[Sidenote:  Gypsies and Magyars.]

Liszt’s place as a composer of original music has not yet been determined, but as a transcriber of the music of others the givers of pianoforte recitals keep him always before us.  The showy Hungarian Rhapsodies with which the majority of pianoforte recitals end are, however, more than mere transcriptions.  They are constructed out of the folk-songs of the Magyars, and in their treatment the composer has frequently reproduced the characteristic performances which they receive at the hands of the Gypsies from whom he learned them.  This fact and the belief to which Liszt gave currency in his book “Des Bohemiens et de leur musique en Hongrie” have given rise to the almost universal belief that the Magyar melodies are of Gypsy origin.  This belief is erroneous.  The Gypsies have for centuries been the musical practitioners of Hungary, but they are not the composers of the music of the Magyars, though they have put a marked impress not only on the melodies, but also on popular taste.  The Hungarian folk-songs are a perfect reflex of the national character of the Magyars, and some have been traced back centuries in their literature.  Though their most marked melodic peculiarity, the frequent use of a minor scale containing one or even two superfluous seconds, as thus: 

[Sidenote:  Magyar scales.]

[Music illustration]

may be said to belong to Oriental music as a whole (and the Magyars are Orientals), the songs have a rhythmical peculiarity which is a direct product of the Magyar language.  This peculiarity consists of a figure in which the emphasis is shifted from the strong to the weak part by making the first take only a fraction of the time of the second, thus: 

[Music illustration]

[Sidenote:  The Scotch snap.]

[Sidenote:  Gypsy epics.]

In Scottish music this rhythm also plays a prominent part, but there it falls into the beginning of a measure, whereas in Hungarian it forms the middle or end.  The result is an effect of syncopation which is peculiarly forceful.  There is an indubitable Oriental relic in the profuse embellishments which the Gypsies weave around the Hungarian melodies when playing them; but the fact that they thrust the same embellishments upon Spanish and Russian music, in fact upon all the music which they play, indicates plainly enough that the impulse to do so is native to them, and has nothing to do with the national taste of the countries for which they provide music.  Liszt’s confessed purpose in writing the Hungarian Rhapsodies was to create what he called “Gypsy epics.”  He had gathered a large number of the melodies without a definite purpose, and was pondering what to do with them, when it occurred to him that