Sex, Death and Statues

I don't know much about opera, but I know what I like. And I love anything by Mozart, especially with a libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte. So, tonight, Monsieur Mange-Tout and I headed off to the Hungarian State Opera House to see Don Giovanni. If you're ever in Budapest, I urge you to go. It's possible to have an elegant evening for very little money. The poshest tickets cost about one fifth as much as their Covent Garden equivalents and a third as much as those at the ENO. The opera house itself is utterly splendid. It's a jewellery box of a building, small, tiered, and heavily gilded and frescoed but without being overdone. Seats are hard yet comfortable (lots of leg room), and it's fun in the interval, too, because you can sip at your Tokaj or Hungarian champagne on a balcony which overlooks the busy Andrassy Boulevard.

Many things appear to be forbidden in the opera house, but, since there were no helpful illustrations accompanying the rather stern signs, I have no idea what these might be. From the behaviour of the cast, they do not include throwing wine around the stage or simulating oral sex.

Whenever I think of Mozart and da Ponte's work I feel a pang of jealousy and a bigger one of awe. Imagine having one of your creations playing to packed houses some three hundred years after it was born. The appeal of this opera for me is that it gives the audience a multilayered, multi-sensory experience; sublime music which does far more than just signpost the plot (in case you're interested, I believe that it helps us understand the characters); a witty libretto with a fabulous rhythm; and a story with universal appeal.

Don Giovanni (aka Don Juan) is obsessed, in fact pathologically so, with chasing skirt. His priapic urges lead him to murder the father of one of his would-be conquests, who later, reappearing in the guise of a talking statue, comes back to drag him down to hell. Before entering eternal damnation he is given a last chance to repent, but refuses to take it.

On one level, Don Giovanni tells a fairly straightforward morality tale warning us of the consequences of libidinous behaviour. We are human beings, it cautions, not human animals. Tonight, though, I found a different message. Mozart and Da Ponte have something to say about creativity, I think - at least to somebody like me. So far I have been something of an artistic skirt-chaser, flirting with one new project after another. This has led to a kind of personal purgatory where my creative juices dried up and threatened to stay dry for all eternity. So I'd like, if I may, to take the opportunity to repent and commit myself to one big piece of work. I'll sit down at my desk day after day and service it diligently and with love. In sickness and health I'll add to the word count and edit with compassion, forsaking all (well, most) others. I promise. I will.

Although I might give statues a wide berth as a precaution.

Occupation and Revolution

But not my occupation. Oh no. No work today - yippee!

After a long lie-in and a late breakfast, Monsieur Mange-Tout and I walked out and headed for the Terror House in Andrassy Boulevard. This excellent museum is in a building with a very unpleasant history; in 1944 it was the headquarters of the Hungarian Nazi party, and between 1945 and 1956 it housed the offices of the Communist secret police.

On the two upper floors we were presented with a rich and absorbing history of the Nazi and Soviet occupations of Hungary. It was all horrifying, but, because of the pleasant surroundings, still civilised. The basement was quite a different story. A slow lift descended through a dark, dank shaft while on a tv screen mounted on one of the walls a narrator gave an account of the method of execution favoured by the Soviet regime (a grisly kind of hanging, nothing like the long drop system previously used in the UK). He was introduced in Hungarian, so I missed out on knowing who he was, but I got the distinct feeling that he was speaking from personal experience. After we had gratefully bundled out of the lift, we found ourselves in a smelly, cellar-type corridor with doorways on either side. This was death row, leading to the condemned cell and the gallows. Photographs of those who had been held as prisoners lined the walls, many of whom seemed to have been involved in the doomed 1956 revolution against the Soviet occupiers. They had been sentenced to death following crude show trials, propaganda footage of which we had seen earlier.

The final room of the exhibition showed hope being re-ignited with the departure of Soviet forces in 1991. Forty five years - more than my whole lifetime. A very long winter had elapsed between the premature budding of freedom and its full blossoming.

Evening fell, and, energies restored by langos (fried frisbees of dough) topped with sajt and fokh (cheese and garlic - apologies for the puerile interlude in such a serious post), we decided to go to the cinema. We found that a film called Freedom's Fury was showing. We didn't know much about it, but had been intrigued by a poster displayed in the Terror House bookshop citing Quentin Tarantino as some kind of participant. It turned out to be the - very un-Tarantinoesque - story of the Hungarian water polo team who, competing in the 1956 Olympics (held just after the revolution in Budapest), found themselves playing the Soviet team in the semi-finals. Even though my mastery of the Hungarian language is obviously considerable (yeah right - Ed.), I was unable to understand much of the commentary. But the film is well made and moving, with first-hand testimony and excellent visuals, so the narrative was clear enough to be comprehensible and enjoyable. Especially touching was the reunion between the two teams, held in Budapest after the fall of the iron curtain. They were philosophical about the unsportsmanlike argy-bargy that had gone on during their original semi-final match, and greeted each other with genuine affection.

I'll be borrowing the film on DVD when it gets released, just to fill in the gaps left by my outstanding linguistic skills. And I'd wholeheatedly recommend it to anyone even vaguely interested in European history or sport.

A Social Act

And so to work. I found myself grumbling inwardly as I showered at 6am, fretting that I have to work instead of enjoying this beautiful city as a tourist. At breakfast, the view from the hotel restaurant (across the river to Castle Hill in Buda) increased my disgruntlement. I gave myself a "stop whining" pep talk and began to think about my reasons for working. After all, when I was a teenager in the 1980s, many people were completely devastated by a lack of available work. The effects seemed to extend well beyond the economic domain and into far more personal territory such as identity and self-worth. For me, identity derived from work isn't really an issue. Of course, I work for money; although he generates his own income, the care and feeding of Monsieur Mange-Tout is a costly business. But I feel I have other reasons, too. So what are they?

The excellent breakfast coffee cheered me up and reminded me of some training sessions I attended last week. The topic was ways of teaching writing, and began with an assertion by one of the speakers that writing is a social act. I laughed inwardly when I first heard this, thinking that some writing appears to have much less social value than other kinds. Thinking on, though, it occurred to me that each piece written does represent an attempt by the author to apply their expertise for the benefit of others - social intent is always there, however technial the topic. What varies is the degree of accessibility of authorial thought to the intended audience.

Likewise, for me at least, working is a social act. I have expertise and it's satisfying to overcome resistance from my slothful nature to deploy this expertise. I think of the wild birds that visit my garden and how tragic it would be to imprison one of them in a cage. Working is like that. Banged up tight in the jail of my skull, expertise gradually dies off - its acquisition, though fun, was ultimately futile. Set free into the world it actually does something constructive.

Having established that to my satisfaction, I then, as I now should, stopped procrastinating and got down to it.

Furry Hedge

Furry what? You may well ask. I do, in fact, refer to Budapest airport, or Ferihegy, to give it its correct name. Having only seen it written down before my first trip to Hungary four years ago, I assumed that it would be pronounced something like "ferry-heggy". Not so. To my unaccustomed ear its true pronunciation sounds remarkably like - you've guessed it - "furry hedge". It could be a euphemism for something unsavoury, couldn't it?

This has implications. Some of the more cosmopolitan among you may know people called Gyorgy. Having now had a brief overview of the Hungarian language in all its Finno-Ugric glory, I now know that "Georgie" is really plain "George", and am suffering from retroactive social embarrassment.

Still, I can always cheer myself up with a cheap laugh over the fact that the Hungarian word for cheese is sajt, pronounced "shite". And hey, it's only my first day here.