(from Hung. csárda: ‘country inn’).
A Hungarian dance originating about 1835, derived from the Verbunkos and eventually replacing it as the primary Hungarian national dance, as understood in salon, ballet and character-dance milieux. It enjoyed great popularity in aristocratic formal dance events, where it was meant as an idealized evocation of peasant dances. Its purpose was thus more social and ceremonial than that of verbunkos (a recruiting music originally danced by soldiers). Like the verbunkos, the csárdás had slow sections (lassan or lassú) and fast ones (friska or friss); the former were in a heavy 4/4 metre that suggested dignity, pride and (often) grief, while the latter could achieve extremely fast tempos and was danced with abandon. One of the pioneers of the genre, Csárdás for Violin and Piano, was the Hungarian composer Márk Rózsavölgyi, who took an interest in it after having built a reputation with verbunkos compositions; he dedicated a csárdás to Ferenc Erkel, for which he was thanked publicly.
Since the csárdás was not a bona fide folk music, its evolution was relatively short: thus, while it inspired a good deal of interest at mid-century, it soon became formulaic. According to Szabolcsi, it was ‘in the center of popular Hungarian instrumental music’ in the 1850s and 1860s, but by the 1870s and 1880s its literature was ‘growing rigid and standardized … and by the end of the century had become very trivial’. Nonetheless, as a popular form it became a staple of the Hungarian Gypsy repertory, the performing inflections of which came to define it. Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody no.2, the most famous of the genre, is cast in csárdás form, its two sections labelled Lassan and Friska: the first section has a heavy, proud and theatrical pathos, while the second begins with twittering cimbalom effects and builds to a furious prestissimo. Two later examples by Liszt, the Csárdás macabre and Csárdás obstiné, are based on the fast csárdás only and have more in common with his late style than with the traditional Style hongrois. The distance between csárdás and its folk roots is illustrated by the fact that one of the most famous examples of the genre, Csárdás for violin and Piano, was composed by an Italian, Vittorio Monti. The csárdás compositions of the violinist Jenő Hubay are particularly successful; indeed, material from his Scčnes de la Csárdá no.5, Hullámzó Bálaton (op.33), is quoted outright in the famous csárdás in Act 3 of Glazunov's ballet Raymonda (1896–7).
F. Liszt: Des Bohémiens et de leur musique en Hongrie (Paris, 2/1881/R; Eng. trans., 1926/R, as The Gypsy in Music)
B. Szabolcsi: A magyar zenetörténet kézikönyve [Handbook of the history of Hungarian music] (Budapest, 1947, rev. 3/1979 by F. Bónis; Eng trans., 1964, 2/1974, as A Concise History of Hungarian Music)
B. Sárosi: Ciganyzene (Budapest, 1971; Eng. trans., 1978, as Gypsy Music)
J. Bellman: The ‘Style hongrois’ in the Music of Western Europe (Boston, 1993)
See also Hungary, §II.
JONATHAN BELLMAN