Minerva’s Hat and the Emperor’s Tailcoat: August Adelburg’s Cosmopolitan “National Opera” Zrínyi

Born to a Croatian father in Constantinople and educated in Vienna, August Adelburg (1830–1873) was a true cosmopolitan. His explicitly “national opera” about Miklós Zrínyi (c1508–1566), a Hungarian national hero of Croatian origins, was premiered in Hungarian translation on 23 June 1868 in the National Theater in Pest. The libretto (originally in German, and adapted by the composer from a drama by Theodor Körner) includes a preface that adumbrates a wholesale theory of cosmopolitanized national opera, as it were. Elaborating his views as expressed in his 1859 essay against Liszt’s On the Gypsies and their music in Hungary, Adelburg insists that the hegemony of the three traditional musical styles—German, French, and Italian—is obsolete, since “the tones have a single expressive language, which is divided into as many dialects as there are musical nations in the world.” At the same time, he also considers the overly use of less “worn-out” national styles misguided, since letting each character sing in the same manner is like “putting a Parisian lady’s hat, instead of an antique helmet, on Minerva’s head, and dressing the Roman emperors in black tailcoat, rather than sagum.” Therefore, a truly up-to-date national opera must in fact be “cosmopolitan” (Adelburg himself uses the term) in its sensitive portrayal of each individual character. Following a brief analysis of some of the most prominent “national” numbers of the work, I conclude by suggesting that Adelburg’s ideas about “cosmopolitanizing the national” render his Zrínyi a kind of mediator between two outstanding Hungarian operas of the period: Mihály Mosonyi’s “all-Hungarian” Szép Ilon (1861), and Ferenc Erkel’s “cosmopolitan” Brankovics György (1874).