Seite - 98 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

98 | Entangled Entertainers ian group Folies Caprice intended to give their performances) and was printed six days after the Volkssänger appeared before the Reichsrat. With this letter, the subliminal confl icts boiling under the surface among the Volkssänger degenerated into a “war” that cast a spell not only over the Viennese tabloids. We can divide Hirsch and Pischkittl’s letter into fi ve main thematic points. Th is letter was the fi rst time that Hirsch publicly expressed his opinion regarding the situation within the Volkssänger community and did not try to satisfy any expectations. In this sense, those who read his letter in the newspaper also learned something of his interpretation of the events that had recently taken place. First, Hirsch begins the letter by questioning Rötzer’s legitimacy in represent- ing the Volkssänger. By bringing this topic up, Hirsch makes reference to the Volkssänger enquiry that took place on 19 January 1903, during which Walenta submitted a petition in the name of forty-one fellow performing musicians re- questing that the performing licensing system be entirely abolished. In his letter, Hirsch now asserts that these Volkssänger had voted against being represented by Rötzer. As Hirsch sees it, Rötzer was therefore not authorized to speak on their behalf.83 Th e second point that Hirsch makes in the letter concerns Recher and Lech- ner’s motives for opposing the Hungarian Volkssänger. Hirsch calls attention to what he sees as the two protestors’ contradictory behavior. On the one hand, they agitated against the performance of Hungarian ensembles in Vienna. On the other, the two, according to Hirsch, had recently enjoyed in a fruitful coop- eration with female Hungarian singers (A rtistinnen). Hirsch states that there were only two female Hungarian singers in all of Vienna at the time. Th e fi rst was C lara Aranyossi, who was under contract with Karl Recher, the musical director at C afé Riedl. And the other was S ophie Ferenczi, who until recently had been a member of the Budapest Orpheum Society, which Lechner ran.84 By bring- ing up the topic, Hirsch sought to question publicly Lechner and Recher’s anti- Hungarian stance. As Hirsch saw it, Rötzer, Recher, and Lechner had no right to speak out against the proposed move of the Folies Caprice to Vienna. All three were, as he indicates, discredited in one way or another. Hirsch then brings up his third point. For the fi rst time, he takes a public stand against the issuing of perfor- mance licenses. He describes the expected consequences of abolishing licenses, such as an increase in competition among the performers, as developments that were more or less part of everyday life. According to the opinion that Hirsch for- mulates, the Viennese Volkssänger should not understand the resettlement of the Folies Caprice in Vienna as an intrusion of strangers from the outside. Rather, the potential presence of the Folies Caprice was merely a consequence of the occupa- tional mobility inherent in being a Volkssänger. Hirsch continues to say that even he had suff ered in the past under the infl ux of Hungarian artists to Vienna. He explains that about a decade ago, when the Budapest Orpheum Society moved This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.