In the 1947 MGM cartoon *The Cat Concerto*, Tom sits at a grand piano before a packed concert hall and begins to play. The opening is measured, almost delicate — a slow, mournful melody that establishes calm. Then, gradually, inevitably, things accelerate. By the end, Tom is hurling himself across the keyboard, his body sprawled and spinning, the music at a full gallop. Jerry, the mouse who has been sleeping inside the piano, wakes to find himself harassed — and before long, is doing his own share of provoking. The piece Tom is playing is Franz Liszt's *Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2*, S. 244 — in an arrangement made for the cartoon. The cartoon won the Academy Award for Animated Short Film in 1947, and the music is no small part of why it works. That escalation from restraint to utter chaos is not accidental — it is structural, and its origins run deep: the slow-to-fast structure had crystallized in Hungary by the late eighteenth century, though the underlying logic may stretch back further still. Liszt (1811–1886) was one of the defining figures of nineteenth-century Romanticism. Born in the Hungarian village of Doborján, he became — alongside Chopin — the most celebrated pianist of his era, performing across Europe to audiences who treated him with a fervor that one contemporary compared to mass hysteria. The *Hungarian Rhapsodies* — nineteen pieces composed mainly between 1846 and 1853, with further additions in 1882 and 1885 — were among his most popular works, drawing on a tradition of Hungarian music that he had known since childhood. But the frenzy built into their structure predates Liszt by generations. To understand it, we have to go back to the Hungarian plains in the late eighteenth century, and to a particular kind of music whose original purpose had nothing to do with concert halls. --- ## 1. The Music Built for Enlistment The musical tradition at the heart of Liszt's Rhapsodies is called *verbunkos* (\*1). It emerged in Hungary in the 1780s and 1790s, and its original purpose was disarmingly practical: it was recruitment music for the military. The name derives from the German *Werbung*, meaning recruitment or enlistment. The practice worked roughly as follows. Army recruiters would arrive in a town or village accompanied by Romani musicians. The musicians would play; the atmosphere would build; men, worked up by drink and the escalating music, would enlist. The structure of the music was not incidental to this — it was the mechanism. A slow, melancholic opening section, known as the *lassú*, established a mood of yearning and sorrow. Then the *friss* began: faster, more urgent, energetic to the point of "fiery" by contemporary description, building toward an almost feverish intensity. (Liszt himself would spell the latter "Frischka" in his writings.) By the time the music reached its peak, the crowd had been worked into a state that made the decision to enlist feel less like a decision than a release. The Romani musicians who played this music improvised freely, without scores, drawing on a shared vocabulary of rhythmic and melodic gestures. From its earliest days, verbunkos was a hybrid — it absorbed elements from Western European art music even as it shaped what composers across the continent would later call the *style hongrois*, or Hungarian style. It was not a folk tradition preserved in amber. It was a living, commercially oriented performance practice, shaped by its audiences and its contexts. That structural arc — the slow lament that gives way to propulsive, almost intoxicating speed — is exactly what Tom plays in *The Cat Concerto*, two centuries after the first recruiter hired his first Romani band. > **Notes:** > > 1. **Verbunkos:** Pronounced roughly "VER-boon-kosh." The tradition is closely associated with Romani (Gypsy) musicians in Hungary, who performed it without written scores, improvising within established conventions. --- ## 2. Liszt: The Bohemian Epic Liszt did not simply write music in the Hungarian style. He had a theory about it — an elaborate, passionate, and in retrospect deeply contested theory — and he committed it to a lengthy treatise published in 1859 under the title *The Gipsy in Music* (*Des Bohémiens et de leur Musique en Hongrie*). The book began, he explained, as a "letter of recommendation" for the *Hungarian Rhapsodies*. He had released them without explanation, and felt the public could not understand their origin or intention without one. The letter became a treatise. The Rhapsodies, he wrote, were not isolated pieces but a unified project: a "Bohemian epic," in which each Rhapsody functioned as a separate canto within a larger heroic poem. Its source was the music of the Romani (Bohémien) people — whom he was careful to distinguish from the Magyar Hungarians. For Liszt, the Roma were the creators; the Magyars were the receptive audience whose appreciation had made the music flourish. The genre itself, he argued, arose from the "fortuitous reunion" of the two peoples. Why, then, call it *Hungarian* at all? Liszt addressed this directly. He needed, he explained, a title conveying the music's *caractère doublement national* — its doubly national character. The logic ran as follows: the Roma created the music, but the music could not have survived without Hungary. Hungary was the only country in Europe that had not outlawed the Roma; since King Sigismond's charter of 1423, they had been granted their own magistrates and left largely unmolested. Without Magyar protection and audience, the music would never have flourished. And in practice, the Hungarian aristocracy had already adopted it as their national art, presenting it at the Viennese court as the "royal music of Hungary" — a fait accompli Liszt was not inventing but reflecting. "It would not have been just," he wrote, "to separate in the future what had not been separated in the past." Liszt's connection to this music was personal and longstanding. He