Toward a Lexicon for the Style hongrois

Abstract

I n the traditional concert repertoire, works with a strong Hungarian-Gypsy flavor have enjoyed a popularity almost unequalled by any other genre. Pieces such as Brahms' Hungarian Dances and Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies remain audience favorites because their distinctive rhythm, drive, and tunefulness provide familiarity and accessibility on one hand, and a spicy exoticism on the other. The characteristic musical gestures used in works such as these, far from being unconnected examples of local color, form a unified 214 and coherent dialect running parallel to the normal musical lingua franca of the nineteenth century. Since Haydn's time, the gestures of this dialect came increasingly to be used and understood outside the Viennese orbit where their appearance in concert music originated. The Style hongrois, as this style has been called, was effective at different levels of intensity. An inflection or two might add a slight Hungarian tint to an otherwise non-exotic passage, or the gestures could appear in greater concentration to form a contrasting section in a larger work. Of course, the Style hongrois could also form an entire musical discourse, as in Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies or Schubert's Divertissement a l'hongroise. The very ubiquity of this style, in its various concentrations, in nineteenth-century repertoire is proof of the appeal it held for audiences of the time. This appeal depended on cultural associations as much as on purely musical ones. What the Gypsies and their music represented to the Romantic sensibility is encapsulated by Liszt's performance instruction at the beginning of the seventh Hungarian Rhapsody, which reads: be played in the Gypsy style, defiant, and yet melancholy. To the popular imagination, the Gypsy symbolized freedom, nonconformity, and independence from the constricting mores of society. Liszt was not only a staunch defender of the Gypsies' culture, he was