The Afterlife of an Unfinished Musical Play: Géza Csáth’s and Tamás Fodor’s Zách Klára

Abstract

The name of Klára Zách is commonly associated by Hungarian readers with the ballad of János Arany or perhaps with Képes Krónika [Illustrated Chronicle], but not with Géza Csáth. The eponymous one-act musical play, composed of ten scenes, is one of Géza Csáth’s lesser-known works since it remained unpublished for decades. Although discovered in the 1960s and published by Zoltán Dér in Csáth’s selected works, Ismeretlen házban [In an Unknown House], the libretto of Zách Klára has never been adapted for the stage due to the lack of its musical parts. However, it is surprising that the screenplay of Tamás Fodor’s reinterpretation of the play in 1996 was included in Csáth’s collected theatrical works edited by Mihály Szajbély in the same year. Fodor’s adaptation of Zách Klára incorporates various texts of Csáth in addition to the original work. In this paper, I explore the transformative nature of Fodor’s text and analyse the intertextual connections between the two works by Csáth.