2 Slavonic Dances

Having made a lot of money out of Brahms’s Hungarian Dances for piano duet, the German publisher Simrock turned to a little known Czech composer for what he hoped would be a similarly successful set of Slavonic Dances. The eight pieces that Dvorak sent to him in 1878 proved to be so popular that when he asked the by now famous composer for another set of Slavonic Dances eight years later he had to pay ten times as much for them.

“It’s devilishly difficult to write the same thing twice over,” Dvorak complained. Miraculously, however, there is no sign in the second set of Slavonic Dances (published in 1886 as Op.72) of anything but effortless creative spontaneity. The first of them, based on the Slovak odzmek, is one of the most vigorous of all in its outer sections and one of the most abundantly melodious in the rather more lyrical middle section. Like its equivalent in the first set, the second dance is based on the Ukranian dumka. Traditionally an expression of Slavonic melancholy, the dumka is interpreted by Dvorák in this case as a graceful and only slightly rueful dance offset by a more cheerful but no less graceful middle section.