My first evening in Budapest was a cascade of surprises. The ride down
from Vienna is not cheery until the cathedral and palace of the primate
is reached, at Gran, a superb edifice, challenging the valley of the
Danube. Interminable prairies, recalling the traits of our Western
country, swam around the busy little train until this residence of the
spiritual lord of Hungary was passed. After that the scenery as far as
Orsova, Belgrade, and the Iron Gates is legendary in its beauty.
To hear the real Hungarian gipsy on his own heath has been long my
ambition. In New York he is often a domesticated fowl, with aliens in
his company. But in Budapest! My hopes were high. The combination of
that peppery food, paprika gulyas, was also an item not to be
overlooked. I soon found an establishment where the music is the best
in Hungary, the cooking of the hottest. After the usual distracting
tuning the band splashed into a fierce prelude.
Fancy coming thousands of miles to hear the original of all the
cakewalks and eat a preparation that might have been turned out from a
Mexican restaurant! It was too much. It took exactly four Czardas and
the Rakoczy march to convince me that I was not dreaming of Manhattan
Beach.
But this particular band was excellent. Finding that some of the
listeners only wished for gipsy music, the leader played the most
frantically bacchanalian in his repertory. Not more than eight men made
up the ensemble! And such an ensemble. It seemed to be the ideal
definition of anarchy--unity in variety. Not even a Richard Strauss
score gives the idea of vertical and horizontal music--heard at every
point of the compass, issuing from the bowels of the earth, pouring down
upon one's head like a Tyrolean thunderstorm. Every voice was
independent, and syncopated as were the rhythms. There was no raggedness
in attack or cessation.
Like a streak of jagged, blistering lightning, a tone would dart from
the double bass to the very scroll of the fiddles. In mad pursuit, over
a country black as Servian politics went the cymbalom, closely followed
by two clarinets--in B and E flat. The treble pipe was played by a
jeweller in disguise--he must have been a jeweller, so fond was he of
ornamentation and cataracts of pearly tones. He made a trelliswork
behind which he attacked his foes, the string players. In the midst of
all this melodic chaos the leader, cradling his fiddle like something
alive, swayed as sways a tall tree in the gale. Then he left the
podium and hat in hand collected white pieces and _kronen_. It was
disenchanting.
The tone of the band was more resilient, more brilliant than the bands
we hear in America. And there were more heart, fire, swing and dash in
their playing. The sapping melancholy of the Lassan and the diabolic
vigour of the Friska are things that I shall never forget. These gipsies
have an instinctive sense of tempo. Their allegretto is a genuine
allegretto. They play rag-time music with true rhythmic appreciation for
the reason that its metrical structure is grateful to them.
In Paris the cakewalk is a thing of misunderstood, misapplied accents.
The Budapest version of the Rakoczy march is a revelation. No wonder
Berlioz borrowed it. The tempo is a wild quickstep; there is no majestic
breadth, so suggestive of military pomp or the grandeur of a warlike
race. Instead, the music defiled by in crazy squads, men breathlessly
clinging to the saddles of their maddened steeds; above them hung the
haze of battle, and the hoarse shouting of the warriors was heard. Five
minutes more of this excitement and heart disease might have supervened.
Five minutes later I saw the band grinning over their tips, drinking and
looking absolutely incapable of ever playing such stirring and
hyperbolical music.
After these winged enchantments I was glad enough to wander next morning
in the Hungarian Museum, following the history of this proud and
glorious nation, in its armour, its weapons, its trophies of war and its
banners captured from the Saracen. Such mementos re-create a race. In
the picture gallery, a modest one, there are some interesting Munkaczys
and several Makarts; also many specimens of Hungarian art by Kovacs,
Zichy (a member of a noble and talented family), Szekely, and Michael
Zichy's cartoon illustrations to Madach's The Tragedy of Mankind.
Munkaczy's portrait of Franz Liszt is muddy and bituminous. Two original
aquarelles by Dore were presented by Liszt. I was surprised to find in
the modern Saal the Sphynx of Franz Stuck, a sensational and gruesome
canvas, which made a stir at the time of first hanging in the Munich
Secession exhibition. Budapest purchased it; also a very characteristic
Segantini, an excellent Otto Sinding, and Hans Makart's Dejanira. A
beautiful marble of Rodin's marks the progressive taste of this artistic
capital.
It would seem that even for a municipality of New York's magnitude the
erection of such a Hall of Justice and such a Parliament building would
be a tax beyond its purse. Budapest is not a rich city, but these two
public buildings, veritable palaces, gorgeously decorated, proclaim her
as a highly civilised centre. The opera-house, which seats only 1,100,
is the most perfectly appointed in the world; its stage apparatus is
better than Bayreuth's. And the natural position of the place is unique.
From the ramparts of the royal palace in Buda--old Ofen--your eye,
promise-crammed, sweeps a series of fascinating facades, churches,
palaces, generous embankments, while between its walls the Danube flows
torrentially down to the mysterious lands where murder is admired and
thrones are playthings.
In the Liszt museum is the old, bucolic pianino upon which his childish
hands first rested at Raiding (Dobrjan), his birthplace. His baton; the
cast of his hand and of Chopin's and the famous piano of Beethoven, at
which most of the immortal sonatas were composed, and upon which Liszt
Ferencz played for the great composer shortly before his death in 1827.
The little piano has no string, but the Beethoven--a Broadwood & Sons,
Golden Square, London, so the fall-board reads--is full of jangling
wires, the keys black with age. Liszt presented it to his countrymen--he
greatly loved Budapest and taught several months every winter at the
Academy of Music in the spacious Andrassy strasse.
A harp, said to have been the instrument most affected by Marie
Antoinette, did not give me the thrill historic which all right-minded
Yankees should experience in strange lands. I would rather see a real
live tornado in Kansas than shake hands with the ghost of Napoleon.