Music and National Identity
Romany Musicians and what they played in the 19th- 20th century Hungary
In this lecture I try to place the issue “music and national identity” into a certain historical
context. Explaining the connection between the two ideas is problematic in itself, but this
point of view has special challenges. All the ideas mentioned in the title mean something
really different according to what they meant some decades ago or hundred, or two hundred
years ago.
First of all, it is not easy for us to imagine a world where music really meant
something. We live in mass culture and music surrounds us. We enter a shop or a restaurant or
just walk on the street and we constantly hear music everywhere. And the music we hear is
adapted to this purpose. Listening to the popular music of our days you cannot tell where it
was written or by who it was composed – if not a computer program generated it. But this
phenomenon and this genre are new. Not long ago you could only listen to music if there were
musicians to play it, or you could sing for yourself. And there were special occasions where
music was important and meant something, but this casual-everyday music did not exist until
today. Music was – if I may put it this way – something sacred.
The other two ideas “national” and “identity” are not less problematic, as the very
expressions mean different things for people coming from different places of the world. For
example in Hungarian the words for nation and people have connotations of rank: nation also
means nobility and people has a taste of peasantry or mob as in “népdal”- folksong which is
actually the music of the peasantry. The connotations of these words are influenced by the
nation’s historical trajectory speaking the given language. And identity – the idea, the notion
in itself is quite new. The build-up of our identity is constructed of the memberships in several
groups, and one of these is the nation we live in. But these in-groups changed radically in the
last two centuries. So when I talk about national identity we have to be aware that it meant
something really different in every fifty years from 1800 to this day.
At the end of the 18th century the claim for national music and dance appeared. The claim for
something genuine Hungarian – and it meant not German. Not an easy task in the time of
Mozart and Haydn and Beethoven.
The structure of the Hungarian society at this time was a bit semi-feudalistic. At the
bottom there was the large stratum of peasantry (serfdom at this time) with its own culture.
This is the “folk” culture – folk music, folkdances, folksongs. But at the 18th century nobody
cared about it. Peasants dancing and singing their primitive music – it had nothing to do with
the nation. Franz Liszt and the Hungarian composers had this opinion too. But this music was
in constant interaction with the higher strata of culture. At the top there was the nobility with
a growing identity of being Hungarian, and looking for its roots in Hungarian culture. (It is
interesting that a couple of hundred years before Latin almost became a living language in
Hungary, because it was the language of elevated conversation.) The turn of the 18th -19th
centuries was also the time of the Hungarian language reform. It means that the nobility was
looking for its identity. German was the language of the foreign power, Latin was forgotten,
so they turned to the mother-tongue. (I will often refer to Franz Liszt who considered himself
Hungarian but did not speak Hungarian; he did speak German, however his best language was
French.) At the middle of the social structure there was the citizenry of the cities, but at the
beginning they did not have role, they came in later as the number and the wealth of this
stratum was growing.
What kind of music the nobility felt genuine Hungarian at the beginning? Having
excluded the music of the peasantry and everything German there was not too much left. But
there was something especially Hungarian and something to be proud of: the military. The
dance of the men in military and the music of the recruitment are the parents of everything
called national later. This is called verbunkos, from the German word Werbung meaning
recruitment. (Recruitments occurred quite often in the time of the Napoleon wars) The name
of this music comes from German, but the roots of the music are deep in Hungarian folk
music and dance. This kind of music became very popular very rapidly. The problem was that
the nobility needed something for social events. A dance danced by only men does not suit the
parties very well. So at the beginning they slowed it down and refined the movements and it
became the palotás – dance of the palace. (As a matter of fact, palotás already existed and it
was adapted to the new style. Most famous example is the Hungarian dance in the opera
Hunyadi by Ferenc Erkel)
Fashions change quickly. Palotás soon became the symbol of the high ranked nobility
serving the Habsburg court and had to give way to the new trend, the sweeping popularity of
csárdás. The word csárda means road-house, a place which is not in the cities but by the
roads, like a motel where you can sleep and eat and drink. Criminality and prostitution were
not completely unknown at these places, so the name csárdás was originally a pejorative one.
