One month after world premiere, watch the new Eotvos opera for free

With its world premiere on 2 December 2023, Valuska is an important event for the Hungarian State Opera and, more widely, for all those interested in opera today, brought to our Slippedisc readers courtesy of OperaVision.   Péter Eötvös, the internationally acclaimed composer who celebrates his 80th birthday in January 2024, was commissioned by the Hungarian State Opera in 2018 to compose his 13th opera and his first in Hungarian. It is based on the 1989 novel The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai, who won the International Man Booker Prize in 2015. ‘Valuska, a young man with a pure heart, becomes a victim of a manipulative society in the shadow of a stuffed whale’ says Péter Eötvös. He has transformed the novel into a performance that combines several genres of opera and theatre with the grotesque. This is a bare, grey world but one with a lot of humour, where the surreal turns painfully believable.  The conductor is Kálmán Szennai and director is Bence Varga.  The title role of  János Valuska is sung by Zsolt Haja and Hagelmayer/ Narrator is sung by  Tünde Szalontay.

The Plot:  Péter Eötvös’s new opera takes us to a bare, grey world of an unknown yet familiar small town, and reveals the tragi-comedy world of the protagonist, newspaper delivery man, János Valuska. In the tradition of the Shakespearean fool, Valuska is different from the townspeople. He is an innocent, infatuated with astronomy and man’s position in the universe. The arrival in town of a circus – with, as star attraction, the world’s largest taxidermied whale – has explosive consequences.

Subtitles in Hungarian and English.

Streamed on Friday 19 January 2024 at 1900 CET/  1800 London  / 1300 NY