You are cordially invited to the book launch of
In the Public Eye: The Budapest Opera House
The Audience and the Press, 1884-1918
(Böhlau, 2014)
by
Markian Prokopovych
Comments: Mary Gluck, Professor of History, Professor of Judaic Studies at Brown University, Providence.
Chair: Nadia Al-Bagdadi, Professor of History at CEU
During the 1884 inauguration of the Royal Hungarian Opera House in Budapest, political elites staged a gala concert in the auditorium while the angry crowd, excluded from this ceremony, demonstrated on the street. In 1917, the crowds queuing to a Béla Bartók premiere needed to be forcibly held back. The book follows the history of the contested institution through a series of scandals, public protests, repertoire controversies and their representation in the urban press of the time. Such conflicts often led to larger issues that concerned the Opera House as a music institution, the birth of the modern public sphere and the modern audience. Thereby, the book calls for a critical rethinking of the cultural history of Budapest and Hungary in the late Habsburg Monarchy.
Markian Prokopovych, a CEU Alumnus, is a cultural and urban historian of Eastern and Central Europe working mostly on the “long nineteenth century” with a recent interest in migration, history of science and the twentieth century. He has worked and taught in Germany, Italy, Hungary and Austria and is on the board of a number of international associations for urban historians, European university networks and historical journals. He is also the author of Habsburg Lemberg: Architecture, Public Space and Politics in the Galician Capital, 1772-1914 (Purdue University Press, 2009)