Levente Gyöngyösi: The Stork Caliph

Levente Gyöngyösi wrote his opera The Stork Caliph at the age of twenty-three; its premiere1 — I am proud to say that it was performed by the Budafok Dohnányi Orchestra under the baton of György Vashegyi — was a real sensation. As we have performed and premiered a great many of Gyöngyösi’s works, I can say that the most significant elements of his oeuvre — his characters and his musical philosophy — are already fully formed here. The Stork Caliph was the composer’s graduation piece, and, in his own words, the story found him while he was looking for a subject for his thesis. A friend recommended the novel to him, and it at once seized the imagination of the then twenty-three-year-old. The libretto was written by Zsófia Balla2 after Babits’s novel of the same title. ¹ Premiere: 23 October 2001, Millenáris.

² Zsófia Balla: a Hungarian poet and journalist from Transylvania, born in 1949. Like the Bluebeard theme, the central conflict of The Stork Caliph is a frequently recurring story in literature. Although the work’s title points to the tales of One Thousand and One Nights and to the story of transformation by a magic word, it is the doppelgänger motif that plays the central role in its conceptual framework. The essence of the idea concerns the duality within us — our good and evil sides, and the struggle between them. There are many nineteenth-century stories very like The Stork Caliph,3 the best known being Stevenson’s famous Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. In essence, all of them are about the fact that even if we recognise and name the duality within ourselves, we cannot simply choose one side or the other. ³ E.g. E.T.A.

Hoffmann, Mademoiselle de Scudéri and The Devil’s Elixirs; Edgar Allan Poe, William Wilson and The Oval Portrait; Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray; Dostoevsky,

The Double; Gogol, The Nose; Chamisso, The Strange Story of Peter Schlemihl.

And of course we must mention Freud, who sets out the notion of good and evil within us quite clearly and succinctly when he observes that we all feel a compulsion to conform to social norms, yet are also full of repressed, socially unacceptable desires, which we can recognise in our dreams. In Gólyakalifa it is precisely this dream motif that forms the essence of the story. Elemér Tábory — a gifted young man on the cusp of a brilliant life and a successful career — has a dream in which he sees himself reflected in the figure of another man: a wretched, hopelessly doomed apprentice, an unfortunate soul struggling with the torments of coming of age. Our composer made a few dramaturgical changes for the opera — merging some characters, for instance, for the sake of the staging; Elemér and the apprentice, however, are sung by different singers.

There are practical reasons for this: if one singer took both roles, our protagonist would likely die of the singing rather than of the drama. With two singers, the most effective situation an opera can offer arises: in those dramatic moments when their desires coincide, the hero’s two selves sing a duet with one another. By contrast, it is a coherent, logical solution for the role of Szilvia — who moves in and out of both of Elemér’s lives — to be taken by a single singer. We are faced with a film-like work of parallel structure, in which the scenes of the two stories alternate. The first act consists of an introduction and four scenes, the second of seven. The composer raises the pace in the second act by shortening the scenes and quickening the transitions.

The first act, in fact, can also be divided into seven parts; the third — the May Day scene, into the middle of which the Stork Caliph puppet show is inserted — falls into three. In today’s survey we present the opera’s most important scenes. The first scene of the first act, which we are not showing here, essentially depicts the seemingly carefree moments of a young man with a bright future before him. It is the day before the May Day celebrations; the school-leaving certificates are to be handed out the next day, and the whole family is delighted that the young man has come of age with a brilliant career ahead of him. The second scene then offers an unexpected, sharp contrast. We are in a carpenter’s workshop, where we meet the apprentice of the terrible fate, whom everyone beats, cuts and scolds.

In both scenes we are given hints that our main characters see something else in their dreams, but the identity of the two cannot yet be made out. The third scene is the May Day festival itself. We shall come back to its opening later, when I present the work’s characteristic musical features. After the bustle of the festival’s opening section, Elemér appears first, then the apprentice in a sudden cut. Their short arias are a kind of reflection on the events of the first and second scenes. Each aria articulates a key idea. Elemér sings, “I shall be a man who need not humiliate himself with filthy dreams.” The apprentice, meanwhile: “I would gladly kill anyone, because of my wretched life. No one is to blame for my fate, yet everyone rejects me.” At the May Day festival, Elemér’s scene essentially freezes on one side of the stage, at first, while the apprentice speaks on the other.

Gyöngyösi in effect divides the stage in two, reinforcing our sense of two parallel worlds. Yet it is not only differences we can make out between the two ariosos. In both scenes, repeated horn notes create tension. The apprentice’s scene begins with the same musical material with which Elemér’s ends: a characteristic rhythm and melody which, at the moment of Elemér’s outburst, is played on high-pitched instruments in fortissimo, while in the apprentice’s scene it continues in a low register, in pianissimo.