Nikolaus Harnoncourt in conversation with Monika Mertl, Vienna, 20 april 1994

"Tradition is slovenliness" - is that a sentiment that applies particularly to Der Zigeunerbaron?
The phrase you've just quoted comes from a fairly complicated sentence by Mahler. I think many forms of slovenliness can be described as traditional. But I don’t regard genuine tradition as slovenly.

In the case of Zigeunerbaron, genuine tradition would mean knowing where this music comes from. Just as Alban Berg's transcriptions - including, for example, his wonderful version of the Treasure Waltz for piano quintet - sound for all the world to come from Schubert.
That’s right. And you can also hear how this music develops into Alban Berg. It comes from Schubert and goes to Berg. This is particularly clear in the case of Die Fledermaus, but the same is true of Der Zigeunerbaron, which is undoubtedly a key work. I'm especially attracted by this mixture of opera and operetta and by the way the melodramas are treated - in short, by the work’s intermetliate position. It reminds me of what people say about Schubert's operas - that there are no arias in them and that he wrote only orchestral songs. But where does it say when an aria is an aria and when it is a song. I find it unbelievably beautiful. Mozart called Die Entführung an operetta and you could equally well say that it, too, tends in the tlirection of what was later to be called operetta.

Der Zigeunerbaron has a performing tradition that you yourself got to know during your time as an orchestral musician. All kinds of things must have crept into the tradition.
Yes, every other conductor changes the instrumentation, adding a couple of horns, altering the timpani parts and so on. During the late forties and early fifties I often played in the Volksoper orchestra. The conductors there certainly knew this sort of music inside-out, but there wasn't a single score that they left untouched. I can also rememher that whenever we played Johann Strauss with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. it was always in some arrangement or other.

What was it in particular that you didn't like about the current version of Der Zigeunerbaron?
I was disturbed by the fact that it was so obviously cobbled together. I had no sense of architectural structure in the piece, but felt that there were holes in it. I wanted to know whether this wonderful music was really arranged in the order in which it`s always heard. It struck me, for example, that Homonay's Recruitment Song had been removed from the finale and placed before it as an independent number. When you see what the finale really looks like, with this Recruitment Song repeated three times, each time differently orchestrated, you realize what a fantastic form it is. You can’t help noticing the scissors and paste. It was a question of changing the characters - a little less fear of the war, a little less shirkrng. The brutality of the recruitment and the pitiful reactions of Zsupán and Ottokar after they`ve already enlisted: “I will make peace with the enemy" - such words are tantamount to an incitement to refuse to fight in the war. And that was certainly unwelcome at that time. The words don’t agree either. There's a censored version of the libretto. It's incredibly interesting to see what the censor wanted and what he didn`t want. You can see how the piece was rewritten with the clear aim of inspiring a sense of enthusiasm for the war. And then I was disturbed, of course, by what people read into the work in performance - this embarrassing, superficial patriotism and the ridrculousness of the gypsies. In Strauss's original, the world of the gypsies is depicted with tremendous affection.

But isn't there a great deal of false gypsy romanticism in the piece?
Well, I'm not sure I'd describe it as false: there's certainly the charm of the exotic, of the person for whorn hearth and home aren't essential - tlrat’s a very old idea. For me, it begins with Mignon. What is she in Goethe? A gypsy? A creature whom we don’t understand and who has dark thoughts, but who is fascinating, who attracts us and who, at the same time, makes us afraid. In much the same way, the gypsy world in this operetta is shown to exert a magical fascination.

An you think that all the patriotism and enthusiasm for war that are contained in the piece, with its jollycomrade's mentality, were not intended by Strauss, at least not in this form?
In the form in which we know it, with Homonay immaculate in his irreproachableness, most certainly not. We can’t tell, of course, whether there is any irony here. But what I do see is that the Recruitment Song has a rhythm that had already existed in Austrian and Hungarian music for over a hundred years. The Hungarians call it verbunkos, which is derived from the German word Werbung (recruitment). This is the kind of music that the Band of Hussars used to play in order to persuade young peasants to enlist. In the Hungarian consciousness, this rhythm is the epitome of cruelty. for if someone had said he was going to enlist and then calmly announced that he had no intention of going through with it, he was already regarded as a deserter and could be sentenced to death. Needless to say; there are plenty of wordless examples of this use of the verbunkos to symbolize cruelty in classical music, the most famous instance being the final movement of the "Eroica" Symphony. On the other hand, one shouldn't draw excessively modern conclusions on the strength of historical hindsight.
Two particularly crucial types of modern conflict are found in the piece and concern our attitudes to foreigners and to brute force and war. You could say that Johann Strauss’s own attitude was at odds with that of his age, but you could also say, of course, that in claiming this, we are guilty of examining the problem too much from our own perspective.

