Actually, it was Carolyne Wittgenstein again who wrote most of the Chopin bio; Liszt and Countess Marie were not exactly on speaking terms at the time.

Many thanks for this, Daro. But what then is the origin of the gypsy music? One prevailing opinion is that it originally came from India? Or did is absorb the surrounding European modes?

That's what Liszt thought. As he wrote in his book, while the Roma appear to have originated in India, once they arrived in Europe their culture was completely isolated, and since it was marked by a deliberate refusal to adopt anything of European "civilization" (except presumably the violin), Liszt simply assumed their music was also based on ancient, non-European influences. However, when he published the first edition, it stirred up a controversy in its own right, not among people in general, but among Hungarian musicologists who were furious that Liszt didn't realize that the music he had fallen in love with as a child when he hung out in the Roma camps was really just the Roma's embellishments and improvisations on existing Magyar compositions, some of whose authors were even still alive at the time.

For whatever reason, Liszt doesn't appear to have bothered to address this issue when he was working on the 2nd edition; perhaps he was embarrassed at how completely he'd missed it.

^ daro, a great post! Thanks for that.

Couldn't resist making mention of this

Frederick Delius ... Song of a Great City

What a haunting description of Paris!

Gypsy music has always fascinated me. But I could never see the commonality between say, Romanian gypsy music, and Spanish Flamenco. Although both are great.

Thank you for this fascinating thread. I wasn't aware of the Liszt book on "Gypsies in Music," nor of Princess Caroline von Sayn-Wittgenstein adding venomous anti-Semitic material.

It would be fascinating to be able to teleport over to Hamelin's Alkan concert in NYC.

I can't say anything useful about the commonality between Romanian and Spanish music in terms of gypsy influence, but last year I did take a belly dance workshop given by a very high-energy Majorcan woman with Roma ancestry. I remember that she traced their history from India across Europe, but I can't remember the details other than what a rough time they've had with being outcasts everywhere. There is a strong gypsy-influenced thread in the international belly dance world; that style is a lot like flamenco, with skirt work and floreos, but done barefoot and without all the pounding. (There is a famous dancer named Elena who does that, and I looked for her online so that you could get the idea, but couldn't find her among all the Elenas.) Flamenco is huge here in Albuquerque, but strangely, our local belly dancers don't do a lot of gypsy style. Maybe I should work on that. It's not particularly in fashion right now.

(BTW I loved Impromptu despite its silliness. Yes, Hugh Grant did go on to bigger things, but it was that movie that turned things around for him when he was ready to give up on acting. The fact that he was starving at the time made him a more convincing Chopin....)

Elene