Ivan Markó
Hungarian ballet dancer who became an international star but never defected to the West
IVAN MARKO, who has died aged 75, survived the cruel vicissitudes imposed on his native Hungary by Communism to become a much-admired ballet dancer, choreographer and founder of one of Hungary’s most famous ballet ensembles.
He could have availed himself of the opportunities offered him by travelling abroad to defect from behind the Iron Curtain; however, he always chose to return to Hungary. He was completely indifferent to the surveillance he was placed under by the Hungarian AVH, the state secret police, during the years when Hungary was governed by a Soviet puppet regime.
Iván Markó was born on March 29 1947 in Balassagyarmat, a town in north-eastern Hungary, close to the border with what was then Czechoslovakia. His father Pál Markó came from a wealthy upper-middle-class background but his passion for gambling and women saw him estranged from his family.
He was sent to Columbia, where he spent three years eking out a living as a dance instructor. On his return to Hungary he married Anna Fleischer, an exquisitely beautiful Jewish woman whom he felt would be his salvation.
The town where their son Iván was born, Balassagyarmat, had a large Jewish population before the Nazi occupation of Hungary in 1944. Anna Fleischer was one of the few who survived the deportation of the majority of the town’s Jewish community to Auschwitz in June 1944.
Three years after the birth of their son, Pál Markó moved his family to Budapest. Their class status meant they could not easily escape the stigma imposed on them by the Party apparatchiks, that of being enemies of the people.
Like many of the former Hungarian bourgeoisie, the Markó family lived in considerable poverty in 1950s Budapest. However, the repression by the brutal Stalinist regime under the leadership of Mátyás Rákosi did little to dampen the spirits of Pál and Anna Markó. He survived it by daringly cracking jokes at the expense of the Communists; she believed that if she had survived deportation to Auschwitz, she could survive Stalin. The couple concentrated on their son’s future.
In Communist Budapest, as in Moscow, those children who exhibited an exceptional aptitude for dance were often offered a way out of the poverty trap in which their formerly affluent parents found themselves. Anna Markó encouraged her son to apply for a place at the Hungarian State Ballet Academy. Iván was only accepted after his third application.
Within a few years of graduating he had proven his exceptional talent and become one of the principal dancers with the Hungarian State Opera. He soon became bored with repetitive roles and the rigidity of the daily routine at the Academy.
In 1972 he became a soloist with the then Brussels-based company of the French choreographer Maurice Béjart. It was through his association with Béjart that his international reputation grew, particularly when he danced in Béjart’s innovative production of Stravinsky’s Firebird, a role Markó became closely associated with throughout his career.
In 1978 he returned to Hungary, then called “the most comfortable barracks in the Soviet camp”. At that time it was operating under what was dubbed “goulash Communism”, a system that encouraged limited forms of private enterprise and was not as oppressive as that in neighbouring Communist countries.
Iván Markó founded his own ballet company in the city of Győr in 1979. Over the next 10 years, he turned it into a much-respected Hungarian institution and it also earned considerable international repute, performing in Vienna, Athens, and at La Scala and Bayreuth. By 1991 he had parted ways with the Győr company and worked as a visiting choreographer in several countries.
Markó married Judit Gombár, a set and costume designer 10 years his senior, but left her for a male dancer with whom he departed Budapest for Jerusalem. He became ballet master at the Jerusalem Academy for Music and Dance in 1991 but, as was his wont, returned to Budapest, after only three years.
Following his return he threw his energy into founding the Hungarian Festival Ballet. His success on the artistic side was not matched by his managerial skills and in 2012 a major row erupted which saw his ballet company accused of being overfunded by the government of Viktor Orbán at the expense of smaller companies which were struggling to survive.
The same year a bitter row about the financing of the Festival Ballet was aired in the Hungarian media and performances directed by Markó were interrupted by megaphone-wielding protestors.
An unseemly insult-slinging defamation case was taken by Markó in the Hungarian courts in which he defended his reputation of having once been acclaimed as “one of the top 10 ballet dancers in the world”. His opponent in the action countered with the view that Markó had been “one of the top dancers in the world only in Hungary”.
His wife predeceased him.
Iván Markó, born March 29 1947, died April 21 2022