But I don't think you could claim that Strauss's attitude was politically correct, at least in today's terms.
Not in todays terms. But it really is very cruel. We forever expect people of other periods to show insights unique to our own.

Of course, one can't expect that. But what is so fascinating about great works is their ability to keep pace with present-day insights.
Well, I suppose so, but it could also be a case of our inability to keep pace with their insights. After all, who's to say what the right pace is? History is history As a member of a generation that has lived to see an absolutely unbelievable range of human possibilities opening up, I, least of all, am in a position to say that someone should have acted in such and such a way.

But we're concerned not with moral standpoints but with the fact that the human relationschips in Mozart's operas, for example, although formed so long ago, still strike our modern sensibilities as...
That’s absolutely right. And you can go back another two hundred years and find exactly the same in Monteverdi.

But in the case of Der Zigeunerbaron it symply doesn't conform to our modern critical attitudes...
No, not in the slightest.

What's involved here is what I'd describe as naive patriotism.
Or else an interpretation of it. It may be even more cryptic than Così fan tutte or Figaro. I mean, if you take it at face value, it's radically different from anything we might think today. But if you were to regard it as extremely subversive, you might well be disposed to agree with it. I do believe that the work contains this range of possibilities.

Although we can't reconstruct Strauss's intentions.
Exactly. I'm wary about saying that it really is so subversive and that it sets out to prove the opposite of what it seems to. But this whole enthusiasm for war takes on a different aspect when you take account of the symbolic language of the verbunkos music That's what I mean when I say “subversive", namely, that in many of the statements that puzzle us there may well lurk other possibilities and that these possibilities were there from the outset.

The material that you've now discovered and incorporated into the score is qualitatively beyond reproach?
Beyond reproach. And it's not strictly true to say that it has been rediscovered and incorporated into the score, but that only when it was taken out do you notice the artificial joins. As soon as you restore it, everything sounds right again.

And Zsupán couplets that Alexander Girardi sang at the première are now heard at the point where Homonay's Recruitment Song has otherwise always come?
That emerges from the dialogue that comes before it. Ottokar and Zsupán have just enlisted, and Zsnpán now wants to extricate himself from the whole affair, whatever the cost, and so he invents a whole series of illnesses. It`s a completely unknown passage: “No doctor can help me now, I am lost! My chest is much too delicate, my lungs are in disgrace!" It’s a wonderful piece of music.

And also a very fanny number.
I really can’t understand why people ever thought of cutting it. But I imagine that it was the censor who cut it, since the idea of a coward or malingerer was intolerable.

What does the music say about the characters?
You have to be careful here not to apply the wrong standards. But there are certain things I think I can infer. Mirabella's conplets, for example, tell me that she has plainly had a child by every man with whom she has come into contact. I personally am convinced - on the strength of the music that she sings - that she has had at least one child by Carnero, so that Ottokar may have another brother or sister. She certainly has one by the Pasha with whom she lived in Belgrade, and she also has one by Zsupán. So there are at least three.
Barinkay is fairly well characterized musically, But I can’t always tell in his case whether his music is operating on two different levels. Everything in the words is also written into the music. An attempt has been made to make him appear less than wholly sympathetic. Even his entrance number depicts him as utterly unrestrained. The way he reacts to Arsena and switches from her to Saffi is completely unfeeling. There's not a trace of emotion behind it. Whereas in Saffi's ease - and this is typical - there is a mass of emotion present.
In the manner of her rejection - and this comes out in the music, too - Arsena is immensely sympathetic, not least as a result of the determination she shows in refusing to allow herself to he used for her father`s dynastic ends.
Musically speaking, what strikes me most of all is the way in which Barinkay is deprived of all his mystique. In the refrain of his Entrance couplet, "]a, das alles, auf Ehr`", the top A isn`t original. It's found only at the end, in the finale, when the chorus sings it as well. On its first appearance it`s a G. It’s really distorting.

The A makes him more radiant.
And the G makes him a bit more pitiful.

And Zsupán is cast as a tenor?
He's cast as a tenor, just as he should be. In his duets with Ottokar he even takes the upper line.

And yet Zsupán is regarded as a traditional baritone role.
In fact, he’s often even cast as a low baritone, so that certuin things have to be transposed down. "Ja, das Schreiben und das Lesen" is very often lower. And this song has a vast middle section, “Doch trinken sie nicht minder”, that's completely unknown. Girardi must have been a character tenor who came to operetta from acting.

So you're once again stirring things up in Vienna?
Yes, I thought the existing version was unlikely to be changed in Vienna for the next forty years. The ideas that literally bubble to the surface from the surviving sources ought to be taken up by the Volksoper. After all, you can’t simply say, "Let's go on playing this just as we’ve always done for the next hundred years". That's why I think it very important that it should be done here. You must first get to know it properly. At least you then know what's being criticized.