Sultan’s Son as Gipsy Musician

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 810, 2 November 1929, Page 31

Sultan’s Son as Gipsy Musician

PRINCE ABDUL KADIR ALMOST STARVING Once an heir to splendour, Prince Abdul Kadir of Turkey, son of the late Sultan Abdul Hamid, is making a bare living in Budapest as one of the violins in an Hungarian gipsy orchestra. He receives 10s a night for playing in a cafe, and on this pittance must support six of his children and the last of his seven wives, as well as pay alimony to one of his former spouses, says a United States exchange. He has tried his hand at composing and has produced, among other works, a military hymn that he says he will dedicate to the man who shall restore the Turkish monarchy. He has also completed two operettas, four tangos and a barcarole, and has attempted jazz in the form of half a dozen foxtrots. But there is no market in Budapest for this production. He has found Hungary glutted with gipsy airs and folk songs, and with no demand for classical operatic * forms or syncopations of the Tin Pan Alley school. Sitting in a dark, dingy room on the top floor of a ramshackle tenement in the Ghetto of Budapest, where he lives in squalor with his wife and six children, the 50-year-old prince chatted with the correspondent about the opulence in which he was born and the misery to which he has come.

“I was born in a golden cradle,” said the prince, his haggard face showing traces of the bitter privations he has borne since Turkey expelled his father. “I was born not only with the traditional silver spoon in my mouth, but with jewels on my hands and rubies on my feet. But today I have scarcely a roof over my head, and am glad when I can earn enough as a musician to buy bread for my wife and children. “There have been many nights when we have gone to bed without a morsel to eat. The money and jewels my father left me have long since been sold, as has also my fine Stradivarius violin that my father gave me when X became of age.” The prince, who speaks in faultless French, explained that it was very difficult to get employment in a country that has not enough work even for its own. musicians. “There are legions of Hungarian gipsy musicians who have sworn to kill ire because I have invaded their ranks.” he said. Abdul Kadir is bearing . these slings and arrows of outraged fortune with stoical resignation. This is due, his friends say, to the prince’s oriental training in fatalism. It is all “kismet.”