Dualistic Csárdáses and Gratuitous Gypsies: Hungarianism in Strauss and Kálmán (Accepted)

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Abstract (max. 250 words):
Johann Strauss II’s Der Zigeunerbaron (1885) depicted Hungary as an “exotic land of mystery” defined by fanciful conceptions of the “Gypsy” and “Hungarian fire” (Baranello 2013). For Hungarians who saw Hungary as more cosmopolitan than “exotic,” such an image was problematic. This presentation compares the treatment of Hungarianness and Gypsiness in Zigeunerbaron with that in two works by one internationally successful Hungarian composer, Imre/Emmerich Kálmán (1882-1953). In two of his most successful works, Die Csárdásfürstin (1915) and Gräfin Mariza (1924), Kálmán both satisfied the Viennese audience’s appetite for “Hungarian fire” and transformed the depiction of the Hungarian onstage into a sophisticated European type that better fit the Hungarian self-image. Rather than conflating Gypsy and peasant into one exotic “Hungarian” stereotype, Kálmán used plot and music to highlight class conflicts and urban/rural contrasts. Showpieces in both works provide the stereotypes international audiences expect, but their framing, musical as well as dramatic, foregrounds a cosmopolitan twentieth-century Hungarian identity that was absent from Strauss’s work. Adjustments made in these works for their presentation on the Hungarian stage are also revealing, particularly as Gräfin Mariza became Marica grofnő: Hungarian translator/librettist Zsolt Harsányi’s transformation of “Komm mit nach Varaždin” into “Szép város Kolózsvár” offers a window into nostalgia for pre-World War I Hungary, as it celebrates the Hungarianness of a city that became part of Romania after the war. Mariza combines a “goulash stew” of Hungarian imagery for the international audience, musical topoi from all over, and Hungarian nostalgia for territories lost.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Lynn M. Hooker is Associate Professor of Music at Purdue University. She studies music and identity in nineteenth- to twenty-first-century Hungary and Central Europe. Her book _Redefining Hungarian Music from Liszt to Bartók_ was published in 2013 by Oxford University Press. She has published on music and modernism, nationalism, race, and popular and folk music and theater, in _Musical Quarterly_, _Ethnomusicology_, _The Cambridge Companion to Operetta_, and _Twentieth-Century Music_. Her current project addresses the transformation of Hungary’s “Gypsy music” industry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, using oral history and archival research.