About the 2019-2020 artists
About the 2019-2020 artists
The Red Hedgehog Tavern
The Gasthaus Zum Roten Igel ('The Red Hedgehog' Tavern) was a Viennese hub of socialising, beer-drinking and music. Schubert and Brahms went there to hear gypsy musicians play and their influence found its way into their writing, most closely in the Brahms Clarinet Quintet and the Schubert C major Quintet.
Crusty old bachelor Brahms was very attached to the place and stubbornly refused to eat or drink anywhere else. In fact he became such a fixture that his and the name of the tavern became synonymous - at least in pictures like the one below. He rarely ate alone and always had two or three acquaintances with him and the meal could be accompanied by jokes and prickly insults of all sorts, no doubt aimed at conductors, singers and politicians.
Brahms was extravagantly fond of goulash and the staff at the Roten Igel kept a small barrel of the finest Hungarian Tokay in the cellar for his private consumption. He was also known to have a special weakness for Rindspilaw (beef pilaf), a simple peasant dish. He also had a fondness for herring salad and often made loud demands for whitebait, a favourite fried food of dockworkers. There is even a story that that, when opening a can of sardines, Brahms would drink the oil directly out of the can. The moral of the story? You can take the boy out of the Hamburg slums, but you can’t take memories of his favorite childhood foods out of the man.
The Red Hedgehog wasn't just a place to eat. Brahms had a close relationship with the 'Hungarian Gypsy' style. There is evidence that relatively early on, he heard Romani bands playing in his native Hamburg. By his late teens, he had become an accompanist for the Hungarian virtuoso violinist Ede Reményi, who had fled from Hungary to avoid persecution following the failed revolution of 1848. Brahms toured with Reményi in the early 1850s, and they played arrangements of various Hungarian Romani songs. Later, Brahms moved to Vienna, where he made many Hungarian friends, and both visited and toured Hungary several times. There are several stories of the composer passing hours listening with fascination to virtuosic Romani bands, both in Vienna and during his visits to Budapest.
It appears that Brahms, more than perhaps any other famous 'art music' composer, conceived of 'Gypsy fiddlers' not only as exotic stereotypes but as capable musicians who had forged a style potentially compatible with the German idioms he most prized.
Over our Brahms at The Red Hedgehog weekend we will recapture the spirit of the tavern. Imagine the scene late at night, with Brahms listening intently to Gypsy bands drawn from Jews, Greeks and Russians as well as Hungarian Roma - and quite probably the odd tramp or two. And from this melting pot came some of his finest creations, not least the late Clarinet Quintet which features large in our festival.