At first the Hungarian nobility simply called it Hungarian. This indecent descent meant a
quiet rebellion in the face of the sophisticated German culture. “You dance Minuet and polka,
but we bring here the fire of the Hungarian nightlife.” Csárdás also comes from folk music. It
is a collective name including a lot of subtypes of dances. It is very important, that the starting
point of all these kinds of music was verbunkos, the music of military recruitment.
Now it is time to talk about an important actor in this course of events: the Romany minority.
In their language rom means man. In other languages they are called people from Egypt:
gipsy, gitane, gitano. The French word bohémien refers to them coming from Bohemia. The
Hungarian word cigány and words like Zigeuner, tsigane, zingaro, etc. are coming from the
Greek αθίγγανοι (athinganoi) meaning intangible, from a 9th century cult in Anatolia.
The ancestors of the Romany started from India in the 7th-8th century. They arrived to
Europe in the 14th century and to Hungary at the end of it. They were a constantly migrating
nomad people living in tents making cowbells, adobe bricks, kettle repairing. They did not go
into the cities rather lived near them in tents. They also were soothsayers and did other
superstitious practices. In some countries they were seriously persecuted (Germany, England),
somewhere they were accepted more or less. As skilled craftsmen they made sometimes
musical instruments, and played music, but they were not in the position of the musician for a
long time. However there was an invisible thread of Romany musician generations. At the end
of the 18th century there were families having long tradition of playing music. And almost
from nowhere there was an explosion of Romany musicians in Hungary at the end of the 18th
century, right at the same time when verbunkos became popular. At a recruitment event the
Hungarian soldiers were dancing and drinking, but the musicians were bands of Romany.
At the villages, in the world of the peasantry there were Hungarian and Romany
musicians together. Of course not in one band, but Hungarian people played music too. But in
the parlours of the nobility it was unimaginable for the nobility to play music for dancing. It
always was the work of a servant. The daughter of a king playing the harpsichord is one thing,
but for dance, that was unimaginable. Thus Romany bands became rapidly more and more
popular. The rich nobility already employed Romany people as smiths and musicians and
suddenly they became indispensable at a real Hungarian event.
In the first half of the 19th century great amount of songs and dances were born,
composers wrote these romantic pieces every day. Romany musicians did not compose music.
They did not even know how to read a score. (Usually they could read the score, but only on a
degree to learn the music.) All these songs and dances were composed by Hungarian or
sometimes German composers. Romany bands were the performers. And they were experts of
this style; nobody could play it like them. They knew how to build a simple song to a great
band piece according to the rules of simple harmonization, and improvisation. And they were
experts of the instruments they played – even in the first half of the 19th century the greatest
musicians started to go on European tours, however it became typical at the end of the
century.
At the first half of the 19th century a beautiful Hungarian style emerged, and one of its
roots is verbunkos. The other root goes into Viennese classicism, the rules of the
harmonisations of the Viennese classics. Vienna at this time was the heart of European music.
Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and a lot of less known composers and a music life with
concerts, operas etc; only Paris and London can be compared to it. And this little country was
part of the Habsburg Empire. So when a Hungarian composer grabbed a pen and took a seat
near the piano, his mind was in the style of the Viennese classicism. This genuine Hungarian
style which was born opposed to the German cultural hegemony has the smell of Vienna in
every bar of it. The most beautiful example of this style is the Hungarian national anthem
composed by Ferenc Erkel in 1844. This composition is a psalm starting with an imitation of
church bells on the strings. It sounds like church music (and uniquely it is sung in churches in
Hungary today) but the rhythm at the end of the introduction is the hallmark of verbunkos.
(That is the ankle-move of the spurred hussar.)
