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

6 | Gypsy Themes in Operettas and Vaudevilles

chapter six ••••• Gypsy Themes in Operettas and Vaudevilles The Role of Johann Strauss Interest in Gypsyness Johann Strauss II (1825–1899), the master of the waltz and the Viennese operetta, also helped contribute to stereotypes of the Gypsy and Gypsy music within European culture. In Act II of his most popular operetta, Die Fledermaus (The Bat), of 1874, the composer introduced a czardas, performed by Rosalinda, pretending to be a Hungarian princess, with the performance serving to substantiate her Hungarian roots. Yet the czardas possesses all the traits associated with Gypsy music, including a two-part construction, consisting of a slow (lassan) part and a fast (friska) part. The solo clarinet part is marked by ad libitum, allowing for a controlledfreedomofperformanceconnectedwithGypsyimprovisation .Pizzicato in the strings, meanwhile, suggests Gypsy (flamenco) guitar. The piece is also played in the Gypsy-associated minor key, with insertions of the augmented second interval. The melding of Gypsy and Hungarian music was widespread among nineteenth -century European composers. Indeed, in 1877, for the performance of Die Fledermaus at the Theatre de la Renaissance in Paris, the piece would be renamed La Tzigane (The Gypsy) (Traubner 2003, 118). Inthe1885operettaTheGypsyBaron(DerZigeunerbaron),Strauss’scrowning work along with Die Fledermaus, the title also suggests the contents, which include Hungarian-Gypsy as well as Austrian cultural allusions. The 1883 novella “Saffi,” by the Hungarian author Mór Jókai (1825–1904), formed the basis for Themes in Operettas & Vaudevilles 137 the libretto; Strauss learned of this work in Pest in February 1883 through his third wife, Adela Deutsch, a few months before its publication. As for the plot, it contains the familiar-feeling elements of a non-Gypsy girl who grows up in a Gypsy camp, adopts the Gypsy culture’s values, and falls in love with one of its apparent members. Strauss, who for the past few years had wanted to compose an operetta covering Hungarian material, was intrigued. The novella’s author, Jókai, was among the most valued Hungarian romantic writers and was perceived as a great patriot—a participant in the struggles of 1848–1849 and a friend of the Hungarian poet and revolutionary Sándor Petőfi. AlthoughJókaididnotpersonallycontributetoStrauss’slibretto,herecommend a true-born Hungarian, the writer and journalist Ignaz Schnitzer (1839–1921), even if the latter was permanently domiciled in Vienna, significantly easing the collaborative process. The close work between Schnitzer and Strauss lasted two years, from 1883 to 1885, moving from the creation of a vision to agreement on the minutest details. Their efforts were aided actively by the then director of the Theater an der Wien, Franz Jauner (1831–1900). The lengthy period of workwas Strauss’sintention,aimedatcreatinganoperabuffa(comic opera).In comparison with his earlier operettas, which gave much space to dialogue and dance—including, for example, Indigo (1871), Der Kerneval in Rom (1873), Die Fledermaus (1873), Cagliostro in Wien (1875), Der lustige Krieg (1880), and Eine Nacht in Venedig (1883)—musical material predominated in The Gypsy Baron. The traditionally elaborate end to Act I was accompanied here by an equally momentous end to Act II, along with a dramatic twist. The courage and risk in such a strategy lay in the typical need, in a three-part work, to make all the themes and narrative threads coalesce by the close of Act II in anticipation of a happy ending in Act III. Early critics, recognizing the work as a comic opera, noticed this innovation at both the formal and libretto levels (Kydryński 1985, 232). Even the severe Eduard Hanslick praised Strauss on the pages of the Neue Freie Presse for attempting to create grander, increasingly complicated forms (Crittenden 2000, 207). The Gypsy Baron’s premiere on October 24, 1885, at the Theater an der Wien was a huge success, and the work has been performed continuously ever since, in European theaters and those throughout the world (Traubner 2003, 129). The National Perspective in The Gypsy Baron The Gypsy Baronisinscribedwiththe specific politicalsituationofthelate nineteenth-century Habsburg monarchy. The work’s political connotations, often emphasized elsewhere (Klotz 2004, 39), would have been impossible for 138 19th- & Early 20th-Century Composers audiencestoignore,giventhe1867compromisebetweenAustriaandHungary, which—throughtheso-calledAusgleich—decentralizedthemonarchyinfavor of a dualistic model granting equal political and economic rights to Austria and Hungary. The political fusion had been encouraged equally at the artistic level, and Strauss’s operetta was seen through the lens of “enthusiastic Hungarian participation in imperial politics” (Crittenden 2000, 175). For Hungary, which...