Partial View

A few weeks ago, Claire, Lizzie, and I went to Budapest, Hungary. I must say, this was one of the best trips I've ever taken. Budapest is a gorgeous city with endless breathtaking grandeur, friendly people, and delicious food. While we were on this trip, we decided to take advantage of Budapest's artistic and cultural richness, and we went to the opera.

We came across the opera house on one of our walking tours of the city, so we went inside to see about the possibility of getting show tickets. When we got to the ticket office, the man there explained that they only had the really cheap tickets left. Well, we were on a budget, so this sounded just fine to us. The ticket man tried to discourage us a little bit by telling us that said cheap seats afforded no view of the stage. Thinking there was a bit of a loss in translation, we urged him on: "So, these are partial view seats? That's fine." He just looked at us gravely and said, "You cannot see anything." Us: "Yeah, partial view. Sounds good." He shrugged and sold us the tickets.

Turns out nothing was lost in translation. These were, in fact, not partial view seats. These were negative view seats.

We were sitting in box seats behind a front row of uppity Hungarian opera-goers that was situated quite perpendicularly to stage right of the proscenium. Viewership was impossible. Well, what can you expect for 400 HUF (the equivalent being something like two euro). Frankly, we were all right with this because we were really there to see the interior of the gorgeous building and listen to the opera and orchestra, so you don't necessarily need to see to enjoy that.

Curiosity would often get the best of us, though, and the three of us wound up trading seats about a million times, or we would wind up standing up (on tiptoes), or we would hang to the column that supported the side-lighting, or we would hover awkwardly above the old Hungarian ladies in the front row of the box. At one point Claire got exhausted by the acrobatics and went and laid down on the dramatic chase lounge in the box and just contented herself to simply listen for a while.

As it happens, it was fine that we couldn't see much because the opera, Bank Ban, was performed as a sort of concert. Meaning, there was no action. The singers would stand up front holding their scores in hand and sing. There were costume changes and set changes, but those seemed pretty pointless and ambiguous; they betrayed no clues as to the plot of the opera. We had no libretti and the performance was conducted entirely in Hungarian accompanied by Hungarian supertitles. By the way, Hungarian is one crazy language. The one thing I could see was the screen with the supertitles, so I studied it a lot during the three and half hours of Bank Ban, and I was able to come to the conclusion that Hungarian just has no cognates to any language I have ever been exposed to. Usually when first seeing a foreign language, you have moments of oh that must mean blah blah because it's just like that word in French which means blah blah. There was none of that. So, for those of you keeping score at home, here is our situation: Negative-View seats to watch an opera conducted in a completely foreign tongue with no libretto and no action. I mentioned there were sets and costumes and that these, too, lent us no clues. You see, we got as far as understanding that they were in some sort of castle. Where? When? A mystery. As you can understand, seeing wouldn't have really helped us figure out anything more anyway. The listening was the important part, and it was stunning. We were able to decipher this much using the basic laws of opera as our guide: Melinda was the soprano/heroine/love interest. Two men, including "Bank," were in love with her. There was a villain who wanted to, I don't know, take over the ambiguous castle, and the alto played the queen, who died. Melinda died, too. And everyone died. Because it is an opera.