There is a third root of this national romantic style, the songs of the kuruc era, but we
have to be careful in this respect. Where there is romanticism of any kind there is
anachronistic projection. The subject for anachronistic projection of the Hungarian national
romanticism was the Rákóczi era and the liberty war against the Habsburg Empire. Kuruc
people were the nobility and their army opposing the Habsburgs from the late 17th century
until the end of the Rákóczi liberty war in 1711. This is a century distance from the 19th
century national romanticism, thus a flourishing world of legends and tales could emerge
about the kuruc world. There are tales and songs about the heroes of the war, and there are
also stories about the grandfathers of the first Romany musicians playing for Rákóczi. In
almost every village in Hungary there is a tree where Rákóczi rested his horse. There really
were songs from that era, but also naturally there were projections back to the past. The most
famous example is the Rákóczi march which has absolutely nothing to do with Rákóczi. This
is a typical verbunkos-style Hungarian dance. It was extremely popular, and has famous
adaptations as the Rákóczi march in The Damnation of Faust by Hector Berlioz, or the 15th
Hungarian Rhapsody by Franz Liszt.
In 1849 the war for liberty failed followed by a decade of oppression. It was a time when
singing a Rákóczi song meant immediate imprisonment. This state of affairs was perfect fuel
for the Romany musicians to establish their role, and as the oppression gradually weakened,
the Romany bands became more and more popular. Listening to them meant real comfort. At
the end of the 1850s Pest and other major cities in Hungary were in Romany music fever. It
was the time when Franz Liszt caused one of the greatest confusions of musical history. His
essay: Des Bohémiens et de leur Musique en Hongrie – On the gipsy and their music in
Hungary – was published in Paris in 1859, then in Pest in 1861 (in German and French). Liszt
was an expert of the subject with the standards of his age. Apart from a few composers (Erkel,
Egressy, Rózsavölgyi) nobody cared about theories and reasons, only enjoyed the singing and
dancing. Liszt knew well the way the Romany bands played; he liked it very much, and
applied their style in his music as an unmistakable Hungarian voice. But he misunderstood the
most important facts. Most confusingly he thought that the Romany bands played their own
music. He wrote that Romany bands had saved the primitive Hungarian music and elevated it
to the level of European music. It caused a great shock and there were vehement and angry
answers, but nobody could oppose with real scientific arguments. Although Liszt was
guessing too, he was best informed. The opposition soon faded and did not even reach the
western ears, thus until today in Western Europe people think that Romany musicians play
their own music. As a matter of fact Hungarians are confused too until today, even
professional Hungarian musicians.
To bring light on this issue a distinction of genres has to be made, first of all a distinction
between folk music and other kinds of music. We talk about folk music when there is no
composer, and in case of the lyrics there is not a certain poet. In Hungarian folklore there are
melodies older than a millennium and there are songs some decades old. They are not just not
composed, but they were not even written in any form. There were scientists who wrote these
songs down, collected and analyzed them. But this is the voice of an illiterate culture, and
here it becomes very exiting, because this is the cradle of all cultures, this is how all cultures
were born. This is how the laws of Moses or the ancient Greek epics were bequeathed from
generations to generations. It also means that literacy ends this kind of culture, not
immediately but quite quickly. Every nation in the world tries to save her folklore, but it’s not
the living thing any more. That’s why you cannot find this thing everywhere. In Germany this
line of tradition ended at the time of Mozart at the latest. The music of the Viennese
classicism is full of German folk music, and also the songs of Schubert, but that was the end.
(Haydn composed adaptations on Scottish folksongs, but not on German ones.) In Africa and
Oceania or South-America there are living traditions until today.
Hungary is a very special case. As I mentioned there was a large stratum of peasantry
in the feudalistic 19th century Hungary and it did not change after the liberation of the serfdom
in 1848. I go a little forward. When Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály started to collect
folksongs in 1905 they met a living tradition all over the country. (Kodály collected mainly
Hungarian folksongs, Bartók collected them too but also Romanian, Slovakian, Serbian
folksongs and he went to Algeria to collect Arab music.) The collection of Hungarian folk
music went on all through the 20th century, and some enthusiast folklorists continue it until
today. The success of this scientific endeavour is unique in the world. The richness of this
culture and the extent it is processed and systemised and analyzed is absolutely unique.
