At least this is the case today. But was it always so? Certainly not in the 19th century. The opera company of the National Theatre of Pest put on its first Mozart opera, Don Giovanni in only its second season, but audiences had to wait almost 20 years for the next première, of The Marriage of Figaro. Another 20 years would pass before a performance of The Magic Flute, while Il Seraglio was first presented to the Pest audience only in 1882.

The situation was no different with the opening of the Opera House in 1884. Here, too, Don Giovanni was the first Mozart opera to be performed, to be followed the next year by The Marriage of Figaro and The Magic Flute, although these productions were no more than second runs of the earlier performances in the National Theatre.

It was only in later decades that Mozart’s works came to occupy the place in the opera repertoire that seems so natural today, in successive great periods of the Opera House’s history: first under the directorship of Gustav Mahler, then in the 1910s in the period hallmarked by Miklós Bánffy and Sándor Hevesi.

It was only then that the Opera House presented Il Seraglio, and Così fan tutte had to wait until 1930 to be premièred by László Márkus during the “golden age” of the Opera House between the two world wars. Why and how the works of Mozart came to be performed over the past 130 years or so will be revealed in an exhibition that can be viewed in the first-floor foyer on occasion of the Mozart Marathon."

Source: Palace of Arts
Address: 1095 Budapest, Komor Marcell utca 1.