I have seen some Australian reviews of André Rieu that interpret him as the conductor of an elite symphony orchestra and chide him for not being on par with the Concertgebouworkest or the LA Philharmonic. I can only imagine what sort of confusion of expectations must be at the root of some highly strung upscale-newspaper music critic walking into an André Rieu concert and trying to form an opinion about the authenticity of the interpretation of the tempo in the third movement or some such. Not that Rieu is a bad musician—far from it. For those who are wondering who the hell I'm talking about, a short video. If this doesn't do anything special for you, pay special attention to the blissful facial expressions in the audience. To say they love it would be a gross understatement.
But everything he plays has one thing in common: every number is essentially an encore. In Maastricht, he plays Wie sjoen ós Lèmburg is en Waar in't Bronsgroen Eikenhout—in Australia, it's Amazing Grace and Waltzing Mathilda. Do the locals know how to waltz? He'll play another waltz. Do they like the sirtaki? Hava Nagila? Rieu will comply, with all the flowing dresses, shiny tuxes, bouncing fiddlesticks, booming bagpipes, and flashy fireworks he can muster. What is striking about Rieu is his odd mix of cultural rootedness and versatility. When Rieu says he loves Maastricht, he means it. He is perfectly sincere when he writes about his home town in sentimental prose filled with exclamation points ("I’m sure there’s no other city where so many people would have sung along, so musically, with every piece. It’s no wonder my heart lies here!"). Limburg oozes from every note Rieu plays. And yet he is a cultural chameleon, jumping from Vienna to New Orleans to Moscow and back within 5 minutes, performing local favorites in ways the locals like better than their local performers.
This is not just a personality trait. To understand Rieu, you have to understand Limburg. Here goes. Dutch Limburg, much as the Limburgers may romanticize the landscape, is a fairly run-off-the-mill piece of Europe. It hasn't been of any great importance since Charlemagne and it is mostly composed of mid-20th-century mass-produced mining towns amid rolling hills. Maastricht, admittedly, is pretty, and so are a few of the smaller towns in Belgian Limburg: Tongeren, say, or Hasselt. But what's special about Limburg is the culture.
It's culture full of paradox, deep and distinct and intensely local, yet mongrel and cosmopolitan to the bone. Dutch Limburgers who could scarcely conceive of living among Hollenjers think little of moving across the national border that divides the two Limburgs. (The reverse is less common because of relative real estate prices.) They speak a collection of dialects that are incomprehensible to the surrounding speakers of standard Dutch, High German, and French and pride themselves on local traditions like vastelaoves (mardi gras) with its endless preparations and extensions, and local organizations like the herremenie (brass bands; Rieu once used 500 amateur brass players in a concert) and sjötterie, which involves dressing up in traditional uniforms that don't follow any particular tradition and using hand-cast bullets in enormous but clumsy guns to shoot small bits off clay off a structure that looks like an oversize telephone pole.
On top of all this, most of Limburg practices a form of Roman Catholicism long on ritual and family gatherings and short on theology and an attitude to life described in contrast to that of their Protestant Dutch brethren as "bourgondisch"—that is, alien to the Calvinist concept of food, drink, merriment, and relaxation being inherently sinful.
In short, there is a lot of random assorted folk culture, and relatively tightly knit family bonds. What else is new?
It is that this particular tightly knit, quaint, cutesy local culture absorbs foreign elements haphazardly and enthusiastically. When I say "absorb," I mean it. Rieu's shtick is Viennese waltz, yet he has managed in short order to turn his annual open-air performances into the kind of "typical" thing that you reminisce about in exile—just like the steady stream of Czech folk dancers making the rounds of small towns. Local popular music includes styles derived from Mexican (norteño), Austrian (Tiroler), and American (tex-mex) folk music, as I noticed to my surprise when I moved to LA and found the local Mexican radio stations to broadcast the sounds of home. If you don't believe it, here's same Austrian Limburgers:
I am going to go out on a limb now: I think that Limburg culture is an instance of a more general phenomenon that shows up in border regions. Limburgers have been governed over the years by many different jurisdictions, and to some extent they have become immune to attempts to assimilate them to one national culture or another. (This to the great annoyance of the government in Den Haag, which would at least like to see the slightly corrupt and strongly family-based political culture replaced with the less corrupt and strongly party-based political culture that prevails elsewhere in the country.) As such, the strong division between indigenous and exogenous that exists in the seats of nations, where the locals speak the same language as government and identify strongly with the nation state, does not emerge.
(This theory was suggested to me years ago by my uncle.)
