# Raggle-Taggle (1933)/Chapter 6

Chapter VI
Bupapest’s Island of Joy
Gypsy Violin Kings
IN the Danube at Budapest there is an island full of wooded glades, where the population of the city loves to disport itself. As you approach it in a little-boat you hear the discordant sounds of countless jazz orchestras, the lilt of Viennese waltzes, the chatter and the shouts of countless trippers. This is Margaret’s Island, the Coney Island of the Magyars, a miniature and refined Coney Island with beautiful promenades through woods to mitigate the promiscuity of cafés, restaurants, bath-houses, slot-machines and bars.
I could not help feeling a sense of weary sadness when I reflected that this park now crowded with trippers was originally a place of retreat and meditation. In the Middle Ages, in the days of King Béla IV, there were only cloisters and nunneries here. The ruins of the Convent of Saint Dominic are a mute reminder that it was here that Margaret, the daughter of King Béla IV, lived. She was a beautiful soul who devoted her life to the relief of poverty and sickness.
To-day few of the shouting revellers in the bars, or the lovers with arms entwined who wander through the dark alleys, recall that saintly woman in her retirement. As I walked about under the trees I heard in the distance, booming over the Danube, the church bells of Budapest. ​Dusk was falling, and through the haze countless lights began suddenly to twinkle.
After a time I came to 2 restaurant with tables set out invitingly under trees, near flower-beds and flashing fountains. This was the celebrated Marcus restaurant, the best in Budapest. It is here that Magyari Imre, a Gypsy Violin King, performs every evening, to hosts of admirers. Magyari Imre is a name to conjure with in Hungary, for he belongs to a famous old family of Gypsy minstrels. He is known all over Europe and nobody visits Budapest without going to hear him play. He can tell you all the international gossip of the day: whether there is going to be a revolt in Yugo-Slavia, or a change of government in Germany, or a financial crisis in Wall Street. People still tell you in Budapest of the scenes that took place when his father died: how the streets of Debrecen were crowded with pilgrims from all Hungary who had come to play in the funeral procession.
As I mounted the steps leading to the central and covered part of the restaurant, I saw him standing at the top between the two gigantic columns that support the edifice: he was playing a long, slow lassm and his orchestra was droning after him.
Magyari Imre is a strange-looking person. He is enormously fat and carries his protuberant bulk on puny legs. His face is pale and dark like the typical Gypsy, and his bright eyes pierce through the enveloping masses of fat as though they were gimlets. As he plays he walks about the balcony, and during a pause on a note he conducts a conversation here and there with habituis of the restaurant. Sometimes he walks far away from his accompanying orchestra, then one by one they creep up silently behind him to support the harmony. No restaurant Gypsy player in Hungary is the ​equal with Magyari Imre for brilliance and style. His rapidity of execution is remarkable in one so weighed down by adipose tissue, and as a player he is as vigorous as a young steed racing over the plains without the slightest trace of effort. After finishing some hair-raising csárdás he sat beside me mopping his brow, rising up every instant to acknowledge the storm of plaudits from the crowds seated on the verandah, or in the illuminated garden beneath. The more I looked at him the more I was fascinated by his grotesque appearance. His expression is queer: he looks at you fixedly without moving a muscle in his face, for his layers of fat are an outer covering which keeps him away from the outer world. Outwardly he is a fat, prosperous bourgeois, who plays in the smartest restaurant of Budapest at a large salary and drives home at night in a sedan car to his luxurious villa. I can imagine that villa. It would be furnished in the most conventional style, as though the little man had taken the greatest pains to banish anything which would recall the exotic tradition of the Tzigan. I am sure Magyari Imre is proud of the transformation that has taken place in so many of the Hungarian Gypsies who have become settled citizens of the country. He feels no mania for wandering through the world from Transylvania to Timbuctoo. “Only the third-class Gypsy players go abroad,” he said to me; “it is a confession of their weakness: when they cannot find an audience in Hungary, they go to London. I have gone abroad to Paris and to London, but only for a short engagement, and I was always eager to return here, to Margaret’s Island, where the great old Gypsy King, Bihari, used to perform.” I have never seen Magyari Imre’s wife, but she should be a fair-haired Juno, an antithesis to the dark-eyed daughters of his race.
​When I asked him about nomadic Gypsies who wander about the country, he seemed to be slightly offended. “No greater insult could be given to one of the musician Gypsies than to confuse him with one of the nomadic tribes which infest the country. As for the Romany language, it is only spoken by the wanderers and generally not understood by the civilized Gypsies. I myself understand a little, but my knowledge, such as it is, was picked up from some tramps in my home town of Debrecen.”
