Based on an infamous 19th-century case in which a group of Jews were wrongly accused in the death of a Hungarian peasant girl, Mr. Fischer’s opera, “The Red Heifer,” is a vivid display of how cultural figures have emerged as some of the most vocal critics of Hungary’s rightward and authoritarian drift under Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

At a time when the traditional left-wing political opposition is hobbled by corruption scandals and its Communist past, Mr. Fischer is among a growing group of artists challenging a government that has tested the ideals of the European Union. The others include the pianist Andras Schiff and a popular theater director, Robert Alfoldi, who was ridiculed by right-wing politicians for his homosexuality.

The tensions in Hungary come as many right-wing parties are on the rise across the Continent and cultural figures from France to Greece to Eastern Europe are starting to respond. At the same time, many former Soviet countries are wrestling with their identities, pulled between the market and social forces of the West and deeply rooted national tendencies.

But in few places are cultural figures taking as strong a part in the debate as they are in Hungary. Since coming to power in 2010, Mr. Orban’s government has changed the constitution to limit the power of the judiciary and restrict press freedom, civil liberties groups say. More troubling, the far-right Jobbik party controls about 12 percent of Parliament, with a nationalistic, anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant platform unthinkable in most of Europe.

“The Red Heifer” is based on a blood libel from 1882 that divided the country much as the Dreyfus affair later did in France. His ambitious composition uses both a full orchestra and a Gypsy band, with references to music from Klezmer to rap to Mozart. The production, featuring adults and children, is set in the 19th century but includes pointed contemporary references.

Onstage, a red papier-mâché cow stomps on the peasant girl’s foot. Another scene features lively folk dancing by the same crowd that later turns into soccer hooligans blowing vuvuzelas, waving Hungarian flags and calling for retribution against the Jews. After that, the 19th-century Hungarian statesman Lajos Kossuth arrives out of the past, singing in a deep bass-baritone: “I am ashamed by the anti-Semitic agitation; as a Hungarian, I feel repentant toward it, as a patriot, I scorn it.”

In an interview this month, Mr. Fischer said that he had long wanted to write an opera based on the case, but it was the rise of Jobbik that spurred him to action.

Tamas Altorjay in the production – Gordon Eszte

“In the last one or two years, it came up to me, and I thought, ‘Now I have to write it,’ ” Mr. Fischer said as he sat in the study of his airy home here, near a grand piano and a wall of books in many languages — an island of cosmopolitanism in a country increasingly turning inward.

“Culture shouldn’t be interested in day-to-day politics,” said Mr. Fischer, who has also been the principal conductor of the Washington National Symphony Orchestra. “We want to be valid next year and the year after. But I think culture has a strong responsibility to find the essence, the real concealed truth which lies behind the day to day.”

Today, that picture shows Mr. Orban subtly courting voters on the far right, hoping to preserve his majority in elections scheduled for next spring. This has contributed to a climate in which, as part of more generalized criticism against foreign forces — especially the European Union and the International Monetary Fund — it has become acceptable public discourse to blame Jews for the country’s economic problems. Last year, Imre Kertesz, Hungary’s Nobel Laureate novelist, compared Mr. Orban to the Pied Piper and said democracy had never fully taken root in Hungary. That same year, Mr. Schiff, a renowned pianist, stirred debate when he said he would not set foot in his native Hungary while Mr. Orban was still in power.

Mr. Fischer, who is Jewish, said he doesn’t feel the same way and is dedicated to the Budapest Festival Orchestra, which receives funds from the government. Still, he has moved his family to Berlin, commuting to remain part of the conversation in Hungary.

He was roundly condemned. Indeed, the Orban government has taken pains to separate itself from Jobbik. “There is no cooperation or partnership with Jobbik, and its support is not required for any decision in Parliament,” a government spokesman, Ferenc Kumin, wrote in an e-mail.

Jobbik’s menacing shadow over Hungary

When will Hungary step up to fight the anti-Semitism, racism and pernicious conspiracy theories promoted by Jobbik, the country’s third most popular political party?

By Mate Hajba | Oct. 23, 2013

Hungarian MP Balazs Lenhardt, left, formerly member of Jobbik party, burns an Israeli flag during a demonstration in Budapest, Hungary. Friday, Dec. 14, 2012. Photo by AP

Former anti-Semitic Hungarian leader now keeps Shabbat

Last year, Csanad Szegedi, former no. 2 of far-right Jobbik party, called on Hungary to protect itself from Jews. Then he learned he had Jewish roots and has become enamored with Judaism ever since.

By Ofer Aderet | Oct. 21, 2013

Members of Members of Jobbik, a Hungarian far-right party, attending the inauguration ceremony of the ‘Hungarian Guard’ in Budapest, August 25, 2007. Photo by Reuters

A year ago he was still arguing that Hungary had to protect itself from the Jews. He was an anti-Semite of the most extreme kind and a senior official in his country’s far-right Jobbik party. The fiery extremist, Csanad Szegedi, even appeared in the black uniform of the Hungarian Guard, the militia group that he founded, at an opening session of the European Parliament. And then, last year, he suddenly discovered he has Jewish roots.“It will take me some time to digest this information,” he said at first. “What is important is not [needing to] know who is a purebred Hungarian, but who protests like a Hungarian. From my standpoint, being Hungarian means demonstrating responsibility for the homeland,” he explained.

