In my essay I intend to deal with an opera film, Erkel's Bánk bán, directed by Csaba Káel.

Before I begin, I wish to make it clear that for me an opera film is a production, in which there is no moving image reference to the origin of the opera on the screen, or the fact that it was originally a musical piece composed for the theatre. Let me mention two examples: I would not classify Bergman's opera adaptation of  The  Magic Flute as an opera film, since in it there are clear references to the theatrical scene, if we consider the opening images, for instance. As opposed to this, Zefirelli's Traviata belongs to the category of opera films. We will see later why I regard this difference highly important.

The recognized canon describes two methods of connecting film images and music: possible music within or outside the image. In the first case, the person or instrument making the music can be seen in the film image, while in the second case, not. Although the second case offers points of interest for the critic, since it is possible here to create the parallel flows (vertical montage, intellectual montage, etc.) of music that coincide or contradict the "atmosphere" of the image, I would rather deal with the first case.

At a first glance it appears that nothing is less problematic than music within the image: people sing or they play an instrument, and from the sound band the music they play will get into our ears. That is, there is a correspondence between the maker of the sound and the produced sound in the ordinary sense: something is itself, none other. A little girl playing the piano, the Latin lover playing the guitar, African natives playing the drums: these are usual images and sounds, we know them from different film productions. Of course, not only film art can provide such images, since a recorded concert or a television-broadcast is also the "riot" of music within the film.

In case of an opera film, however, there is a serious problem regarding the image and the music, especially the music within the image mentioned above.

While originally the musical tissue of the opera creates a whole - which means that singers and the orchestra re-create the musical piece during the theatrical performance of the opera in a physical and intellectual space -, this unity is lost in the opera film. There is no doubt that on screen they perform the piece singing, while the orchestra - that accompanies their song, reveals or unveils the symbolic or dramatic elements in their song, and converses with them - cannot be seen. Obviously, the orchestra cannot be sensed during opera performances visually either, or at least not to such a great extent as at a symphonic concert, but the sign of the conductor's baton, the pale light looming from the orchestra pit and all the other, seemingly insignificant moments point towards the fact that one of the most important factors of a theatrical performance is the orchestra. Poetically speaking, it is there on the stage with the singers, since theatrical visual events can be described in one continuous grand total, recorded from a fixed camera position and the pit with the orchestra is an unalienable part of it.

If the symphonic orchestra cannot be seen in the film image, but the people in the image sing about their fate, their thoughts, their feelings with the help of this invisible orchestra, from an aesthetic point of view, an incomprehensible quality is created: part of the audible music is within the image, part of it is outside, although it should apparently be in first place (in the internal space of the work of art), and not only because it is acoustically one, but because it is one according to the plot as well. The kettledrum describes the storm itself, but this storm cannot be set at two different places, or if it is, it is nothing but a semi-storm, to put it jokingly. In other words: the music within the image signifies itself, while the music outside the image signifies something else, namely, the image. In an opera film, this means the total disintegration of music.

We might approach the question from the angle of the image, since naturally, when we speak about the music within the image, we also talk about film image: the film image is under the power of exact objectivity (George Lukács), or naturalistic authenticity, if you like. The image of something has never been so close to the objective physical reality as its photographed portrait or its recorded moving image (such as the mere documentation of scientific experiments, a scientific short film, furthermore, regarding our topic, ethno-musicological film recordings of individuals playing instruments or singing, etc.).

If at the cinema I visually and auditively sense that some people have been wanting to communicate something in songs about their fate or about who needs to be killed when - although I am aware that on ordinary days this happens relatively seldom, since these topics are usually discussed with words -, I would accept it as a ruling fact in the given situation, and I would also believe that this war is arranged by someone in front of cameras. Obviously, they wanted to surprise me with something special, something artistic. After all, a camera can only record what is in front. Nevertheless, if I also hear musical sounds that turn out to be in close relationship with the singer's voice, but I cannot see the orchestra, the reality of a speaking movie disappears for me.

All these are real and known difficulties. Together their result is that I can watch opera films only with uneasiness and disbelief. After all, it is strange to see the loudest silent movie of film history.

It is apparent at the beginning that the question of music within or outside the film requires overscrupulous foresight in an opera film. In the "party" scene at the royal court two musicians appear, one winder, the other playing the strings. Since this is an opera film, our realism demands these two instruments be heard - the musicians visibly play a tune, while others sing. But this could only have been possible if 1) the opera music is stopped and the two instruments are actually played while on the screen, or 2) Erkel's score is re-written and the parts of the two mentioned instruments are included in it. In this latter case, the other part of the music (the orchestral facture) outside the image suddenly - and dramaturgically without any reason - would have turned into music within the image. Without any reason, since the two instruments can get their sound heard - or the sounds can get their image seen - which obviously signals an important intellectual content. But these two instruments are not mentioned in the sujet of the opera, they do not play any part in the plot. Furthermore: they arouse disturbing desire in the viewer that could be defined like this: I want to see more instruments, if only for a moment, to fulfill my optical realism. I can see that people have fun and play music on the screen, but I can hear that not only these two instruments make the music.

Nevertheless, this is just pure aesthetics. Let us deal with the film instead.