He went on to tell me of his education at the Conservatorium, but he admitted that among Gypsies, however trained they may be in Western music, the great inspiration of their lives is the bulk of traditional Gypsy airs, handed down from father to son. “When the child can walk,” he said, “the father puts a tiny fiddle in his hand and makes him mimic the players in the orchestra, for there is a great mass of unwritten music which is played by the Gypsy violinists, and among them are many which are never played except among Gypsies themselves.” I was surprised to find that he was less chauvinistic than the other Gypsies when he agreed with me that they had created very little music. “I agree,” he said, “with Béla Bartók when he says that the Gypsy transforms and sometimes even deforms Magyar music, but I hold that there would to-day be no Hungarian music at all if the Gypsies had not for hundreds of years preserved it by their playing. And is it not obvious that in the course of time melodies should change in accordance with the idiosyncrasies of each player?”
If Magyari Imre hates the wandering race for its improvidence and thieving, he nevertheless has the greatest admiration for the minstrels of Hungary of the past.
​“Alas!” he said, “no longer may we enjoy such tunes: to-day the Gypsy has a hard struggle to keep up the standard of the bands, for the virus of jazz has entered Hungary. In Budapest and in the principal towns all the boys and girls want to dance to jazz because America has brought in films which are the criterion of modern life.”
And Magyari Imre is passionately patriotic about his Tzigan music because he believes that it is the only music which speaks to the Hungarian soul. The Magyar needs the Gypsy to stir up in him ancient recollections of the country’s glories and all that imported, mechanically-constructed music can only dim the spirit of Hungarian nationality. It is remarkable how intensely patriotic the Gypsies are in Hungary: they will not allow a word to be said against their country and they vigorously assert the superiority of the Hungarian Gypsy musician over any other race.
After our long conversation punctuated at various intervals by rhapsodies played by him with the orchestra, a tall, lean, dark-complexioned man came up to Magyari, put his arms round him and kissed him on both cheeks. This was Brenkacs János, a Gypsy violinist who had returned to Budapest from Cleveland, Ohio, where he was leader of a band. With him was a florid-complexioned individual called Lieber, who was his host for the evening. Both Magyari Imre and Brenkacs called for bottles of wine and began a vigorous series of reminiscences. We consumed one bottle after another of the dry Hungarian wine and the two Gypsies rattled on in conversation. I remained silent and as for Lieber, it was he who always paid. Every time Magyari Imre played, Brenkacs would take out his note-book and write down the name of the piece. At the end when he came back to our table, puffing and blowing and ​wiping the perspiration from his face with a towel which he kept for the occasion, Brenkacs would greet him in the following terms: “Eljen: nobody is your equal, master.” Magyari Imre would then bow and both men would stand up and drink to one another. After a few minutes Brenkacs would repeat the compliment to his friend’s virtuosity and solemnly, without a smile, the two would rise and repeat the toast. This ceremony went on every few minutes throughout the evening until two o’clock in the morning.
Magyari Imre in his violin-playing has continued the great old tradition of the Hungarian folk players of a hundred years ago. At my suggestion he played for me many of the original works by Gypsy composers such as Bihari, Czermak, Czinka Panna, Reményi and Dankó and in the moments of rest he related to me anecdotes from the lives of those bards of the Gypsy race. In the Bihari period the violin reigned supreme in the countryside, for there were no machines in those days for the mass production of music and the violin was the thyrsus wand to awaken the singer as well as the dancer.
