For nearly a century, it has been a tradition of the Hungarian State Opera to mark All Souls’ Day with Verdi’s Requiem as a reflection on mortality, a tradition that, in recent decades, has also been associated with the national day of mourning on 4 November. Premiered in 2024, the OPERA presents the requiem mass in a staged version directed by Ádám Tulassay. This year’s principal performers are Zsuzsanna Ádám, Erika Gál, István Kovácsházi, and Gosh Sargsyan, with Jiří Habart conducting the OPERA Orchestra and Chorus.
“An opera in ecclesiastical robes” – this oft-quoted remark by conductor Hans von Bülow, originally intended as a negative critique, aptly illustrates the widespread view that Verdi’s Requiem, though borrowing its structure and text from the Catholic liturgy, conveys not so much a religious message as a universal expression of emotions associated with mourning – pain, sorrow and anger born of loss, fear of judgment, and the longing for peace – all rendered through dramatic means worthy of the stage.
In director Ádám Tulassay’s staging, the movements of Verdi’s work unfold as a sequence of loosely connected moments of varying emotional charge, which we follow from the perspective of the soprano – Zsuzsanna Ádám, making her debut in the production – as she envisions the apocalypse, the day of death. Her partners for are István Kovácsházi, Erika Gál, and the Armenian singer Gosh Sargsyan, both also debuting in this production; Sargsyan has recently earned the acclaim of the OPERA’s audience at the Georg Solti Academy. The performance also features a ballet solo danced in double casting by two artists of the Hungarian National Ballet, Zsófia Gyarmati and Zsuzsanna Papp. The Hungarian State Opera Orchestra and Chorus are conducted by Jiří Habart, one of the leading figures of the young generation of Czech conductors, who earned this engagement as a prize winner of the 2023 Kodály Zoltán International Music Competition in Debrecen.
The staged version of Verdi’s Requiem are performed at the Hungarian State Opera on 2 and 4 November 2025.
Photo by Valter Berecz
