In 2023, the Museum for the Applied Arts (MAK) in Vienna held a sesquicentennial exhibit marking the anniversary of the Vienna World’s Fair (Weltausstellung) of 1873, recreating the exotic “Oriental” displays of Egyptian and Japanese crafts in the Prater fairground. Jon Banks’s new book, Hungarian “Gypsy-Band” Music in Vienna, 1850–1914: The Csárdás Craze, looks to the exhibition of 1873 for a different strand of exoticism, produced entirely within the domestic borders of Franz Joseph’s Austro-Hungarian monarchy: the “Csarda” pavilion that displayed Hungarian products, served Hungarian food, and played Hungarian music. Spared the dismantling that usually follows world’s fairs, the Csarda survived for the next four decades as a celebrated center for performing “Gypsy-Band” music. (The Csarda, as it was called in Vienna, took its name from the Hungarian word csárda, meaning tavern, which gave its name to the folk dance called csárdás, which could also become a musical piece without dancers.)
The “Gypsy-Band” (Zigeuner-Kapelle) was always advertised as performing Hungarian music and was sometimes even billed as a “National Band.” Musicologists have long puzzled over the complex, overlapping meaning of “Hungarian” and “Gypsy” music, dating back at least as far as Haydn’s Rondo “all’ongarese” in the G-major trio of the 1790s, often known as the “Gypsy” trio. Whether the actual music of the rondo was Hungarian or Roma or both would become a matter of musicological convention, with Haydn himself partly defining the terms, but for the “Gypsy Band” of the later nineteenth century the ethnographic identification was as much a matter of personnel as musical material. Roma musicians played a particular social role as musicians within Habsburg Hungary and therefore also on tour in Vienna.
The bands that played in Vienna were usually led by a principal Roma violinist, or Primas, who presided over a string ensemble colored by the presence of the indigenous cimbalom: a boxed stringed instrument played with hammers for a distinctive and partly percussive sound. While the music was meant to express Hungarian national pride, the Roma musicians were sometimes the objects of ethnographic disparagement, as in the press coverage of “Braune Musikanten” (brown musicians) in 1887. The music itself was considered irresistibly emotional (“engulfs us like a whirlpool”) but also primitive and disorderly. The repertory was almost entirely a matter of memory, without notated or published music, so that the pieces, as well as the timbres, could only be heard from the bands themselves.
Haydn was living in Hungary at Esterháza and learning to compose “all’ongarese” in the eighteenth century, and the legendary Hungarian Roma musician Janos Bihari dazzled Metternich’s Congress of Vienna in 1814, but Banks’s history of the “Gypsy-Band” is based largely on press advertisements and references and only begins in the 1850s (when the Vienna press became increasingly important). The bands were noted as playing Hungarian music in diverse Viennese venues, overlapping with the prominent Strauss family waltz concerts as complementary aspects of a new Habsburg popular music presence. Banks conjures a whole social, cultural, and institutional history of Vienna from the advertisements, from Sperl’s Ballroom to Schwender’s Colosseum to the Csarda Prater pavilion, which marked a new wave of Hungarian music in Vienna, centering on the genre of the csárdás—invariably described as fiery (feurig).
Brahms, who supposedly settled in Vienna in the 1860s so that he might reverently “drink my wine where Beethoven drank his,” was probably drinking in the Csarda and listening to gypsy bands in the 1870s, even as his “Hungarian Dances” for piano four-hands brought some of this material into the domesticated interiors of Viennese salons. If Brahms was a fan of Hungarian and Roma violinists, Liszt claimed more authentic Hungarian national inspiration than Brahms, and the proliferation of bands playing Hungarian music in Vienna led to controversy over authenticity: Which violinist was really Roma? What music was actually Hungarian? What is the authenticity of a “Gypsy-Band” playing the “Gypsy music”—presumably the Anvil Chorus—composed by Giuseppe Verdi for Il Trovatore?
Banks is able to document from the press another vast upsurge of band presence in Vienna from 1898 until the outbreak of World War I, when a “Gypsy-Band” was almost always playing somewhere in Vienna. Princess Stephanie, the widow of Archduke Rudolph, was apparently still, even after Mayerling, a great fan of the darkly compelling romance of the csárdás, while even Emperor Franz Joseph had a favorite csárdás (“Vékony deszka kerítés” or “Thin Board Fence”) and supposedly could beat a drum with his foot to mark the rhythm. It is also reported that the emperor once clapped out the rhythm as soprano Maria Jeritza sang the entirely inauthentic csárdás from Die Fledermaus by Johann Strauss Jr. The authentic “Gypsy-Band” in Vienna rarely involved singers or women.
While mustering his very empirical source base in the press, Banks is rather cautious about trying to interpret what the huge presence of Hungarian music meant to the consumer public in Vienna. He notes that Hungarian nationhood must have been a politically tense subject in the 1850s, in the immediate aftermath of the repression of the Hungarian revolution of 1848. Yet, the epigraph to the opening chapter, commenting on the instability of music for which “there is no inner agreement controlling the harmony of the instruments, as if in the next moment everything were likely to shatter and fall into a thousand pieces,” is offered without comment on the cited journal Debatte, noted for discussing constitutional affairs, or the referenced date of 1867, precisely the year of the Austro-Hungarian Ausgleich. The Csarda pavilion in the Vienna exhibition of 1873 should probably be understood as a cultural monument to dualism, and the music that it publicized could plausibly be interpreted as a sort of soundscape of dualism, playing to a public that was uncertain about how to sort out the new reciprocity of emotional engagement and resentment between Austria and Hungary. Even Franz Joseph had to respond in new ways to Hungarian rhythms.
By the same token, the upsurge in interest in 1898, which might in some ways touch on the emperor’s jubilee, could also be plausibly connected to the issues of mass politics described with a musical metaphor by historian Carl Schorske as “politics in a new key”—and though Banks does note one band advertisement in an antisemitic journal (Kikeriki), he generally eschews political reflection on what this band music meant to a mass public at the turn of the century. While Banks’s work is immensely valuable in its own right, it would have been interesting to frame it more explicitly in the shifting Habsburg political context, not least to consider what Hungarian “national” music meant in the framework of nationhood and nationalism, a framework that has been radically reconsidered by the most recent generation of Habsburg historians.
On the whole, Banks believes that Hungarian-Roma music lost its transgressive edge across the nineteenth century as it became part of Viennese popular culture. The pieces remained popular in part for their familiarity as the “Gypsy-Band” alternated csárdás numbers with waltzes, polkas, and operetta tunes, which, in their turn, may have sounded a little less familiar as played by Roma strings and cimbalom. Banks’s book will certainly be read with great interest alongside Philipp Ther’s Der Klang der Monarchie, a musical history of the Habsburg Empire, also just published in 2025, as new attention to soundscapes allow us to amplify newly interesting aspects and issues in Habsburg history.
