A wonderfully musical people in danger of losing their identity
PAUL JOHNSON
Ifear that the 21st century will see the virtual extinction, as a separate race and culture, of the gypsies. They have survived persecutions as ubiquitous, continuous and vicious as those visited on the Jews, including the most recent and bloodiest by Hitler, but they may not survive modernity and intermarriage. One hundred and fifty years ago, those like George Borrow, who were interested in their language, or like Liszt, who loved and transcribed their music, could find without difficulty entire communities with long histories and elaborate structures. One hundred years ago. painters like Augustus John or Laura Knight, who relished their colourful ways as irresistible, could live among their families or tribes. Even 50 years ago, when I was a young officer in the fortress of Gib, you could find, in immense caves near Granada, wild families of dancers and musicians who would work themselves into a frenzy if plied plentifully with the liquor they sold. They still exist, of course — there are said to be between two and three million gypsies in the world — but, thanks to benevolent welfare states, they are more usually settled communities than the travelling tribes that kept their cohesion. When I lived at Iver I remember canvassing one of these groups. They were nearly all called Smith, which reflects their commonest trade of tinware and horses, but had highly romantic forenames — Atalanta. Orlando, Cassandra and so on. But I think that the replacement of the horse by the car and truck has destroyed gypsy self-confidence, and many of them are now educated in state schools and so many 'out'.
I am glad that I was just in time to witness the improvised music and dancing of Spanish flamenco. Now, all has been tidied up for the tourist trade, something the historic gypsy communities could not have borne, for wild freedom was the essence of their culture and the verbunkos improvisation the heart of their music. This was what attracted Liszt. During the early part of his career he was a concert pianist, almost certainly the greatest virtuoso of all time. He was treated exactly like the Beatles and other pop heroes; not, indeed, by skinny teenagers but by mature, bosomy ladies of rank — countesses, princesses and the like. In Berlin at the end of 1841, these swooning creatures carried glass phials into which they emptied the dregs from his coffee cup, snatched at his cigar butts and thrust them into their cleavages, and grabbed at any
broken and discarded strings from his pianos (he was a great punisher of his instruments) and had them made into bracelets. I learnt all this from Alan Walker's superb two-volume Life. It was Liszt's improvisations, of exceptional fertility and skill, which brought the ladies to their feet.
Hence, when he discovered gypsy music — at its best in Hungary, which had always treated gypsies with more kindness, or perhaps one should say less brutality, than any other country in Europe — it was their performing without scores and concerted improvisation as if by magic that fascinated him. Hence his wonderful Hungarian Rhapsodies, Liszt grasped that the gypsy verbunkos was probably the oldest continuous musical tradition in the world. They came from north India and, according to an 11thcentury Persian document, 10,000 of their musicians and dancers were imported by Iran as far back as the fifth century BC. Thence they spread slowly into Europe. They used a variety of instruments, including their own form of bagpipes, and one of their innovations was to include women not just as dancers but as instrumentalists. Indeed, the first woman bandleader in history was Panna Czinka, who ran a famous gypsy group in the mid-18th century.
Liszt believed, wrongly as it turned out, that all gypsy improvisation was part of the same, single, enormous pattern of music, thousands of years old, a Homeric epic of sound which was, as it were, bred into their genes. He believed that his rhapsodies were therefore invisibly integrated and the essence of Hungarian music, all of which he attributed to gypsy origins. In seeking to explain this to the public, he embarked on what became a fat, two-volume book, Des Bohemiens et de leur musique en Hongrie (1859). Later in the century the rise of musical nationalism rebuffed his theory, and he was savaged by patriotic composers like Bart& and Kodaly, who proved that Hungarian music was indeed national and that the gypsies merely adapted it as they did everywhere else. So the rhapsodies fell out of favour, and I remember being told as a boy, when I praised them, that they were really 'bogus'. However, they are now again recognised as superb works of art.
Liszt admired the gypsies, as some 19thcentury writers (George Eliot, for instance) admired the Jews, for their ability to survive endless persecution, their attachment to their ancient ways and their success in maintaining their freedom of choice. Liszt even adopted a 12-year-old musical gypsy, called Josi Sarai, who had played the violin almost before he could walk, and whom Liszt hoped to educate and turn into a prodigy. But the lad proved quite untamable and had to be returned to his tribe, where he flourished musically. When he was 28 and famous in his own little world, Liszt admitted he was right and wrote him a letter: 'You have done well, Josi, not to engage in concert-room torture, and to disdain the empty, painful repetition of a trained violinist. As a gypsy you remain loyal to yourself.' There's a theme for a wonderful musical here.
Gypsies have sometimes been compared to the Jews, and if one reads the Second Book of Samuel, which describes how King David 'danced before the Lord with all his might . . . shouting to the sound of the trumpet .. . leaping and dancing' — and being rebuked by Saul's sniffy daughter Michel for his frivolity — one can see a connection. But the differences are much greater than the similarities. The Jews were a religious and a learned rather than a musical people (at least until the 19th century when they became a great power in the musical world). They never resisted civilisation but absorbed and embellished it, when they were allowed to, and in the mid-20th century they proved they could even adapt to civilised militarism, and so were able to create and preserve a country of their own. This will be the salvation of the Jews, even if elsewhere they continue to marry 'out' and are assimilated. The gypsies have no such resource. Liszt predicted all this in his book, prophesying that civilisation and what he called 'Mammon-worship' would lead the gypsies to 'forsake their art for gain', lose their distinctive musical culture and so their identity as a people. Must they, after all these centuries, go the same way as the Hittites and the Assyrians, the Medes and the Carthaginians?
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