(Fr.: ‘Hungarian style’).
A term applied to the evocation of romungro (Hungarian gypsy) music-making in west European art music from the mid-18th century to the early 20th. Despite the proximity of Vienna (the principal site of the style hongrois) and Hungary, romungro music was conceived and represented by Austro-German composers as exotic – that is, as existing outside familiar musical, aesthetic and social boundaries (see for example Liszt, Des Bohémiens et de leur musique en Hongrie).
Distinctive features of the style hongrois are evident in the earliest printed ungaresche (see Ungaresca), from the late 16th century, and occasional representations of gypsy fiddle playing are found in such late 17th-century sources as Alessandro Poglietti's Rossignolo and an anonymous Sonata jucunda (CZ-KRa). But it was the employment of Austro-German composers like Dittersdorf and the brothers Haydn at Hungarian courts, and the enthusiastically received performances of itinerant romungro musicians in Vienna, that helped to stimulate the vogue for the style hongrois in the last decades of the 18th century. (The romungro bands, whose repertory included the Verbunkos, were subjected in their turn to Western influence in their instrumentation – two violins, cimbalom and double bass – and their harmonic and melodic styles.) In the works of the Viennese Classicists the style hongrois is more often a brief allusion than a formal and stylistic determinant of an entire movement; more fully developed examples are, however, found in the episodes of rondo finales, including those of Haydn's String Quartet op.33 no.3 and keyboard concerto h XVIII:11, and, most colourfully, in the Rondo alla zingarese from his Piano Trio h XV:25 with its tonic drone, double mordents, pizzicato, double stops and wide leaps in the violin, along with alla zoppa syncopation and repeated ‘stamping’ triads in the keyboard. Mozart used similar techniques in the last movement of his String Quartet k590. The style hongrois was sometimes blended with other exotic and national styles: the Turkish in Mozart's Violin Concerto k219, a polonaise in Haydn's Piano Trio h XV:20 and a central European folksong in his Symphony no.103.
In the 19th century the style hongrois was cultivated on a grander scale in the instrumental music of Weber, Schubert, Liszt, Joachim and Brahms, and occasionally in lieder and opera (Muth from Winterreise; Gypsy March from Act 1 of Weber's Preciosa and Caspar's aria ‘Hier im ird'schen Jammerthal’ from Der Freischütz: see Bellmann, 1993). Schubert's Divertissement ŕ l'hongrois, d818 exhibits many of the elements characteristic of romungro music. Formally, the style hongrois in the 19th century appears to borrow from the multi-sectional verbunkos literature, but such works as Brahms's Hungarian Dances and Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies owe much to contemporary styles of western European improvisation and are ultimately indebted to the 18th-century free fantasia.
From the late 18th century the style hongrois amounted to an oblique recognition by the dominant Viennese culture of Hungarian nationalism as a socio-political movement; but the style engaged only superficially with Hungarian nationalism, as is evident in Die Fledermaus (1874) in which a song of exile exhibiting the mannerisms of the style hongrois appears in the contexts of light opera, of masquerade and the society party. With the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1918, the relations of power between Vienna and Hungary that had sustained the style also dissolved. Despite Bartók's early use of its mannerisms in his unfinished Symphony and the Violin Sonata, his later rejection of them in favour of idioms inspired by folksong was a significant rhetorical gesture in early 20th-century Hungarian nationalist music. Unfortunately, however, that rhetoric involved a critique of romungro music (rather than of its Western imitations) that dealt the death-blow to the style hongrois and aesthetically denigrated the music that had inspired it. Only occasional instances of the style hongrois are met in the 20th-century art music (Ravel's Tzigane, 1924), the style appearing sporadically in operetta, café music and cabaret.
See also Gypsy music and Hungary, §II, 4.
G. Schünemann: ‘Ungarische Motive in der deutschen Musik’, Ungarische Jahrbücher, iv (1924), 67–77
Z. Gárdonyi: Die ungarischen Stileigentümlichkeiten in den musikalischen Werken Franz Liszts (diss., Friedrich-Wilhelm U., Berlin, 1931)
B. Bartók: ‘Gypsy Music or Hungarian Music?’, MQ, xxxiii (1947), 240–57
B. Szabolcsi: ‘Exoticisms in Mozart’, ML, xxxvii (1956), 323–32
B. Szabolcsi: ‘Joseph Haydn und die ungarische Musik’, BMw, i/2 (1959), 62–73
F. Bonis: ‘Beethoven und die ungarische Musik’, GfMKB: Bonn 1970, 121–7
B. Szabolcsi: ‘Beethoven und Osteuropa’, Feiern zum 200. Jahrestag der Geburt Ludwig van Beethovens: Piešťany and Moravany 1970, 11–12
T. Istvanffy: ‘All'ongarese’: Studien zur Rezeption ungarischer Musik bei Haydn, Mozart und Beethoven (diss., Heidelberg U., 1982)
J. Bellman: ‘Toward a Lexicon for the style hongrois’, JM, ix (1991), 214–37
J. Bellman: The ‘Style hongrois’ in the Music of Western Europe (Boston, 1993)
MATTHEW HEAD