Hungarian State Opera

Located in Budapest, it is a busy institution, with over 200 operas each calendar year, on top of extensive educational programs, ballet, and musical theatre.

In recent years, the company has also courted controversy, both in choices of casting, and in succumbing to public pressure to end scheduled productions early.

[citation needed] From the beginning, the Hungarian State Opera was a large institution, initially employing a total of 475 people, including performers, orchestra players, and varying administrative staff.

[2] Despite this, two of the purported goals under Mahler's leadership was to both make the company a national voice of Hungary, and also to eventually create a homegrown ensemble of Hungarian singers.

Nevertheless, Bluebeard's Castle eventually had its world premiere with the Hungarian State Opera Company in 1918, only to have the work banned in 1919 until the late 1930s, because of the forced exile of librettist Béla Balázs.

[4] The company has enjoyed significant investment from the Hungarian government in recent years, in the amount of hundreds of millions of dollars, including funds to renovate the Opera House for the first time since World War I.

[5] There has been much comparison drawn between the far right political leadership of Orban and Donald Trump in the United States, but one significant difference has been each of their approaches to governmental funding to cultural institutions.

[6] Later in 2018, Hungarian State Opera generated controversy by the announcement of a mostly all-white production of Porgy and Bess, composed by George Gershwin.

Years before the Hungarian production, Anthony Tommasini argued in The New York Times that opera has never been concerned with appearance to suggest authenticity - he notes that people were accepting of Luciano Pavarotti as a starving French artist.

He goes on to quote African-American opera singer Simon Estes, who said, "This may sound extreme, but I think it's almost unconstitutional for Porgy and Bess to be performed only by black artists."