had been born in a Hungarian village, and his earliest memories, he wrote, were intertwined with Gypsies and their music. As a touring virtuoso he had sought them out repeatedly: visiting their camps, sleeping under the open sky, listening through the night. He described his first experience of the music on returning to Hungary as something he recognized immediately as a "native language" — sounds that seemed to emanate, he wrote, "from another planet," entirely outside the conventions of European art, yet which spoke to him with the accents of exile and orphaned souls. The frenzy of the *friska*, he observed, was something particular. He described watching a Gypsy celebration reach its peak: > The *Frischka* rapidly intensified, reaching a frenzy of exaltation and almost delirium. At its final stage it resembled nothing so much as the dizzying and convulsive whirling motion that is the peak of Dervish ecstasy. > > — Franz Liszt, *The Gipsy in Music* (1859) His project, as he understood it, was one of preservation and elevation. He wanted to gather the scattered fragments of Romani musical expression — music performed without scores, passed between players, shaped by improvisation — and crystallize them into a "Bohemian epic" that would endure. The piano, he argued, was uniquely suited to this task. Through it, Romani music could be given a permanent form and brought to "the highest realm of art, accessible to all humanity." Central to his self-presentation was the claim that he understood this music differently from other composers who had drawn on it. His predecessors, he argued, had treated Romani melodies as raw material to be corrected and adapted to Western conventions. He had not. His method, he wrote, resembled that of a classical scholar who removes the errors and corruptions accumulated in a text over centuries, revealing the original beneath — not imposing Western rules, but stripping away what had obscured the authentic core. What he did not surrender was the conviction that his Rhapsodies had achieved what other composers had failed to: an authentic record of the Romani spirit, elevated to the level of European art. --- ## 3. Before Liszt: The Style Hongrois and Its European Travels Liszt's predecessors had been drawing on Hungarian music long before he made his claims of authentic transmission. By the time he composed his Rhapsodies, the Hungarian style had already passed through the hands of Haydn, Beethoven, Weber, and Schubert — and each of them had worked with material that was already, in its way, processed. The predecessors Liszt criticized had not, as he implied, simply imposed Western conventions on an innocent folk tradition. They had been working with verbunkos as they found it: a performance practice already shaped by commercial contexts and already in dialogue with Western music. Joseph Haydn spent decades in service to the Esterházy family in Hungary, and his contact with verbunkos was direct and sustained — he had access to both published scores and manuscript sources. His engagement with the Hungarian style was real but deliberately restrained: he incorporated its gestures with minimal additional stylization, allowing the style to speak largely on its own terms. Beethoven, who almost certainly heard the celebrated Romani violinist Bihari perform in Vienna, went further. He drew on verbunkos gestures in works including the Seventh Symphony and the *Appassionata* Sonata — not as exotic decoration, but because the expressive intensity of verbunkos was, as scholarship has suggested, the only musical vocabulary he felt was powerful enough for what those passages required. He was, in this reading, the first composer to understand that Hungarian musical elements could carry deep artistic meaning rather than simply providing local color. Weber's engagement was more superficial. He had limited direct contact with Hungary, and his use of Hungarian-style elements — which he often did not carefully distinguish from Turkish or Polish influences — remained primarily a matter of exotic coloring: one foreign flavor among several. Schubert, by contrast, traveled to Hungary twice and heard Romani bands perform live. His *Divertissement à l'hongroise* worked with verbunkos material at a level of structural complexity that none of his predecessors had attempted: not as surface decoration, but as an "organic constituent of the musical process." He did not simply borrow; he transformed. The scholarly verdict on this history runs almost directly counter to Liszt's own claims. Csilla Pethő, in her survey of the style hongrois across the four composers, puts it plainly: > It is first in Schubert's compositions that style hongrois reached the significance and high artistic merit that was later to be encountered in the Hungarian-related works of Liszt and Brahms. > > — Csilla Pethő, *Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae*, 2000 Liszt — who denounced Schubert for treating Romani motives "as lost fragments distorted by crude artists, which could have their value restored by reshaping them according to Western musical rules" — was criticizing a composer whose engagement with the material was, by most later assessments, richer and more deeply integrated than his own. --- ## 4. Bartók: The Rejection That Wasn't A generation after Liszt, a young Hungarian composer named Béla Bartók announced that the project of authentic Hungarian music was going to have to start over. Bartók (1881–1945) had been trained at the Budapest Academy of Music in a firmly German tradition — the spirit of the institution, one contemporary critic observed, was defined by an almost religious veneration of Brahms. Hungarian national music, as most of his teachers and contemporaries understood it, meant verbunkos: the style of the Romani bands, the style of the *Hungarian Rhapsodies*. This was what audiences meant when they said music sounded Hungarian. Bartók rejected it entirely. Beginning