csárdás

Csárdás derives from Hungarian csárda, a wayside inn or roadside tavern, typically found along the great plains highways and cattle-drives of the puszta, the Hungarian steppe. The suffix -s is the standard Hungarian adjectival or possessive ending, so csárdás means 'of the csárda' or 'belonging to the inn.' The csárda itself was a distinctively Hungarian institution — not a grand urban tavern but a low, whitewashed building on a dusty road, often little more than a smoky room with a dirt floor, where drovers, peddlers, shepherds, and travellers stopped to drink, eat, and — critically — dance. The word csárda may derive from Turkish karavansaray or, more probably, from an older Hungarian root; it appears in documents from the seventeenth century and was in common use by the eighteenth. The dance called csárdás was documented in written sources from the 1830s, when Hungarian national romanticism was actively seeking folk forms to distinguish Magyar culture from the German and Habsburg cultural dominance.

The csárdás is structured around a fundamental contrast of two tempos: the lassú (slow), a walking movement of dignified, almost mournful character in which couples move together in close hold, and the friss (fast), an explosion of spinning, stamping, heel-clicking footwork that accelerates until the dancers are barely in control. The transition between lassú and friss — and the return from friss to lassú — is the emotional architecture of the dance, and it maps onto a sensibility deeply embedded in Hungarian cultural self-understanding: the contrast between bánát (sorrow, longing) and vigasság (joy, celebration), between the heaviness of the plain and the fire of the people who inhabit it. Hungarian writers and composers of the national romantic period — Petőfi, Vörösmarty, later Bartók — repeatedly identified this emotional duality as a defining characteristic of Magyar temperament.

The csárdás entered art music through the Hungarian rhapsodies of Franz Liszt and the Hungarian dances of Johannes Brahms in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Liszt, himself of Hungarian origin, composed nineteen Hungarian Rhapsodies for piano — most of them built on the structural contrast of csárdás tempos — and later orchestrated several of them. Brahms composed twenty-one Hungarian Dances, the first book published in 1869, based on popular Hungarian and Roma melodies he had absorbed from the violinist Ede Reményi. These pieces introduced the rhythmic and melodic character of the csárdás to concert audiences throughout Europe who had no direct experience of the Hungarian plain. The Roma musicians who had been the primary performers and transmitters of csárdás tradition in the nineteenth century were both the essential conduit of the style to urban and aristocratic Hungarian society and, in a pattern characteristic of folklore transmission, rarely acknowledged as the originators of what was being appropriated.

The csárdás achieved its most famous international dissemination through operetta: Emmerich Kálmán's Die Csárdásfürstin (The Csárdás Princess, 1915), a Viennese operetta set in the milieu of Hungarian cabaret and csárdás dancing, ran continuously in Central European theaters through much of the twentieth century and remains in repertoire today. Vittorio Monti's Csárdás (1904) for violin and piano, composed by an Italian using Hungarian folk idioms, became one of the most performed short violin pieces in the world — played at concerts from Beijing to Buenos Aires by violinists who may never have been to Hungary. The Hungarian inn-dance, with its structural opposition of slow sorrow and fast celebration, proved to be a formal idea portable enough to travel without the culture that produced it.