(Meaning, that this country had great minds but was also so poverty-stricken that you could
find this illiterate culture all over the country through the whole 20th century.)
Romany people also have their own folklore, but it has nothing to do with the national
romantic style played by Romany bands in the cities. (The folklore of the Romany has always
strong connection with the culture they live in. There is not any known common kind of
music among the Romany people of Europe.)
So folk music is one genre and composed music is another, and the Hungarian national
romantic style belongs to the latter. Nonetheless the line between the two is not a sharp one,
there was constant interaction. In the 20th century folklorists found folksongs with Petőfi
poems as lyrics. (Sándor Petőfi was one of the greatest poets of the national romanticism.)
The confusion initiated by Liszt became a tradition and at the turn of the 19th and 20th
centuries no one cared about this distinction of genres.
The bands of Romany musicians became more and more popular approaching the end of the
19th century. In the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy they were the Caesars of the nightlife; they
earned fortunes and spent it in the other night. They went on tours abroad, even to Russia and
the U.S. Some of them married daughters of French dukes and Italian tycoons. There are
legendary stories of their virtuosity and success abroad – which made them a good living in
Hungary. The golden age of the Romany bands was the first half of the 20th century until
World War 2.
There was a wave of nationalism at the beginning of the century and later after the
Versailles peace treaty in the 1920s and 30s. And this time not only the Rákóczi era was in a
romantic distance but also the revolution of 1848. But this was a much more comfortable
romanticism. In the 1850s the participants of the war really had to sing the patriotic songs in
whisper. In the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy you could be patriotic against the German almost
with no risk. People wear clothes like the heroes of ’48, but they had nothing to be afraid of.
Actually it was one of the greatest times in Hungarian history. But it felt good to remember
the great heroic times, and sing about the revolution, and meanwhile enjoy the benefits of the
Dualism. Later in the 1920s and 30s sorrow was real because of the shock of the Versailles
peace treaty, and later there was even something to be afraid of – the Great Depression. So the
popularity of the Romany bands always had enough fuel.
The repertoire of the bands widened. They played verbunkos and csárdás but above
these there was a huge repertoire of songs (folksy tunes), and hits from popular operettas and
even operas. This is the time of the birth of popular music. They played in cafés and
restaurants every night. The regular guests had their own songs which the band immediately
started to play as they entered the restaurant. This expertise was not the talent of the race or
the blood. Romany bands hired German conductors to teach them the most popular songs and
opera and operetta numbers. They were educated musicians; however they still played
everything without score and in the same style. This is the so called roma music or gipsy
music which was popular also after WW2, and started to loose its popularity in the 1980s and
90s. Now it is not easy to find a restaurant in Budapest with an authentic Romany band
playing for the dinner, and there is a good chance that you won’t find any Hungarian guests in
it.
In 1931, when the popularity of Romany music was at its peak, and everybody knew
tens of songs by heart, Béla Bartók wrote an essay. He makes his point in the very first
sentence: “What you call gipsy music that is not gipsy music. That is Hungarian music; new
folksy Hungarian music played only by gipsy bands, because a gentleman does not play
popular music for money according to tradition. This music is Hungarian because all of it is
composed by Hungarian gentlemen.” The question is that why one of the greatest composers
of the 20th century felt it important to bother with these things concerning popular music.
