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Hungary Turned Far Right. That’s Meant Millions for Its Opera.

Zsolt Haja, left, and Lajos Geiger holding a sword during a rehearsal of “Bank Ban” at the Erkel Theater in Budapest. It’s one of the works the Hungarian State Opera is bringing on tour to New York.Credit...Akos Stiller for The New York Times

BUDAPEST — The grand, gilded Hungarian State Opera House here is where Brahms once heard Mahler conduct Mozart. It’s where Bartok’s still-shocking “Bluebeard’s Castle” had its premiere a century ago. It’s where the artist Matthew Barney shot part of his “Cremaster” cycle, and Jennifer Lawrence filmed scenes for her violent thriller “Red Sparrow,” in which she played a ballerina-turned-spy.

These days, the house is also emerging as a flash point in Hungary’s culture wars.

The opera company is in the midst of one of its biggest expansions ever, thanks to the investment of hundreds of millions of dollars by the increasingly autocratic right-wing government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who is building what he calls an “illiberal democracy” and has described Hungary’s theaters, opera houses and concert halls as “temples of national culture.” The money is paying for the first major overhaul of the State Opera since the Cold War, as well as a construction spree that will leave it with three theaters when work is completed next year.

But in the midst of its country’s rightward turn, the company has recently attracted controversy. It canceled some performances of the musical “Billy Elliot” after a conservative newspaper denounced the work as “gay propaganda” and staged “Porgy and Bess” with white singers, against the wishes of its creators’ estates.

This month, the State Opera and the Hungarian National Ballet are bringing 350 singers, dancers and musicians to New York to perform nearly two weeks of fully staged operas and ballets. The lineup includes “Bluebeard’s Castle,” Karl Goldmark’s rarely staged “The Queen of Sheba” and “Bank Ban,” an 1861 Ferenc Erkel work considered the national opera of Hungary, as well as ballets including “Swan Lake” and “Don Quixote.” The tour will run from Oct. 30 through Nov. 11 at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center.

“Our musical heritage has always been very strong, and we have to convey it,” Szilveszter Okovacs, the general director of the opera, said in an interview here last spring, explaining that it made sense to tour while the main opera house was closed for renovations.

The ambitious and expensive tour comes at a moment when many of Hungary’s leading classical musicians, especially those with international careers, have criticized the Orban government. The eminent pianist Andras Schiff no longer performs in Hungary, where he was born. (“I’m a great opponent of the political situation there now,” he told the BBC in 2013.)

Adam Fischer, a sought-after conductor, stepped down as music director of the State Opera in 2010 in part to protest the Orban government’s policies. His brother Ivan, the music director of the acclaimed Budapest Festival Orchestra, is an outspoken supporter of human rights at home and abroad. But both Fischers, who are among Hungary’s most revered artists, still perform there: Adam leads a Wagner festival that draws audiences from around the world to Budapest, and the Budapest Festival Orchestra continues to receive some government support.

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Orsolya Hajnalka Roser, in blue, and Laszlo Boldi sing in a rehearsal for “Bank Ban.” The State Opera is expanding, thanks to a huge investment by the increasingly autocratic right-wing government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban.Credit...Akos Stiller for The New York Times

The State Opera and Ballet’s first United States visit comes as the Trump administration has been making overtures to Mr. Orban’s Hungary. Both President Trump and Mr. Orban came to power taking a hard line against immigration and courting the right. Both campaigned against George Soros, the liberal investor. Both have emerged as strong critics of the European Union. Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, has described Mr. Orban as “Trump before Trump.”

One area where they diverge, though, is the arts. Mr. Trump tried, but failed, to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has had an uneasy relationship with artists, many of whom have been publicly critical of his policies. Mr. Orban, on the other hand, has made big investments in culture, seeing it as an important component of national identity. After his re-election in April, the government’s website reported that the opera star Plácido Domingo had congratulated Mr. Orban in a letter, praising him as “a great supporter of the arts and culture.”

Classical music and dance are among the most international art forms and have played a big role in cultural diplomacy over the years. But they can stir tensions as well. During several recent visits to the United States, the Russian conductor Valery Gergiev has attracted protests by advocates for gay rights and Ukrainian autonomy; last spring, the Philadelphia Orchestra drew pro-Palestinian demonstrators who were opposed to its tour of Israel.

Michael M. Kaiser, who used to bring visiting international companies to the Kennedy Center regularly when he led it, said that the politics involved in the Hungarian tour could lead to tensions.

“I think there are certainly elements of discomfort,” said Mr. Kaiser, the chairman of the DeVos Institute of Arts Management at the University of Maryland. “We in the arts always want to believe that we are showing off the very best of humankind.”

In Hungary, Mr. Orban’s Fidesz party has moved to exert more control over cultural appointments in recent years, naming scores of theater directors across the country. Mr. Okovacs, a trained singer with a deep knowledge of opera and a showman’s knack for audience development initiatives, worked as a television executive before he became general director of the State Opera in 2011.

