Page - 97 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

Jewishness and the Viennese Volkssänger | 97 and singspiel managers in Hungary and demanded that performances by Hun- garian colleagues in Vienna no longer be permitted. Th ey explicitly addressed the case of the Folies Caprice. Heilinger promised to pass on their concerns to the minister-president in the form of an interpellation. Th e Folies Caprice is the fi rst example of a specifi c Hungarian group being considered the enemy of the Viennese Volkssänger. Th e representatives of the Volkssänger found themselves once again in a new, diffi cult situation: From now on, they could no longer advocate a general ban on Hungarian troupes perform- ing in Vienna. Rather, they had to demonstrate their infl uence on local politics by advocating a specifi c issue on behalf of their colleagues. Th e blocking of the planned move of the Folies Caprice to Vienna served, as it were, as a litmus test for the delegation committee’s ability to assert itself in the interest of the per- formers it represented. Th e performing musicians’ initial reaction to the Folies Caprice’s plan to move to Vienna manifested itself in a radicalization of language. Discussions no lon- ger focused on Hungarian performers in Vienna, but rather on the “invasion of Hungarian Volkssänger.” Th e heightened use of language in turn increased the imagined threat. Furthermore, the Viennese Volkssänger did not want the ban on Hungarian ensembles in Vienna to seem only like a strategic tactic in a profes- sional rivalry. For this purpose, the Viennese Volkssänger emphasized the connec- tion between their artistic occupation and the historical and cultural “heritage” of the Habsburg capital. Th ey said that the “total ruin of a professional branch that was intertwined with Vienna and closely linked with local history” would occur in just a short time.82 According to this view, the planned move of the Folies Ca- price to Leopoldstadt was interpreted as an attack on the entire “Viennese spirit” and the widespread sentiments attached to the idea of Old Vienna. Albert Hirsch Betrays His Fellow Volkssänger Indeed, it is somewhat surprising that Hirsch was not a part of the deputation that brought the matter to the Reichtsrat. As a member of the delegation com- mittee, which was launched on the occasion of the fi rst Austrian Volkssänger and Vocal Artists’ Day on 27 October 1902, and as one of the three singspiel hall op- erators who had submitted a protest to the authorities against the Folies Caprice moving to Taborstrasse, he himself might have even been in a position to lead the delegation. But despite Hirsch’s absence, there was no indication at the time that the Volkssänger were split with respect to the question of how to deal with the issue of the Hungarian performers. Only with this context in mind can we understand the commotion and in- dignation that a kind of letter to the editor in the Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt triggered among the Viennese Volkssänger. Th e letter had been written by Hirsch and Franz Pischkittl (the leaseholder at the Hotel Central, where the Hungar- This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.