Gypsy Music in European Culture: From the Late Eighteenth to the Early Twentieth Centuries

Part II — Gypsy Music in the Works of Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Composers

Part II Gypsy Music in the Works of Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Composers Inthenineteenthandtwentiethcenturies,composers—asrepresentatives of Europe’s intellectual elite—actively shaped the topos of Gypsy music in European culture. They did so chiefly through their music but also through their published works. These works helped shape the dominant discourse on Gypsies and Gypsy culture within the European tradition, while also reproducing conventionalized notions of Gypsy music. TheGypsythemeplayedoutwithparticularflairinprofessionalstageworks, bothintheirspokenandvisualelements.Theseworksexploitednational,racial, and exotic means of portraying Gypsies and Gypsy music. Compositions designed for the stage opened up broad possibilities for the use of Gypsy subject matter, through lead characters and various embellishments of Gypsy motifs. Gypsy heroes were incorporated in serious or tragic operas and ballets but also in lighter works such as operettas, vaudevilles, and musicals. In nonstage works, both solo and choral songs were used to convey Gypsy themes, allowing composers to combine their own imagined conceptions of Gypsy culture with prevalent tropes in European literature. Songs from the nineteenth century in particular portrayed the Gypsy by appropriating the verses of Romantic poets. InstrumentalworksinvariablyhandledGypsysubjectmatterdifferentlyfrom worksaccompaniedbytexts.Mostcommoninsuchportrayalswereminiatures, while full symphonic works were much rarer. The references to Gypsy culture usually appeared in a work’s title, which also set the work within a national, racial, or exotic perspective. The music, in these cases, and its perceived Gypsy gestures often occupied secondary significance. Stage Works Employing Gypsy Motifs StageworksemployingGypsysubjectmatter,datingfromaboutthe1600s to the 1800s, served to reinforce stereotypes—and particularly so in the 1800s. Very seldom were attempts made to go beyond stereotypical portrayals, and even if such efforts were made, Gypsy heroes were still placed within “typical” contexts. In a work’s music, the Gypsy idiom was used only to enrich, and references to instrumentation, scales, and, when applicable, dances were implemented loosely and without the pretension of authenticity. Musical stage works with Gypsy associations were dominated by the five themes of love, freedom, magic, nature, and evil. This “pentalogue” guided the way in which the Gypsy characters were created, and was supported by stereotypical visuals of Gypsies at their campsites. In addition, stereotypes about Gypsies’musicaltalentsprovidedanidealavenueforintroducingGypsyheroes intoworks.Fortheirpart,womencharacterswereoftenpresentedasvehiclesfor anexoticsongordance,withexamplesincludingPreziosillafromVerdi’sLaforza del destino and Mab from Bizet’s La jolie fille de Perth (The Fair Maid of Perth). As early as the seventeenth century, artists used Gypsies to enhance the attractiveness of a work, such as in Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Le carneval mascarade mise en musique (1675), in which “les Bohemiennes” appear beside Spaniards, Turks, and Egyptians. The commentary—“une Egyptienne dansante, est accompagnee de quatre Boemiennes jouants de la Guitarre—” refers clearly to Gypsies, whoaretypicallyportrayedingroupsplayingawayonsomeinstruments(Lully 1720, 129). The Gypsies, treated as a collective hero, were immortalized in the English masque The Metamorphosed Gipsies, written by Ben Jonson for George Villiers. The renown of this form was reflected in both the proliferation of lute transcripts and the publication of virginal books. Later stage works included RinaldodiCapua’stwo-actintermezzoLaZingara(1753),May-day;or,TheLittle Gipsy (1775), by Thomas Augustine Arne, and The Gypsies, by Samuel Arnold (1778). An increasing awareness of literature on Gypsy themes in the nineteenth centurytranslatedintomorestageworks.ThesuccessofVictorHugo’s1831novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame resulted in a flood of operas and ballets based on the story of the beautiful Gypsy girl Esmeralda, with more than thirty such worksappearingbythecentury’sclose(Laster2003,600).Literarymodelsalso influencedthecreationofCarlMariavonWeber’s1821operaPreziosa,including Cervantes’s “La Gitanilla,” a novella that would also inspire other musical stage works, particularly the Spanish zarzuelas (Dziedzic 1984, 67–70). Nineteenth-centuryoperasonGypsythemesenjoyedgreatpopularity,witha selectexamplebeingTheBohemianGirl,bytheIrishcomposerMichaelWilliam Balfe (1808–1870). The work would be performed in German, French, and Italian , and would meet with success in Berlin and Russia. Balfe’s flair for melody even earned him acclaim across the Atlantic, where the opera’s songs were published in popular editions with piano accompaniment. The protagonist’s song from ActIII,“TheFairLandofPoland,”wassopopular thatitbecamea“single” inthe UnitedStates(Janta1982,86).While“LaGitanilla”hadbeenthestarting point for the work, the librettist, Alfred Bunn, drew more directly from the popular ballet La Gipsy, staged in Paris in 1839, with music by Francois Benoist, libretto by Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges, and choreography by Joseph Maziller. The performance included the Polish krakowiak dance, performed excellently by the Austrian ballerina Fanny Elssler (1810–1884). The principal hero of Balfe’s opera, derived from Jane Porter’s popular novella “Thaddeus of Warsaw” (1836), was the Polish nobleman Tadeusz, whose fate was linked to a certain group of Gypsies and the family of Count...