Culture Shock:The Roma people are the classic example of the way cultural impact can co-exist with political and social contempt
In 1844, when the great pianist and composer Ferenc Liszt was on tour in Paris, his Hungarian compatriot Count Sándor Teleky brought him a present from home. The present was a 12-year-old Roma boy called Josy and he was essentially a slave. Teleky had bought him from a family living on his own estate. As Liszt himself explained in his hugely popular book The Gypsies and Their Music in Hungary, he had decided to conduct an experiment. Fascinated by Roma music but repelled by Roma life, he wanted to take a "susceptible" Roma of obvious musical talent and train him as a classical musician. Josy was supposed to be the Eliza Doolittle of musical history.
Not surprisingly, the experiment was a complete failure. Though Liszt never deals with Josy's own feelings in his book, it is not hard to imagine the fright, dislocation and resentment of a boy kidnapped from his family and homeland and thrust into a big city with unfamiliar luxuries and demands. Liszt was genuinely shocked and disturbed by Josy's ingratitude. "His entire young nature is dominated by pride; to steal whatever he pleased, embrace with all the girls, break any object of which he did not understand the mechanism." Josy spent the money Liszt gave him for clothes on food and drink. He refused to study.
Eventually, the hopeless Josy was given up as a bad job. "We brought him back to his tribe," wrote Liszt. "We never knew afterwards what became of this intractable scholar: and often wonder whether we shall meet him again some day at the corner of a far-off wood, violin in hand, smoking or sleeping." But Josy's fate still stands as an emblem of the contradictory nature of the relationship between mainstream European culture and the Roma.
As Liszt was among the first to recognise, the Roma have been immensely important in the development of European music. They have been its great synthesisers and communicators, carrying and developing styles from all the countries they have moved though, from the Balkans, Hungary, the Czech lands, Slovakia, Ukraine, Turkey, Spain and beyond. From flamenco to Stephane Grappelli, from Liszt to Brahms, Rachmaninov to Janacek, from the Gypsy Kings to Gogol Bordello, the playing and influence of Roma musicians has been incalculably important.
Yet it has never been matched by a larger sense of respect for the people from whom it comes. The Roma are, indeed, the classic example of the way cultural impact can co-exist with political and social contempt. Like the Irish Travellers, whose effect on traditional music has been immense and whose image loomed large in the creation of the Irish literary theatre, the Roma have been more artistically influential than socially cherished.
On the one hand, there is a romantic attraction to the wildness and freedom of the Roma culture, qualities that seem inherent in its music. "We longed", wrote Liszt, "to hear those rhythms and harmonies on account of their appearing to us as emanating from another planet. They were so completely different from anything which European art permits, or even countenances, in any way, in music." That attraction was, for settled European men, positively erotic, wrapped up in fantasies about Roma women.
The overwhelming vogue for "gypsy" stories left its mark on the musical repertoire through Bizet's Carmen and Puccini's La Bohème. Janacek's The Diary of One Who Disappeared, dealing with the love affair between a Moravian peasant boy and a gypsy girl, has been successfully revived in recent years, using a fine translation by Seamus Heaney.
On the other hand, though, the same wildness and freedom could be configured as licence and anarchy. Liszt was offended by the demand of professional Roma musicians that they should be paid for allowing him to steal their tunes and warned anyone dealing with the Roma to be wary of their "trickery". The rise of cultural nationalism created new suspicions about the fluidity, promiscuity and decidedly non-national nature of Roma music.
Reacting against Liszt's claim, embodied in his Hungarian Rhapsodies, that Hungarian music was essentially "gypsy music", Bartók and Kodály insisted that on the contrary, the "pure" Hungarian musical culture was entirely different from what the Roma bands played. The same anxiety can also take the opposite shape: today, the "gypsy punk" band Gogol Bordello can be sniffed at because only some of their members are "real" Roma.
Mainstream culture is still, in effect, trying to do to Roma culture what Liszt tried to do with Josy. It wants to tap in to the thrills, the romance and the energy of "gypsy music" and is prepared to acknowledge its richness and virtuosity. But it wants to do so purely on its own terms. The Roma can come in and play, so long as they give up their "intractable" difference. The very difference that makes them exotic and attractive also makes them unacceptably Other. To patch over the contradictions, we have developed a linguistic division of labour in which the people can be Roma but the music remains "gypsy".
Only when we come to accept that the people are as real and complicated as the music will we be able to transcend these dark anxieties and in the process understand the true nature of European culture itself.