Well, the images during the overture again raise a theoretical question. Is it possible to use the overture as background music, as music outside the image, and if the answer is yes, what images can be attached to it? Opposite or identical? At a first glance, the overture is music without stage image, in which we hear the most important themes, and the viewer-listener is prepared for the coming musical and stage happenings. The stage is still behind the curtain. Theoretical considerations suggest that the overture should run with blank at the cinema, or perhaps a short film about how the film was made should be projected, in which we could see the performers and their characteristic actions. The director of the opera film chooses the solution to edit water images to accompany the music at the beginning of the film, because the third musician in the overture returns as the short introductory music in the first scene of the third act - which is followed by the well-known scene by River Tisza, with the storm and Melinda jumping into the water. The images show men with torches, paddling on the river, with ethnographic authenticity. Unfortunately, what they were doing was not quite clear for me, although others believed that they were looking for Melinda's body. Yet, the question comes up: why do I see these images and not something else? Why does the director tie my visual imagination? The overture of the opera does not reveal the fate of Melinda's dead body.

Here we can see a swirl, too, that pulls down the torch that fell into the water, and we also see the face of an old man, watching it.

A significant moment. On the one hand, it gives a new meaning to the opera, which is not there, while on the other hand - because in the storm scene the swirl returns as a natural phenomenon that pulls Melinda down -, it is to provide the intellectual unity of the whole movie. (Melinda's tragic ending is commented on by the close-up of the old man's face). A torch and an innocent person are taken by the swirl, which probably means that Melinda is the living fire of life destroyed by the evil. The old man's face might be death itself. It is an acceptable idea, the only problem is that it is completely unprepared from the structural point of view of the film, since the film cannot handle the patriotic line of the drama or the original opera, and instead focuses the attention on Bánk and Melinda's marriage crisis, rather appropriately. In this crisis, Otto, Gertrud, and Biberach represented the opposition, but they have no connection, whatsoever with the swirl or the old man's face. Unfinished line? Not even that.

Furthermore: even if it can be built up dramaturgically (perhaps Biberach, the Straying Knight should appear among the fishermen, too, and his face could be the face of death, who knows?), we still have to face the unchangeable fact that we do not have authorization for that. Erkel's opera does not deal with the primeval elements, the metaphysical questions or the possible manifestation of death. It is a simpler story with a meddler, a young loafer pretending to be the heroic lover, an old queen envious and jealous of other's beauty and youth, a statesman recognizing his own vulnerability, and Melinda, who could preserve her innocence and fidelity in marriage. A chamber drama with sentimental overtones. (In the original drama, Melinda dies a rather unpoetic death: she burns in her house.)

Here we have to face again: the film image is brutally realistic, especially if it is photographed so plastically that it provokes our sense of touch, as Vilmos Zsigmond did. If the living, moving, breathing water appears on the movie screen, depending on the level of education, knowledge content bottlenecks and associations come alive. In the musical facture of Erkel's Bánk bán, however, water does not play such an emphatic role. It is true, though, that Melinda drowns in the water, but water is only a tool for her death, a mere accident, nothing more. Melinda's death is caused by iniquity, in other words, by a human-social phenomenon.

At this point I have to say a few words about the use of the sounds of nature - bird whistle, the pattering horseshoes, thunder - in an opera film, which in my opinion is guilty of giddiness. Music itself - being an acoustic art - loves the jokes of onomatopoeia. Frog croaking, dogs barking, birds singing: for music these sounds are easy to create. How about the clinking of coins, the roar of a storm and the howling of wind? Music can produce these effects without any effort. Aesthetes and composers in favour of "absolute" music, however, did not think much of this ability of European music. They believed that music had a much more important role: it has to express the symbolic content of these sounds, the unity of reflections, emotions and to show what these sound phenomena create in the human soul.

If in an opera film the sounds of nature are heard, as they were created by the Maker, the ghost of the realism of film image immediately questions the presence of singing people on the screen. This restless ghost asks the viewer: why don't these people use their ordinary voice?

Csaba Káel also edits the original sound of blowing wind and thunder in the stormy scene. It makes the music of the opera hardly audible, but even if we could hear it, it is all the same: the film was enriched with absolutely superfluous pleonasms, or to put it more correctly, it was impoverished. If the film is about music, why cannot we have the storm made of music as well?

In the murder scene of the film, Gertrud attacks Bánk with a dagger disguised as her own crucifix, only to be killed with this very dagger just a couple of minutes later. This motive is completely incomprehensible for me. Gertrud's figure in Katona's drama or in Erkel's opera does not suggest that there is something wrong with her religious conviction. We are not in the age of Renaissance, when any aristocrat or secular pope could have owned such murderous objects. The transformation of the cultic object, the symbol of Christianity did not occur even to Marquise de Sade, as far as I know, although he found great enjoyment in the blasphemy of Christian symbols. After Bánk's murder, she throws the bloody dagger-crucifix into a marble washbasin, and it colours the water with blood. New associations bubble up: Christ's blood, Wagner the Grail, then Freud, and the incestuous duel of man and woman? Come on!

At this point of the opera film I began to throng: I felt that a life and death struggle develops between the director and Erkel Ferenc, as well as his so called ally, the white-clothed, suffering Melinda. Of course, I was supporting Erkel, the Hungarian reform age, Katona and the Hungarian people struggling for breath in the era of absolutism, and I wished their torture could come to an end soon.

I am looking forward to the CD-recording of the opera, which I heard is also before release. I believe that a recording of music-historical importance will be made of Bánk bán, owing to the work of the singers. And the current generation will learn who Bánk bán, Melinda, and Gertrud are, and what it means to sing these roles with responsibility and humbleness, that is all.