Allegretto scherzando

The Office

music from Bagatelles for two violins, cello and harmonium, Op.47

by Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904)

Allegretto scherzando

Tempo di minuetto: grazioso

Allegretto scherzando

Canon: andante con moto

Poco allegro

Perhaps the least likely of all Dvorak’s scores, the Bagatelles were written for a friend who enjoyed playing the harmonium - an instrument much more fashionable in the home at that time than it is now, of course, though even then it had churchy assocations, as the ending of the first movement of the Bagatelles so frankly acknowledges. Always ready to oblige a friend but particularly willing in 1878, when he was enjoying his first big success with the Slavonic Dances, Dvorak supplied the harmonium-loving Srb-Debrnov with a most agreeable little work. Domestic in scale, tuneful in manner - the theme of the first movement is derived from a Bohemian folksong, incidentally - it is also artful in the unacademic canon of the fourth movement and structurally virtuous in the way the material of the opening Allegretto scherzando is recalled in the third and last movements.