Waiting for cholera, lurking,
Day and Night are keen competitors.
There’s no cholera and they moan: lo,
All the crooning comes to nothing.
(Borsszem Jankó, Budapest, 1910)
(French operetta composer Charles Lecocq opened Le jour et la nuit in 1881, featuring a somewhat racy farce of concealed nuptial identities. The Hungarian premier, under the title “Sun and Moon,” came in Debrecen in 1884, while a 1899 Budapest production seems to have become a modest staple of the repertoire for a time, enough so that Budapest readers would have appreciated the rhymed couplets here. The return of cholera in 1910 proved not to be as deadly as the experience of 1892.)
Sic Transit Pestilentia 