The Habsburg Cafe by Andrew Riemer Page A

of Kakania. To the accompaniment of catchy tunes and rousing choruses, these absurdly escapist musical plays celebrate a fantasy in which no-one dies in a hunting lodge or falls victim to the anarchist’s bullet, but lives happily ever after.
    Viennese operetta reached its apogee in the years between the gunshot at Mayerling and that of Sarajevo—though examples of this essentially imperial entertainment for the masses continued to be composed beyond the years of the Great War, into the 1920s, and indeed almost until the grim days of Vienna’s fiery death in 1945. Their plots—if they may be graced with such a term—almost always end with the triumph of love. Whatever the complications, misunderstandings, or obstacles that keep the lovers apart for an hour or two, all is well by the time the rousing finale is reached. With much swirling, clinking of glasses, rushing around the stage and with as high a note as the singers of these confections are capable of reaching, a typical Viennese operetta ends with marriage, happiness and celebration.
    It would be difficult to see any connection between these trivial and escapist fancies and the world of experience. Operettas may be set in Paris or Peking, Vienna or St Petersburg, but their true location is always a never-never-land where any occasion will do for singing and dancing. Many of them reflect, nevertheless, the fantasies of Kakanian amity and benevolence, and seem to subscribe to the fiction that this troubled world was, when all is said and done, one big happy family, an idea assiduously promoted by its rulers even at a time when that fiction could no longer be sustained anywhere but in the theatre. There at least the pretence could be continued.
    Until the approaching war made travel between Budapest and the provinces difficult if not impossible, my parents spent each Easter with my mother’s family in Sopron, a picturesque bordertown some fifty or sixty kilometres to the east of Vienna. Sopron remained an essentially Austrian town even after the partition of that part of the world at Versailles caused it to become—to the dismay of many of its inhabitants—the westernmost city in the newly independent state of Hungary. During our last visit, my parents took me to the little municipal theatre to a performance of
The Gypsy Baron
.
    I remember almost nothing about that performance. My sole memory is of a scene in a forest clearing—crudely painted flats and backcloth—with a group of gypsies seated around an obviously fake campfire. In their midst stood a black-haired figure, with a large gold earring in one ear, a short jacket with elaborate frogging slung casually over his shoulders. He sang a lusty song—with many refrains I remember—in which the chorus of gypsies participated enthusiastically.
    The Gypsy Baron
was first performed in Vienna in 1885. It seems obvious that by that time the Habsburg propaganda about the essential unity and harmony of the Empire had appealed to the promoters of popular entertainment, who could see solid profits flowing from its promulgation.
The Gypsy Baron
, like many subsequent examples of the genre, seeks to transcend the national, ethnic or tribal rivalries that have always tormented this world. Hungary was the most troublesome territory of the Empire, not necessarily because the Hungarians were more fervently patriotic and more gallant than their neighbours—though they liked to think that they were—but because they were the most numerous. Gypsies, according to Viennese mythology or prejudice, were a particularly Hungarian phenomenon—another cause of dissatisfaction to Hungarians who were convinced, of course, that gypsies belong properly to that more easterly part of the continent which we now call Romania. Barons were, on the other hand, one of the high (though not too exalted) ranks of the Kakanian nobility. A gypsy baron, a contradiction in terms according to many