Hungarian State Opera House

Two sphinxes in Carrara marble guard the side entrances, one holding a laurel wreath and the other a theatrical mask in its claws. They stand for Apollo and Dionysus, order and frenzy, a pairing that runs through the decoration inside as well, on the foyer ceiling and again on the auditorium roof.

In the niches beside the main entrance stand Ferenc Liszt and Ferenc Erkel, carved by Alajos Strobl. Both men sat for him in person, and he was twenty-six at the time. Liszt is caught mid-movement and Erkel is perfectly still, a contrast Strobl used deliberately to mark the difference between the two men.

Then look along the parapet at the sixteen composers on the skyline, from Monteverdi to Smetana. They are not the originals. The first set was cut from a softer stone, decayed so badly by the 1930s that one fell onto the pavement, and was replaced in 1965 in a different style, with a partly different cast of composers, some of whom the Opera had never staged.

The foyer is where Ybl sets out what the rest of the building is going to do. Liver-coloured walls, dark grey marble, eight columns and gilded barrel vaults, all of it borrowed from the Italian Renaissance palace.

Look up at the coffers. Bertalan Székely painted the nine muses into gilded four- and eight-sided frames, Urania through to Terpsichore, with Apollo among them. Above the main entrance there is a golden lute, and above the gates and the old cash desks are Antal Szécsi’s relief portraits of four composers, including Ferenc Doppler and Karl Goldmark.

Hang back here for half a minute after the guide moves off. You get the ceiling to yourself and you still catch the group at the bottom of the stairs.

The stairs split in two and run up to the auditorium doors, marble the whole way, with balustrades you will want to put a hand on. The ceiling above them is mirrored and gilded into nine coffers, and every one of them is a Mór Than painting on the Waking of Music and the Power of Music.

The best story is in the long side panels, the contest between Apollo on the lyre and Marsyas on the flute. Apollo wins, and the satyr is skinned for his insolence. Along the wall Than tells the Orpheus story in three scenes, at the gate of the underworld, leading Eurydice out, and his own death.

At the foot of the main marble wall is Strobl’s statue of Ferenc Erkel, who wrote the first Hungarian operas and was the Opera’s first musical director. Ede Telcs’ bust of Ybl faces him across the hall. The man who wrote the music and the man who built the room, set up to look at each other.

Three storeys of boxes in a horseshoe, each tier set back behind the one below, and twenty-four-carat gold on every parapet and elbow board. The royal box sits in the middle of the grand circle, kept for Hungary’s three highest office holders and their guests, with Gyula Donáth’s figures of the Tenor, Soprano, Alto and Bass standing in the boxes on either side.

The restoration made the room smaller on purpose. Capacity came down from 1,200 to 1,000, the boxes now seat four instead of six, the rows are further apart, and the wooden dividers between the ground floor boxes were swapped for wickerwork so the sound dies away properly.

The auditorium is closed to tours whenever the company is rehearsing, and the Opera publishes no warning of which afternoons those will be. It is the one thing that spoils this visit for people. When it happens the guide takes you into rooms that are normally shut instead, which is a decent consolation and not the thing you came for.

Lotz’s fresco is forty-five metres round, and it is the best thing in the building. Six groups of gods sit on Olympus listening to Apollo play. Find Zeus and Hera with Athena and Hermes, then Nyx with Hades, Persephone and the god of sleep, then Dionysus with a centaur, then Poseidon, then Aphrodite with the three Charites turning you back towards Apollo.

The chandelier under it came from Mainz and went into the ventilation shaft in 1884, carrying five hundred gas lights. What hangs there now weighs about two tonnes and has more than two hundred bulbs. Twice a year it is still lowered onto the ground floor seats on hand winches, to be cleaned and to have its bulbs changed.

One more thing to look for, up where the arches meet the Corinthian columns. Each hexagon holds a putto, and the house story is that the putti play the day’s music at midnight to keep the acoustics honest.

Every tour finishes the same way. The guide sits the group down on the grand staircase, and young singers from the company come out onto the landing in costume and perform short scenes staged by András Almási-Tóth, the Opera’s artistic director.

It is a proper voice in a room built to carry one, at a range of a few metres, and it is the reason people come away from this tour happy even when the auditorium was shut.

Sit towards the middle of the steps rather than at the back. You can hear it perfectly well from anywhere, but the scenes are acted as well as sung, and from the back you are looking at the backs of heads.