around 1905, he and his colleague Zoltán Kodály began traveling into the Hungarian countryside to collect folk music — not the commercial Romani repertoire of the concert halls and aristocratic salons, but the songs of the peasants themselves, preserved in villages far from the circuits of professional musicians. What he found there convinced him that this was the real thing: ancient melodies with roots, he believed, in the Central Asian heritage of the Magyar people, entirely uncontaminated by the commercial Gypsy tradition. He and Kodály declared themselves the first genuinely Hungarian composers. Their predecessors — including Liszt — were dilettantes who had mistaken a commercial entertainment style for a national soul. His critique of Liszt was specific: verbunkos, for Liszt, had "primarily served as local color and a medium for his impetuous virtuosity." Bartók wanted something more consequential — a music in which Hungarian identity was not a surface but a structure. What makes this rejection complicated is what Bartók actually did in the process. When he arranged peasant melodies for concert performance, he did not simply transcribe them. He modified them — slowing tempos, exaggerating rhythmic gestures, introducing ornaments that had no basis in the original performances — in order to make them sound more authentically folk-like to urban concert audiences. Leafstedt describes the result with precision: > A series of peasant dances for violin and piano or orchestra had to be transported far enough from their roots so as to create an illusion of a peasant ritual brilliant enough not to fade under the spotlight of the modern concert stage. > > — Carl S. Leafstedt et al., *Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition* The man who denounced Liszt for producing a stylized simulacrum of Romani music was, by his own method, producing a stylized simulacrum of peasant music. Bartók's context was different from Liszt's, and the difference matters. Liszt had operated within a Romantic framework in which the artist's mission was to identify, preserve, and elevate the authentic expression of a people — to rescue it from obscurity and bring it to the concert stage. The grandiosity of the project was the grandiosity of the era. Bartók, by contrast, was writing in the shadow of the First World War and the Treaty of Trianon (\*2), which stripped Hungary of more than two-thirds of its territory and unleashed an intense, politically dangerous nationalism. The folk-music movement he championed was explicitly opposed to the irredentist nationalism that used verbunkos and popular Hungarian song as its soundtrack. His project was not romantic nationalism in the manner of Smetana or Dvořák — but something more anxious and more self-conscious: an attempt to ground national identity in something scholarly and multiethnic, at a moment when the mainstream was demanding something loud, simple, and exclusive. > **Notes:** > > 2. **Treaty of Trianon:** Signed in 1920 as part of the post-WWI peace settlement, the treaty reassigned large portions of historic Hungary to neighboring states. It remains a defining trauma in Hungarian national memory. --- ## 5. What Was Always There The story of Hungarian music in the Western imagination is, at every stage, a story about constructing authenticity rather than discovering it. Verbunkos, the foundation of everything that followed, was never the pure expression of a timeless people. It was a hybrid from its creation: shaped by Romani performers who worked within both indigenous and Western musical conventions, used by army recruiters as a functional tool, and refined through commercial performance for aristocratic audiences. By the time Haydn, Beethoven, and Schubert engaged with it, it had already been processed. By the time Liszt wrote his Rhapsodies, it had been evolving in dialogue with European art music for the better part of a century. Liszt's claim to have preserved its "original essence" was sincere — and wrong. What he had done, as later scholarship documented, was absorb the commercial Gypsy performance style of his era, with its emphasis on showmanship and brilliance, and elevate it to the concert stage. He was not mistaken in thinking it was something worth transmitting. He was mistaken in thinking he had found the bottom of it. Bartók saw Liszt's error clearly. He did not see his own. The peasant melodies he collected were real; the culture he encountered in the villages of Transylvania and the Hungarian plain was genuine. But the concert arrangements he made of that material were transformations — deliberate reconstructions designed to create, for urban audiences, the impression of an ancient rural world. The impression was powerful. It was also, in its way, artificial. What survived all this — the recruiting music of the 1780s, the Romantic epic of the 1850s, the modernist revivalism of the 1910s — was the structure itself. Slow and mournful; then fast and frenzied; then beyond control. Tom at the piano, his body taken over by the music, Jerry — no passive victim — stoking the chaos from within. The frenzy that verbunkos was designed to produce — in young men standing in village squares, being offered a chance to enlist — is still there, two hundred years later, in a cartoon cat who cannot stop playing. --- ## Sources - Franz Liszt (attrib.; collab. Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein), *The Gipsy in Music* (*Des Bohémiens et de leur musique en Hongrie*, 1859), English translation by J. Broadhouse, William Reeves, London, c.1881 - Carl S. Leafstedt et al., *Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition* - János Sipos, review of Hooker's *Redefining Hungarian Music from Liszt to Bartók*, *Hungarian Cultural Studies*, Vol. 9 (2016) - Csilla Pethő, "Style Hongrois: Hungarian Elements in the Works of Haydn, Beethoven, Weber and Schubert," *Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae*, 41(1–3), 2000