Later in the essay it becomes clear that Bartók was upset about an edition of a Hungarian
folksong collection (Ungarische Volkslieder), which had absolutely no respect to the
distinction of the different genres. There were real folksongs with these folksy national tunes
mixed together. Bartók sacrificed years to collect and systemize, analyze Hungarian and other
nation’s folk music. He then brought this ancient primitive culture to syntheses with the
highest traditions of European music from Bach to Richard Strauss. And it was the way of
him becoming one of the greatest composers of the century. And he had to face the popularity
of operettas and simple tunes and see editions without any scientific care. The point of his
essay can be summarized like this: The role of this music is like the cabaret or operetta
abroad. I’d like to gladly lay down, that this kind of folksy music – wrongly called gipsy music
– is much more of value than this western rubbish music… But the only role of this music is to
satisfy the bad taste of the mob. Bartók witnessed the birth of mass culture.
At this point we arrived at the issue of quality, a delicate matter. I am sure about one
thing. Authentic folk music is perfect. Something happens in the villages – somebody falls in
love and runs away with a girl, a boy has to leave his wife and go abroad with the army,
somebody gives life to a baby or somebody dies – and people start to sing about it. There
must be a first one, but then as time goes, the song stars to shape. The song shapes into the
tradition of centuries (and is born in this tradition in the first place), and if it becomes popular,
it spreads in the whole country or beyond, and becomes a family of hundreds of variations of
that song. This is how culture is born.
Composed music is not that case. The quality comes from the hand of the composer,
and in case of Romany bands, from the performer too. Complexity and quality is not the same
thing. The one voice of the monophonic folksong is perfect in its primitive structure. The
music of the Romany bands is much more complex than the folksongs, and requires expertise
and virtuosity from the performer. Still, the style of it is much more closed, restricted to the
repertoire of national romanticism and its descendants; and the harmonization uses only
several clichés of romantic music. What these features say about quality or value in general?
Maybe we can judge the quality of performing of a certain kind of music, but is it possible to
attribute a certain quality or value to a whole style?
And what can we say when it comes to national identity, and its connection to arts,
especially music? Zoltán Kodály had a conception of musical mother tongue. His concept –
most simplified – was to teach Hungarian children Hungarian folksongs from the age of 5 or
earlier, to create something like the culture of the villages, where it was the natural cultural
environment. What is our musical mother-tongue, or what is our cultural mother-tongue?
What do you hear since you were born, and what do you listen to? What is the music that
surrounds us since our childhood? Does it have to do anything with our nationality? A great
Hungarian linguist made a good point observing that a Hungarian marketing manager felt
effective for Hungarian customers to advertise a Japanese car with the music of an American
Jewish composer from a play taking place in Russia – If I were a rich man. I think we have to
admit that our cultural identity is much wider than the borders of our country.
The music of the Romany bands was the heart of the national identity of the
Hungarian people of the cities from the 19th century to the beginning of the WW2. Then it
became tradition and slowly went out of fashion. Now there are attempts to preserve this
tradition as an important part of Hungarian culture. As there also are efforts made to preserve
the folklore which also was and is an important part of national identity however in a
completely different way. Folklore as living culture was the very identity of the people with
no respect to nationality for centuries, as the peasantry was no nation. Folk music became part
of national identity in the 20th century as people learned that this is a deep well of culture.
People in the villages just went to dance, dancing and singing what they learned as learning
the mother-tongue. It is completely different, when you know that you are member of a
certain national community, learned the history, read the literature, and go to a folkdance
school.
Globalization has two opposing effects on the culture of different communities. On one hand
mass culture grows stronger and stronger shaping everything the same, food, films or music
just alike. But on the other hand people do not like uniformity so cultures of distinct
communities start to become popular. Every culture having a unique tradition deserves to be
preserved. In Hungary hundred years ago only a few enthusiast people cared about folk music
and the Romany bands played everywhere. Today the popularity of folk music is growing and
Romany musicians have to retire. Fashions come and go but today we live in a world like
never existed before. The ubiquity of mass culture can not be compared to any culture’s
popularity. The music of the Romany bands was born against a foreign cultural hegemony. In
it you can here the voice of a nation preserving its traditions, tales and poems and music.
Authentic Hungarian gypsy music almost completely ceased to exist. If it eventually
disappears we will loose the music of a nation’s identity.