VIENNA, CLASSICAL COMPOSERS AND FOLK BANDS

Vienna, celebrated home of the great classics, was also the crucible of a cosmopolitan traditional music culture. The beautiful blue Danube was an international artery, passing through nine countries, the largest river shipping company in the world before 1900 was based in Vienna, and in the age of steamers and heavy industry, the river was the new silk road, bringing in goods from as far east as Odessa and the Black Sea.

It also brought in people. The imperial walled city that Schubert and Beethoven once knew had become a sprawling metropolis by the end of Brahms’s life, with a fourfold increase in population mostly made up of immigrants from the East. Among them were the Hungarian Romani bands who made such an impact on Liszt and Brahms. These extraordinary players were rooted in the csárdás tradition but also prided themselves on learning the latest Rossini and Strauss favourites instantly and by ear, without written music. Their independence of written scores repeatedly delighted and confounded the Viennese and there are reports of them being “scientifically tested”, once in darkness, to eliminate any possibility of cheating.  

This suspicion was symptomatic of a deeper anxiety about their spontaneity and transgressive disregard for authority; as one newspaper put it in 1860,”‘It exerts a violence, this gypsy music, an elemental effect, like a force of nature; it rushes at us like a storm, grips us like an irresistible whirlpool, and we have to swim with it, whether we want to or not”. 

One of the few composers who was born and spent his whole life in Vienna, Schubert was an aficionado of Viennese popular culture and once lived next door to the famous Red Hedgehog tavern. One group of friends nicknamed him the “knight of the cimbalom” in honour of the Hungarian national instrument and he recognised his own aspirations in the see-saw between virtuoso abandon and deep pathos in Romani music, and the alienation and defiance that it represented. His first devotees understood these connections intuitively, and we invite you to hear the Scherzo of his iconic String Quintet as they did, in a context shaped by the Romanian “Furculesti” dance and the hurdy-gurdy drone of Der Leiermann from his own Winterreise. 

We also perform one of Schubert’s most popular songs, Auf der Brücke. The Hungarian elements in his songs, particularly Winterreise, may not always be so clear to audiences now but were strongly felt in his own time. The energy of Ernst Schule’s poem about separation and joyous reunion is matched here by ZRI’s clarinettist Ben Harlan’s exuberant orchestration, which also connects it with the Horǎ de Concert, a dance from the Romanian oral tradition originally recorded by two cimbalom players.

Like Schubert, Brahms greatly enjoyed Vienna’s popular culture. His Hungarian Dances drew on all sorts of traditional sources, and the famous theme of No. 5 was originally the ‘Bártfai Emlék Csárdás’ by Béla Kéler, which in turn had a complex variety of sources. We also perform the Adagio from Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet, re-imagined in our arrangement which connects it to the folk traditions that Brahms knew and loved. He was a regular at the Csarda, a dedicated Hungarian tavern and cultural centre in Vienna, where the very best Romani players, many of them international stars, were employed nightly. The pieces interpolated into the movement here are a “Sarba” from the Carpathian mountains and a tune from the Klezmer repertory, all part of the soundscape against which Brahms wrote his quintet, and his first audiences heard it.

Of course, Schubert and Brahms were not the first famous composers to have been inspired by the folk musics of Hungary and elsewhere in eastern Europe. The folk references in the finale of Haydn’s D minor string quintet are loud and clear. The dramatic pauses at the beginning recall the serious Hungarian hallgató “listening” style that was a trademark of Romani fiddlers, and the augmented scale intervals further suggest that Haydn was evoking their tradition deliberately. His work at Esterházy exposed him to a considerable amount of Hungarian music and indeed one of his successors there was Ferenc Sárközy, a Romani virtuoso who also became famous in Vienna. Haydn wrote several clearly folk-influenced pieces such as the Gypsy dances and Gypsy Rondo; but the modern rediscovery of the earliest Romani recordings is revealing more that, like this quartet, show traces of traditional musics even when they are not mentioned in the titles.