Mrs. Karnyó

Counting Emil Petrovics as one of his teachers, János Vajda (1949-) is considered the father of post-modern Hungarian opera. Of his entire multifaceted oeuvre, it is in his two-part opera Mrs. Karnyó that his sense of humour and the grotesque emerged most vividly. The world premiere, directed by Tamás Ascher, took place at the Opera House on 4 May 2004. The libretto, based on the comedy of the same name by Mihály Csokonai Vitéz, is the work of Szabolcs Várady. As one scholar of Vajda's opera opined, the piece is an eclectic one whose unique character emerges in the playful and witty flashes of musical quotations, some of them familiar, others less so.

Hungarian-language discussion programme