market economy. Despite dire warnings posted on the backs of doors in hotel rooms or displayed in cafés and restaurants all over the city, some tourists readily accepted invitations whispered to them in many languages: ‘You want exchange? Very good rate!'

In that grimy city, where the superb collection of old masters in the art gallery is disintegrating under the onslaught of damp, mould and neglect, the Opera House stood, as formerly, a resplendent emblem of national pride. The fairytale foyers, a late nineteenth-century dream of ‘Renaissance' grandeur, the sweep of the auditorium and the graceful proscenium arch were a riot of freshly applied gilt. This was not the faded splendour of theatres like Covent Garden or La Fenice which speak of tradition, of restraint and of the allure of rich but worn magnificence. Here everything was much too bright, raw in its opulence, in the dazzling shine of a newly created world. And when my eyes had adjusted to all that brightness, I realised how small a theatre this was. Where I had remembered a vast auditorium, its tiers of galleries rising to the sky, with an enormous stage capable of containing massive fortresses and vast palaces, I saw a cosy, extravagantly jewelled place, a diminutive, provincial cousin of the great houses in Munich, Dresden and Vienna which it could not match in grandeur but could rival in richness of decoration. A charming place, but not one to inspire awe.

The lights dimmed, the visiting Soviet conductor raised his baton, the first notes of the pilgrims' song rose insecurely from the horns. When, at length, the not very expertly played tumult in the orchestra pit subsided, the curtain went up to reveal a crinkled cyclorama, in front of which a group of young people clad in leotards pranced, leapt up and down and generally rushed around in a fever of activity. Later, Venus' love-nest rose from the depths of the stage, lit by a flickering pink glow and dominated by an enormous plush-covered sofa with large brass studs, on which reclined the Queen of Love. Never was the old joke about the fat lady more to the point. With a flapping double chin and a vibrato a mile wide (the legacy, no doubt, of her Russian training), the singer performed the music efficiently enough. But where was the enchantment, where the glamour? Her dumpy clenched fists and fat little wrists beat time to the music. She shuffled two paces to the right, two paces to the left and collapsed on her sofa as if exhausted from passion and desire, streams of perspiration running down her chubby cheeks.

The performance continued on its pedestrian way. At length the hero escaped from Venusberg and encountered his former friends in the valley of the Wartburg as they were returning from the hunt. Obliging menials trotted around the stage displaying various trophies, principally a reindeer in shiny wax suspended between two poles of machined timber. Meanwhile another drama was brewing in the auditorium. A correctly dressed elderly gentleman began to upbraid a pair of jeansclad Germans who cuddled and kissed, tickled and slapped (between shared sips from a large bottle of mineral water) in their expensive seats—purchased, no doubt, for a song in Vienna, just as I had purchased mine. Other properly dressed members of the audience, observing this fracas, murmured approbation as the old gentleman's fury rose to heights of vehemence in his defence of the respect to which culture, especially Hungarian culture, should be entitled. I remembered the retired town clerk. I remembered the terrible fuss over my mother's painted fingernails. I grew so discouraged that I left after the second act, going back to my hotel to watch what CNN had to say about the imminent war in the Gulf.

A few days after returning to Sydney I went to the opera again. There was no comparison between the two performances. What I saw and heard at Bennelong Point had the assurance and sophistication of a metropolitan culture. And yet the old worm was already gnawing away inside me. I forgot the fat Venus in her pink suburban disco, the squawks that emerged from the orchestra pit, the clumsy shuffling as the Thuringian nobility arrived to witness the great song contest. What I saw again was that vast, glamorous edifice of my childhood enchantment, an emblem of a marvellously satisfying and romantic world I had lost forever. By comparison, the black shell of the Opera Theatre, its cramped stage, the whole of that brutally practical auditorium spoke of a humdrum and commonplace life. I realised, as I walked out of the theatre into a star-lit summer night, the Harbour twinkling magically with a thousand lights, the open-air cafés serving their last customers, the ferries gliding silently over the mirrored water, that exile seels your eyes, allowing you to see only what your longings and sense of loss will permit.

My mother as the
grande dame
c. 1940. When the Russians looted our flat in 1945, they put pins through the eyes in the photograph.

A golden summer in our ‘villa', sharing a tub with a cousin.