”If someone forms a government,” he said, “of course he gives positions to people he can trust, to run it smoothly.”

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Zsolt Haja as Petúr in “Bank Ban.” “Our musical heritage has always been very strong, and we have to convey it,” said the general director of the State Opera.Credit...Attila Nagy

But, he added: “It’s not a bad thing. At the opera, it has been so for 135 years. It has always been a State Opera. And that’s where it stops: They have never exercised any pressure.”

And at a time when other major cities, including New York and London, have found it difficult to support two opera houses, Hungary has reopened a second, the Erkel Theater, run by the State Opera as a lower-priced alternative. Mr. Okovacs noted that it was the Orban government that brought back the Erkel in 2013, after it had been closed for several years.

Now the company is in a fever of construction. It hopes to complete the renovation of its main house by September. A few miles away, construction crews are building a third theater for chamber-size works in a cavernous 19th-century railway maintenance shop. The opera house is turning the facility into a sprawling, 237,000-square-foot complex of workshops, rehearsal studios and storage space called the Eiffel Art Studios. It will include a restaurant in a vintage rail car.

And the ballet has been transformed in recent years. The idea for the New York tour began with Tamas Solymosi, the director of the ballet, who has hired a large number of new artists — decreasing the average age of the dancers by nearly a decade, he said, to 25 or 26 — brought different repertoire, and established a new school, the Hungarian National Ballet Institute.

Now, he said, the company was ready for the world stage. Unlike the State Opera, which is bringing Hungarian works on tour, the ballet is making a point of focusing primarily on well-known classics. Mr. Solymosi, who had an international career as a dancer, said he wanted the New York audience to have a reference point. “How can they can really judge the company if I bring something they’ve never seen?” he said.

The State Opera’s programming is extensive — it has held more performances than any major opera company in recent years, by some counts — and inventive. A Puccini festival this season features hits (both a traditional “La Bohème” staging for purists and a modern take, “La Bohème 2.0”) as well as rarities, including “Edgar.” The company is performing dozens of different titles, including Meyerbeer’s “Les Huguenots”; a staging of two unfinished Mozart operas, “L’Oca del Cairo, ossia lo Sposo Deluso”; and plenty of war horses.

In May it celebrated the centennial of “Bluebeard’s Castle” with a striking new production conducted by the celebrated Hungarian composer Peter Eotvos and directed by Kasper Holten, the former director of opera at the Royal Opera in London. The performance was praised by the critic John Allison in Opera magazine, who noted that “no orchestra has lived with this music more.” (The company will bring a different “Bluebeard” production to New York, but the same strong cast: Andras Palerdi as Bluebeard and Ildiko Komlosi as his bride, Judit.)

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Transformed in recent years, the Hungarian National Ballet will perform “Swan Lake” and other classics on the tour.

Credit...Attila Nagy

But the State Opera has also courted controversy. In January, it staged “Porgy and Bess” with white singers — over the objections of the Gershwin brothers’ estates, which ask that the work be performed with black casts. The staging drew criticism abroad, but also praise within Hungary from some who saw it as striking a blow against political correctness. The production, mounted during Mr. Orban’s re-election campaign, relocated the action to a hangar-like space full of homeless people searching for a promised land — reminding some of the refugee crisis that overwhelmed the Budapest train station in 2015, and of Mr. Orban’s strong anti-immigration stance.

“There was really silly fake news about our ‘Porgy’ production,” Mr. Okovacs said in the interview, switching briefly from Hungarian to English to employ a favorite phrase of Mr. Trump’s.

Less than a month after that interview last spring, his company was making international news again, this time for canceling 15 performances of a revival of the musical “Billy Elliot” after a columnist in Magyar Idok, a pro-government newspaper, denounced it as gay propaganda.

The columnist, Zsofia N. Horvath, questioned how a state institution could stage such a show. “Promoting homosexuality cannot be a national goal in a situation when the population is decreasing and aging, and our homeland is threatened by foreign invasion,” she wrote.

In a response published in the newspaper, Mr. Okovacs questioned whether operas by Mozart, Strauss and Beethoven featuring women who dress as men were gay propaganda, too — and noted that the State Opera sends a CD to the family of every newborn Hungarian baby.

“Just because something that is an undeniable part of life appears onstage at the opera,” he wrote, “it doesn’t mean we are promoting it.”

The company said that it canceled 15 of the 44 planned performances not because of the criticism, but because the blowback had weakened audience interest.

Andrea Tompa, a Hungarian theater critic who has written about the growing political influence on the performing arts in Hungary, said that she caught one of the remaining “Billy Elliot” performances after the firestorm. “What is really frightening is that these institutions don’t take strong positions,” she said in a telephone interview. “Even if their artistic leaders have strong political relationships.”

Over the summer, as the controversy died down, Mr. Okovacs announced the theme of next year’s opera season, which seems far less likely to arouse criticism in the right-wing press: Christianity.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section AR, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: State Opera Is Awash in Political Theater. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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