According to Magyari Imre, János Bihari was the greatest figure of all and the one who carried Gypsy music to its highest perfection. Every Primás or leader of a Gypsy band in Hungary from his day down to modern times looks upon himself as a descendant upon whom has fallen the mantle of the great patriarch who played for the assembled monarchs at the Congress of Vienna. Indeed, it is probable that the lofty social position of Bihari in the early years of the nineteenth century has been the real cause of his fame among the Romanies to-day. I can imagine the lean and hungry Gypsies in cafés looking back with envy to that great ​old Gypsy who was the favourite of kings and emperors. “Remember,” said Magyari, “he was born in 1760, the same year as Napoleon, and he was a Napoleon of the fiddle, I tell you. He played the dictator all over the countryside and no festival was complete without him. Like the traditional Gypsies he did not know how to read music, but once he heard a melody he could reproduce it from memory, adding many arabesques in the Tzigan manner. One of his most effective performances was to imitate and even parody the performances of virtuosi who visited Vienna and Budapest. After they had finished playing a long concerto or sonata he would seize his fiddle and with a roguish smile would reproduce most of what he had heard, but he would exaggerate the mannerisms of the artist and add in the roulades and flourishes of the Gypsy race and transform the music in accordance with his own temperament.” Magyari Imre’s description ® of Bihari’s performance made me think of Carolan, the old harper of eighteenth-century Ireland, who improvised his concerto in the style of Corelli and Geminiani. One of the principal characteristics of the folk musician all over Europe seems to have been the power of imitating whatever he heard. But Bihari possessed many other qualities of originality and his audiences would excite him by applause to show them off. In the evenings in the country when the pine torches were lit and the dancers had congregated under the trees, Bihari would gravely advance into the centre, followed by his small band of string-players with one cimbalom. The dancers would clap their hands and stamp their feet for him to begin playing the csárdás, but he would first of all play lassu after lassu before he launched them off into the fury of the friss. Liszt tells us that Beethoven was so inspired by a melody he heard Bihari play in his improvising, that he introduced ​it into his overture to King Stephen. What Magvari admired specially in Bihari was his splendid arrogance, for was it not right that a national bard should be arrogant? A bard in the olden days was the noblest of the noblest and he dressed in golden raiment, for his voice was golden and the gods spread their message through its honeyed tones. Bihari spoke to the emperor as an equal. One day his majesty asked him to choose what he would like, thinking that he would select some gift for himself, but Bihari proudly replied that his majesty should grant him and his entire band the patents of nobility! Like so many Gypsy performers he was a Don Juan and he exercised all his powers of fascination when playing, in order to capture the heart of some lady in the audience. He would single out a woman’s face in the hall and fix his gaze upon the girl as he played his passionate lament. In Vienna many society ladies succumbed to that hypnotic eye and sent him billets doux. “That custom of playing to a lady’s face,” said Magyari Imre, “has descended to our day and that is the way the Gypsy in the café wins his way into the lady’s heart and into her cavalier’s pocket!” On one occasion Bihari, when playing at the court of Marie Louise in 1814, played so earnestly to the expression on the face of one of the young Princesses that the empress noticed it and asked him whether he was married. When he assured her in the affirmative the queen invited him to bring his wife to Court dressed in the Gypsy costume. When the empress saw his wife she said to him: “In comparison with such a beautiful Gypsy the charms of young princesses are but small.” The young princess, it is said, was so touched by his admiration of her that she sent for him privately and presented him with a gold medal.
The melodies and dances are short and there is hardly any development from a musical point of view, for the violinist would repeat them again and again and trust to his momentary inspiration for the improvised flourishes. At times the style seems to be a parody of the music of that period, as for instance in the following passage:
Both Bihari and Czermak, however, let themselves go when they came to the csárdás: no matter how highbrow they tried to become in their serious works, they would always end up their piece with the traditional dance as in the following example by Czermak:
After hearing Magyari Imre play Bihari and Czermak, I asked him to play something by Czinka Panna, friend of Rákoczi, national hero, and the greatest woman Gypsy who ever lived in Hungary. Among the Gypsies in the country the name of Czinka Panna is one to conjure with, as I found in my rambles. Whenever I ​wanted to awaken friendly thoughts in wandering fiddlers on the road I would play the famous tune of Czinka Panna and listen to them sing words in Romany to it. The melody seems to possess a special significance for the Gypsies, and an old man once told me that it is a magic tune:
Czinka Panna is a mythical character in Hungary, and she should be cherished by women violinists the world over as the first woman to win national fame as a minstrel at a time when few of her sex won renown with that instrument. We hear of Czinka Panna in 1725 as a wonder-girl among the Magyar folk. At the age of fourteen she was already famous, and she wandered from village to village with bands of Gypsies who would perch her up on a table in the inns to play for the company the stirring Rákoczi march tune composed for the hero by her grandfather, Michael Barna. “A queer little thing she must have been,” said Magyari, “and they say she was very dark in complexion, being a true daughter of Egypt, and her raven black hair would fall over the violin when she played. With her bow she struck sparks from the fiddle, I tell you, and she thrilled everyone by the vigour of her style.” It was not only her playing that won her renown in Hungary but her character. She had married before she was fifteen and became a model wife among the Gypsies. Her house was always clean and her children so neatly dressed that her virtues became proverbial among the Romanies, who are not noted for their cleanliness. The baron of the district of Gömör where she came from was so struck by her sterling worth that he built a little ​house by the River Szabajo for her to live with her family. And there she did live in complete happiness, but only when the snow was on the ground and the wind blew across the plain. In the summer when she saw the brown tents of the tribes in the distance she would leave her family and roam with the bands, playing in the villages, for she was always a vagabond at heart and no thought of husband or children was strong enough to stifle the passionate call of music in the wilds that welled up in her heart. After her death verses were composed by the Gypsies in her honour and were sung in Hungarian and in Latin.
