Slavonic Dance in A flat major Op.46 No.3

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. Although Dvorak was clearly influence by Brahms’s Hungarian Dances, his Slavonic dances differ from their model in that they are all based on tunes of the composer’s own invention. Stylistically, however, they derive from one kind or another of Czech folk dance. The outer sections of No.3 in A flat major, for example, offer two manifestations of the polka – one gentle, one energetic – even though the middle section, in which two trumpets introduce a syncopated melody in thirds, is quite different.