Two Hungarian Dances

No.3 in F major

No.7 in A major (arr.Schmeling)

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. One of those is No.3 in F, which appealed to him presumably for the cheerful simplicity of the wedding dance (borrowed not from Reményi but Rizner) that adorns the outer sections and the zestfully syncopated middle section. No.7 in A offers a similar contrast between its good-natured main theme (this one borrowed from Reményi) and the variants that briefly enliven its easy-going rhythms.