Seven Hungarian Dances

Hungarian gypsy music was as liberating an influence on some nineteenth-century composers as jazz on some twentieth-century composers. Brahms succombed to it, its distinctive rhythms and its exotic harmonies, when he met Eduard Reményi, a somewaht disreputable but persuasive Hungarian violinst who gave several concerts with the young composer in the early 1850s. When Brahms started writing his Hungarian Dances for piano duet in 1858, while there were other sources he could have drawn on, he no doubt remembered the Hungarian pieces that had made such an impression on him in his concerts with Reményi. Certainly, when the first two books of Hungarian Dances (Nos. 1-10) were published in 1869 Reményi accused Brahms of plagiarism - although, in fact, they claim to be no more than arrangements.

The third and fourth books of Hungarian Dances (Nos. 11-21), which were published in 1880, are based largely on Brahms’s own material. Although they proved to be less popular than the earlier set, the last five of them achieved the distinction of appearing in orchestral arrangements by no less a composer than Antonin Dvorák – in acknowledgement, no doubt, of the inspiration he had found in the Hungarian Dances for his own, hugely successful Slavonic Dances, which he sensibly issued in both piano-duet and orchestral versions.

Unfortunately, of Brahms’s twenty-one Hungarian Dances for piano duet, only Nos. 1, 3 and 10 were orchestrated by the composer himself. The last of those three (the opening number in today’s selection) offers a good example of what Brahms and his contemporaries found so attractive in Hungarian gypsy music. Based on a wedding dance (Tolnai Lakadalmas) by Rizner, it is an exuberant celebration of vigorous rhythms, emphatically displaced accents and zestful syncopations, their effect heightened by precariously brief fluctuations in tempo. No.3, also based on a Rizner wedding dance, includes a similarly vigorous middle section between contrastingly graceful outer sections. It is surprising that Brahms did not orchestrate No.4 since it is not only one of the more expansively constructed - framed as it is by its expressive opening theme - but also one of the more colourful of the piano duets, with hints of the cimbalom in the opening and closing sections and heel-clicking in the sprightly middle section. Based on Merty’s Souvenir de Kalocsay, it is usually heard in orchestral concerts in an arrangement by Juon.

Hungarian Dance No.5 is based on Kéler’s dashing Souvenir de Bártfai together with a more Slavonic tune in a quicker tempo. The teasing tempo changes applied in the middle section of No.5 are a persistent feature of the entertainingly witty No.6 (based on Nittinger’s Dance du rosier) until the various tunes are allowed to run off at full speed towards the end. In the absence of orchestral versions by Brahms himself, incidentally, Nos. 5 and 6 are usually performed in arrangements by Parlow.

The first and one of the two most familiar of all the Hungarian Dances, a favourite encore item based on Sárközi’s Isteni Csárdás, is a reminder - in the composer’s sonorous scoring of the opening theme for strings - that the heart of Hungarian gypsy music is the violin. While Dvorák was certainly aware of that, he clearly felt that in orchestrating the brilliant little No.18 the appropriate treatment of Brahms’s tunes would be to heighten the violin sound with the brightest of woodwind colours.

Gerald Larner ©2005