Where Once an Empire Flourished, Nostalgia Is for Sale

BUDAPEST — It was opening night at the Operetta Theater here in beautiful Budapest, and the evening was resplendent with a sense of the radiant past.

The show was "Rudolf," a musical based on the famous story of Crown Prince Rudolf of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and his double suicide at the Mayerling hunting estate in 1889 in the company of the Baroness Maria Vetsera, literally a femme fatale.

Not everybody feels nostalgic about the Hapsburgs, to be sure, even if one of the bridges across the Danube is called the Elizabeth Bridge (after the most beloved Hapsburg of them all, the Empress Elizabeth, the mother of Prince Rudolf). Elizabeth's portrait peers from countless postcards and the windows of tourist shops.

After all, the Hapsburgs did crush Hungary's independence movement in 1848, ruled autocratically and picked a fight with Serbia that was the proximate cause of World War I (and their own demise). So it is at most one and a half cheers today for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, if there are any cheers at all.

After asking residents how they feel about the Hapsburgs and why "Rudolf" seems to capture the imagination, very few express nostalgia for a bygone era. Still, the very staging of such a spectacular musical represents a change and a restoration of sorts, of the kind of popular entertainment that was banned, or that Hungarians could not afford, during the Communist time.