Reviews

BOOKS

Hungarian ‘Gypsy-Band’ Music in Vienna, 1850–1914: The Csárdás Craze Jon Banks

202PP ISBN 9781648251092 UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER PRESS £85

Scholar and multi-instrumentalist Jon Banks plays the accordion in ZRI, a classical/‘gypsy’ band named after the Viennese tavern Zum rothen Igel (‘The Red Hedgehog’), where musicians such as Johannes Brahms enjoyed performances by visiting Hungarian bands. His book is a detailed study of those ensembles and their rich interaction with Viennese culture from c.1850 to 1914.

Through his painstaking analysis of advertisements, news reports and anecdotes in the Viennese press, contemporaneous Hungarian sources such as Liszt’s Des Bohémiens et leur musique en Hongrie (1859) and early commercial recordings, he explains how these mostly Romani musicians fed off the city’s growth, where and how they performed, how they engaged with the mainstream of Western classical music and how the conditions of their employment affected their lives and music making. Typical improvisatory fare showcased the charismatic primá (normally, but not exclusively, a band’s lead violinist) in hallgató, the emotive performance style that doubtless inspired, for example, the opening sections of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies.