Markian Prokopovych's new book, In the Public Eye: The Budapest Opera House, the Audience and the Press, 1884–1918, is an ambitious, well-documented, and accessible study of the Budapest Opera House during the first thirty years of its existence. As its title suggests, this is more than a traditional institutional history of an opera house, or even of musical culture of fin-de-siècle Budapest. Prokopovych successfully combines the roles of a musicologist and a cultural historian to provide a remarkably complex and comprehensive treatment of his topic. Detailed textual analysis of selected pieces performed on the stage of the Budapest Opera is accompanied by in-depth contextual readings of the larger cultural and political world that framed these performances.

Prokopovych actually tells three different stories, which are skillfully interwoven into a common historical narrative. The first is the creation and the transformation of the opera house itself during the crucial years between 1884 and 1914. The second is the broader European social world of opera and its intersection with bourgeois culture, which was just emerging in Budapest at the end of the nineteenth century. The third is the local story of popular debates and urban conflicts, which mediated between the musical production of the Budapest Opera House and the capital's social elites and cultural consumers. Prokopovych moves skillfully and seamlessly among these different levels of analysis. He is not only versed in the traditional idiom of musicologists, but is familiar with trends in contemporary opera studies. His most general concern, however, is with the politics of aesthetic reception and production, which rendered the history of the Budapest Opera House unique among European opera houses.

Prokopovych uses what he calls the “booming urban press” of fin-de-siècle Budapest, including its satirical and humor magazines, as a privileged entrée into the history of the Budapest Opera House. Through judiciously chosen examples, he introduces his readers to a colorful cast of characters and impassioned debates that defined the early history of the institution. At the same time, he never loses sight of his larger story, which is the role of the opera house within the cultural and political landscape of the Hungarian capital. He understands the implicit meanings and unspoken nuances of this world, and he is able to convey them to an audience not necessarily familiar with the intricacies of Hungarian politics.

The story that Prokopovych tells is of a dysfunctional institution, one whose frequent scandals, changes of personnel, and difficulty in establishing a stable musical repertoire reflected the unresolved social and political tensions of the Hungarian capital as a whole. In tracing this conflicted history, he resists the urge to provide simple answers or causal explanations for these difficulties. His final assessment, however, is a positive one. After stumbling from one crisis to another, the Budapest Opera House eventually found a way out of its difficulties and modernized itself as an organization. By the early twentieth century, it had transformed itself from an aristocratic, highly politicized institution, with an unruly and uninformed audience, into a professional opera house with competent leadership and an attentive audience able to appreciate the artistic nuances of the performance.

In the Public Eye is an important contribution to our understanding of the turbulent history of the Budapest Opera House. It is also an astute analysis of the complex ways that artistic production, urban culture, and local politics intersected and reinforced each other in fin-de-siècle Budapest. Given its ambitious scope, it is hardly surprising that the book raises a number of social and political questions that go beyond its stated intention. The most important and obvious one is the connection between the new, middle-class audiences of opera and the role of the assimilated Hungarian Jewry in shaping the culture of the early twentieth century. Indeed, the absence of substantial references to the role of Jews in the cultural life of Budapest is striking in this account. The silence actually reflects the dominant taboos that the official press at the time maintained on the subject. The second question that offers itself for further study is the relationship between the different sites of cultural production that defined the urban landscape of fin-de-siècle Budapest. What were the implicit or explicit relationships between the opera house, the official theaters, and the underground culture of Orpheums and music halls? How did the audiences of the capital negotiate the aesthetic differences and potential conflicts among these venues? As these questions suggest, In the Public Eye is an important book that does not simply provide valuable new research about Budapest opera, but opens up new avenues for research and debate about urban culture.