Neither Bihari nor Czermak possessed her originality and the few tunes that have come down to us are masterpieces. She was a wistful little thing and for ever lamenting the passing of those glorious summer days when the Gypsies might rove at will over the broad expanses without a care in the world with God to feed them as He does the birds of the air. One of her melodies called “Cserebogár, sárga cserebogár,” tells the story of the metry cockchafer in the summer heat flitting about joyfully as though his life would never turn to woe. Little does he think of the pitiless winter that will descend upon the earth and change all his happiness to sorrow:
“Cockchafer, yellow cockchafer, I do not ask when summer shall come, nor how long my life shall last; I only ask when I shall be my love’s.”
The power of those melodies, as Magyari Imre explained to me, is magical. The Gypsies have from early childhood learnt to associate them with their race ​and tradition. Among certain nomad tribes I met with in Hungary music is even used for healing the sick and relieving from pain. According to the Gypsy belief, all illness and pain is caused by malignant spirits that lie in wait for the unwary, and the duty of the shaman or wizard is to drive them away. Music is one of the most potent charms in Gypsy lore just as it is among the Arabs, who hold that a note of music when once it has been played does not fade away but is stored in the air ready to return one day. Melodies, according to the Gypsies, may bring storms or sunshine: they may cause sickness or bring back health. It is a terrifying thought, for who knows but that we are surrounded by the hymns of hate of those who preceded us? Thus the tune of Czinka Panna to the Gypsy mind confers on those who hear it certain virtues associated with that minstrel woman whom they reverence. Ferencz Liszt tells an interesting story of the magical power of music which is characteristic of the Gypsy point of view, and it comes from India, the original home of the Gypsies. Once upon a time there was a young Indian princess who was in love with a young musician possessing many magic melodies, including one that could consume with fire the person who sang it. The princess was in love with him, but she longed in her heart to hear the wonderful tune that could consume with fire and she begged the young man to satisfy her curiosity. At last he gave in to her wish.
It was a moonlight night and they were both walking on the banks of the Ganges. The musician took his harp and descended into the river, and as he played the waters began to rise. As the beautiful voice floated through the air the waters began to rise higher and higher, above his waist, then up to his neck, and still he sang In tones that were becoming ever softer and softer. ​At last the waters closed above his head, and all that the maiden saw was a bluish flame which flitted for awhile over the waters.
To civilized people music has lost a great deal of its magical fire and we listen unmoved, for our pleasure becomes intellectual as we analyse the structure of the piece as though it were a piece of architecture. But to the primitive Gypsy mind music is much stranger. When a wandering minstrel plays a dance tune he associates it with stories, legends and ballads, and as he plays he sees before his inner eye a picture. I have heard Gypsies weave fantastic stories around certain melodies as if music irresistibly called up in their mind forms and pictures. The essence of the Gypsy art is to stimulate through the wild, untamed nomadic spirit which the race has preserved down the ages. The wild nomadic personality of the Gypsy enables him to penetrate more easily to the heart of the nations wherein he has made his home. Between the Magyar race from the central plateau of Asia and the Romany from India there are certain affinities, and thus the two races react mutually upon one another. The Magyar nature needs the Gypsy to stimulate his senses at certain periods and raise him to a pitch of intoxication, but we should remember that wine, lights, perfumes play their part as well as music in the Hungarian orgy. Music is by far the most important of the elements because it is the most suggestive, and I remember a Magyar peasant saying to me: “Give a Magyar a glass of water and a Gypsy, and you’ll see him become completely drunk.”
While these thoughts were passing through my mind Magyari Imre was away at the other end of the verandah playing to the face of a lady who was sitting alone. Each time that he began a fresh tune she would take a rose out of a bundle of flowers that lay beside her and ​throw it to him. The waiters were evidently in awe of her, for they hastened to her side every few minutes with liqueurs which she would toss off with an arrogant gesture. She was a decidedly pretty girl with auburn hair, pale waxen complexion and green eyes. Her face was virginal and innocent, but her violent red dress and her carmine lips gave her the appearance of a maiden turned vampire. Magyari Imre stood by her table and played to her for a long time. The girl then started to sing in a soft voice that echoed through the moonlit garden and held the people spellbound. Her singing was the essence of Magyar folk-lore: it had a desolate sadness, a sense of restless, unsatisfied seeking as she passed from one melody to another, always followed by Magyari Imre and his band. Her voice was like a dazzling bird of paradise winging its way in the clear air, and when weariness would descend and her wings would refuse to bear her up, then the violin and the cimbalom would revive her spirit and help her to soar again. All around them was ghostly silence and the sounds of the city faded away into the distance. The heavy scents of the trees mounted to us from the garden that stretched down to the Danube, and through the leaves the moon worked fantastic patterns. Such is the final memory that remains with me of my meeting with Magyari Imre, the Gypsy Violin King, under the trees on that moonlit night on Margaret’s Island.