I am Hungarian and this is 100% true! (Don't know if we should laugh or not thoug...)
The thing is the following:
the director of the opera house said that they got a contract at first which didn't contain the all-black rule so they made the opera. However, when the owners heard this (after a couple of performance) they started to protest to stop playing the opera. They stopped it for a while, but the directorate realised that people really-really loved Porgy&Bess so they decided to continue as they can and wrote the statements that singers identify with the black culture. I read statements from singers who said that as performers they have to identify with a lot of cultures and black culture is not an exception.
To be fair, there are no black opera singers in Hungary (also not too much black people at all) so it is really hard in Eastern European countries to keep this strict rule. So yeah, interesting story...
33
I am Hungarian and this is 100% true! (Don't know if we should laugh or not thoug...)
The thing is the following:
the director of the opera house said that they got a contract at first which didn't contain the all-black rule so they made the opera. However, when the owners heard this (after a couple of performance) they started to protest to stop playing the opera. They stopped it for a while, but the directorate realised that people really-really loved Porgy&Bess so they decided to continue as they can and wrote the statements that singers identify with the black culture. I read statements from singers who said that as performers they have to identify with a lot of cultures and black culture is not an exception.
To be fair, there are no black opera singers in Hungary (also not too much black people at all) so it is really hard in Eastern European countries to keep this strict rule. So yeah, interesting story...