During the 1884 inauguration of the Royal Hungarian Opera House in Budapest, political elites staged a gala concert in the auditorium while the angry crowd, excluded from this ceremony, demonstrated on the street. In 1917, the crowds queuing to a Béla Bartók premiere needed to be forcibly held back. The book follows the history of the contested institution through a series of scandals, public protests, repertoire controversies and their representation in the urban press of the time. Such conflic...