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Cathedral Square has been made by nature and its designer an ideal place for staging monumental productions, especially open-air festivals. For Kuno Klebelsberg the model to be followed was the open-air festival of Salzburg. Ferenc Hont would have preferred to see Hungarian national dramas and operas produced there, while Béla Balázs dreamed of folklore festivals organized for South-East European peoples. The famous open-air theatre of County Csongrád, the Open Air Festival of Szeged (1931, 1933-1938, 1959-), began in 1931 and except for a break of about a decade after the war, has continued to offer a rich repertoire of various kinds of open-air productions, from operas to musical comedies, its most popular programmes. In 1959 the open-air festival was revived by the municipal authorities who decided to offer an even wider range of programmes than before the war (plays, operas, ballets, modern and folk dance etc.). During the International Festival of Folk Dance, an integral part of the Szeged festival, the folk music and dances of Hungary and several European countries offer the main attraction. By now the overall structure of the programme, and the order in which the various genres follow each other on the programme during the season of the festivities have been definitively settled and have changed very little from year to year. Operas tend to be the most popular items of the programme. The theatre and its productions staged under the starry summer sky, the theatrical season from the end of July to the last week of August attract a large audience, tens of thousands of people, from Hungary and abroad, each year. In 1994 the huge iron eyesore preventing the local citizens and the visitors from enjoying the beauty of the square was removed at last, replaced by a smaller, lighter and dismountable structure for seating the audience.
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