But over the past year it turns out that this anti-Semitic fascist leader has become enamored with Judaism. In a report that appeared over the weekend in the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag, it was disclosed that Szegedi has decided to live as a practicing Jew. He observes Shabbat, attends synagogue, is studying Hebrew and is even trying to familiarize himself with the Talmud, the code of Jewish law. “He is attempting to observe the 613 commandments,” the newspaper said, referring to the basic obligations of an Orthodox Jew. But Szegedi admitted that he was not always successful at this. “Kosher cuisine – without pork, salami and the other things that Hungarian cuisine is based upon. It will take me time to wean myself from them,” the former right-wing leader acknowledged.

The transformation that Szegedi has undergone is just about as radical and wild as some of the views he expressed at the European Parliament. “This budget proposal reads like a document written by [Israeli President] Shimon Peres,” he once stated. “[It’s] a budget that will make the Hungarians poorer and the rich Jews richer.” And he accused what he called “the Jewish intelligentsia” of doing harm to the “holy throne” of St. Stephen, Hungary’s first king, who is considered the founder of the Hungarian state and the spiritual authority for all the rulers who followed.

Szegedi’s popularity began to put off his adversaries and political competitors, who began to look for dirt on the rising right-wing leader. Ultimately they found it. It turns out that his grandmother on his mother’s side is a Jewish survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp and his maternal grandfather was also Jewish and was interned in a labor camp. In fact, half of his family perished at Auschwitz.

In investigating further, Szegedi discovered that his grandfather had a previous wife and together they had two children. The wife and children all died at Auschwitz. After the war, the grandfather married Szegedi’s grandmother, a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz. The couple were married in an ultra-Orthodox wedding ceremony but several years later distanced themselves from religion. His grandmother chose not to speak about her past, although when Szegedi’s mother was 14, his grandfather disclosed the family’s Jewish past to her. But he warned, however, her not to reveal it to anyone out of concern that there would be “another Auschwitz.” The grandfather was said to be very pleased when Szegedi’s mother married a non-Jew “as protection,” he explained.

Now, however, the former fascist anti-Semite acknowledges his past failings. “I hurt other people. When I spoke disparagingly of Jews or Gypsies [or Roma, as they prefer to be called], I was also harming children who had never done anything wrong and may have talents that they could develop, but I blocked their path,” he conceded. “You start hating until the hate becomes an aim unto itself…. At the beginning, it was ‘the crimes of the Gypsies.’ Then it was anti-Semitism, and then we also started hating Romanians and Slovaks, because they had persecuted the Hungarian minority [in their countries]. Ultimately you hate the whole world and most of [the world’s] peoples because they have not met your standards.”

The disclosure of his Jewish background distanced Szegedi from many of his friends. “All of a sudden, people who I thought were my friends stopped being friends,” he recounted, and from his position as No. 2 in the Jobbik party, he became the party’s No. 1 problem, Welt am Sonntag, the German newspaper, noted. Even his friends in the party did him no favors. “The best thing would be if we shoot you so you can be buried as pure Hungarian,” one told him. Another suggested that he deliver a public apology. “And then,” Szegedi said, “I thought, wait a minute, I am supposed to apologize for the fact that my family was killed at Auschwitz?”

He quit the Jobbik party and began searching  for his roots. He spoke to his mother and grandmother. He had discussions with rabbis and developed a relationship with rabbis from the Chabad Hasidic outreach movement. He even made a visit to Jerusalem with them to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial museum and the Western Wall.

Nonetheless, in choosing to describe him, Welt am Sonntag gave the article about Szegedi the headline “Not entirely kosher.”

From the New York Times

In Hungary, Anti-Semitism Rises Again

By MARIANNE SZEGEDY-MASZAK

Published: October 29, 2013

My maternal grandfather was transported to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria after the invasion of Hungary, but he was lucky. He and his family were granted safe passage to Portugal after making, in effect, a deal with Heinrich Himmler for freedom in exchange for their property.

Before this deal was made, my maternal grandmother had disguised herself as a Hungarian peasant during the Nazi occupation. She met the wife of the anti-Semitic former prime minister (and Nazi collaborator) Bela Imredy, with whom my mother’s family had once socialized (albeit not with great closeness). My grandmother asked if there was anything Mrs. Imredy could do to save my grandfather. Mrs. Imredy replied that she couldn’t. And as they parted she turned and said, ominously and elliptically, “Now it’s our turn.”

My parents married at the end of 1945, after my father was liberated at the war’s end. He later became the Hungarian ambassador to the United States. He resigned in 1947, after the Communist takeover. He and my mother managed to remain in America. My father died in 1988, my mother in 2002.

I wonder what they would make of Hungary today. The same stereotypes of the past — the association of Jews with Communism and capitalism — fuel the support for Jobbik today.

Into this caldron has stepped the great conductor Ivan Fischer, himself a Hungarian Jew. He recently composed and performed an opera entitled “Red Heifer” that chronicles the story of a small group of Jews in the 19th century who were wrongly accused of the murder of a Hungarian girl from the countryside. It is a true story, one that uses the distant past to illuminate a dark time in the present.

Of course it is unlikely to change any minds. But the simple fact of it is an affirmation of the power of art to accomplish what decent politicians cannot. It is also an example the terrible persistence of a state of mind, a kind of psychopathy that did not begin with Hitler and, tragically, did not end with him.

Marianne Szegedy-Maszak, a journalist, is the author of “I Kiss Your Hands Many Times: Hearts, Souls, and Wars in Hungary.”