Three Hungarian Dances

No.1 in G minor

No.3 in F major

No.10 in F major

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 exotic harmonies, when he met Eduard Reményi, a slightly disreputable but persuasive Hungarian violinst who gave several concerts with the young composer in the early 1850s. When Brahms started writing his own 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 when he heard Reményi play them. Certainly, when the first two sets of Hungarian Dances were published in 1869 Reményi accused Brahms of stealing the tunes from him.

Of the twenty-one Hungarian Dances Brahms eventually published in piano-duet form, the composer himself orchestrated only three - Nos. 1, 3 and 10. The opening number in G minor is based not on a Reményi original but on the Isteni Csárdás by Ferenc Sárközi. Although it is a highly attractive example of what Brahms and his contemporaries found so attractive in the Hungarian gypsy idiom, above all in its passionate opening theme on the strings, Bartók described it from his purist point of view as fundamentally “anti-Hungarian” in rhythm. No.3 in F major, based on tunes by Reményi and Rizner, appealed to Brahms presumably for the cheerful simplicity of the wedding dance that adorns the outer sections and the zestfully syncopated middle section. No.10, also in F major and also based on at least one tune by Rizner, is another wedding dance but a rather more vigorous one than the preceding example.

arranged for violin and piano by Joseph Joachim (1831-1907)

No.1 in G minor: Allegro molto

No.4 in B minor (originally F minor): Poco sostenuto - vivace

No.5 in G minor (originally F sharp minor): Vivace

Brahms was first seduced by Hungarian gypsy music, its distinctive rhythms and exotic harmonies, by way of his duo partnership with the young Hunagarian violinist Eduard Reményi, with whom he gave several concerts in the early 1850s. Although his love of the idiom shows in much of what he wrote from that time until his very last works in the 1890s, its most popular manifestation has always been the the 21 Hungarian Dances for piano duet, which he assembled into four sets between 1858 and 1879. Unfortunately, when the first two sets were published in 1868 Reményi accused the composser of plagiarism and, indeed, although Brahms claimed to have done no more than “arrange” them, some of the dances are based on tunes he had got to know through Reményi. Not that this bothered Joseph Joachim, the other Hungarian violinist in Brahms’s life – the dedicatee of the Violin Concerto and much the greater musician – who, no doubt recognising the essentially violinistic nature of many of them, arranged the complete set for violin and piano.

As it happens, none of the three Hungarian Dances included in this programme derives from Reményi material. Based on Sárközi’s Isteni Csárdás, No.1 in G minor is a reminder, not least in Joachim’s resurceful scoring, that the heart of Hungarian gypsy music is the violin. No.4 (in F minor in the piano-duet original, transposed to B minor for the violin) is based on Merty’s Souvenir de Kalocsay and is not only one of the more expansively constructed – framed as it by its expressive opening theme – but also one of the more colourful, as Joachim acknowledges in his capricious treatment of the middle section. Like No.1 in G minor, No.5 in F sharp minor (transposed here to G minor) is a favourite encore item. It contrasts Béla Kéler’s Souvenir de Bártfai with a traditional Slavonic tune and, while indulging the violinist with sonorous G-string and double-stopping techniques, makes particularly witty play with the tempo changes so characteristic of the idiom.