Page - 101 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

Jewishness and the Viennese Volkssänger | 101 and the authors’ society. In January 1897, Hirsch had encouraged his colleagues to boycott the authors’ society because their royalties were unreasonably high.87 He had proposed that the Volkssänger perform their own plays that they them- selves penned. A year later, Hirsch announced in an advertisement in one of the daily newspapers that he was accepting farces and musical pieces by authors and composers. Recher argued that Hirsch had arbitrarily renounced solidarity with the Volkssänger.88 In Recher’s opinion, Hirsch was doing the same thing again, this time with the Folies Caprice. He had previously been an ardent opponent of the Hungarian troupes and had even encouraged fellow performing musicians to follow his lead. And now he was bringing an ensemble from Budapest to Vienna. According to him, the Folies Caprice, which did not have a license to perform in Vienna, approached Hirsch through a middleman and off ered him twelve gulden a day if he as a licensed Volkssänger agreed to serve as their director. Because the Polish singspiel society from Lemberg had off ered him only eight gulden, Hirsch did not hesitate to agree to the plan that the Folies Caprice proposed. Recher accused Hirsch of being ruthless and greedy. Recher also accused him of being the kind of person who changed his character as often as other people change their under- wear, fl ocking to anyone who brings him the greatest profi t.89 Th e extent to which these accusations against Hirsch were true remains open to debate. But in the context of Hirsch’s Jewishness, the similarity between the tone of these accusations and anti-Jewish stereotypes prevalent at the time may not have been entirely accidental. We see that Recher was not averse to making antisemitic allusions in other remarks that he made. When he mentioned Hirsch being director of the Lemberg Singspiel Society, he referred to the ensemble members as “Polish Jews.”90 Although some people immediately interrupted and asked him to call them “Polish artists” rather than Jews, Recher nonetheless re- peated the designation “Polish Jews.”91 For the fi rst time in the dispute among the Volkssänger, someone stigmatized Jewishness. It was used as a category replacing the term “artist.” Recher thus introduced a twofold dichotomy: being Viennese versus being Polish and being a Volkssänger versus being Jewish. According to Recher, a member of the Lemberg ensemble was neither truly Viennese nor a true Volkssänger. Following Recher, Modl took the fl oor. He criticized Hirsch’s comment that with the Budapest Orpheum Society a Hungarian troupe had already come to Vienna and that he had suff ered as a result of their appearance in the city. Modl emphasized that the vast majority of the ensemble’s members at the time it was founded were not Hungarian but Viennese, although they did perform in Bu- dapest. In saying this, Modl drew a clear distinction between the Budapest Or- pheum Society and the Folies Caprice. He had explicitly spoken against the Fo- lies Caprice moving to Vienna, declaring, “But we don’t need any all-Hungarian groups. We don’t want to let ourselves be devoured by an infl ux of foreigners.”92 This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.