Two Slavonic Dances

The most important commission Dvorak ever received - it was the turning point in his career - came to him by way of none other than Johannes Brahms. Impressed by Dvorak’s Moravian Duets, Brahms was generous enough to send them with a warm recommendation to his own publisher in Berlin. Simrock duly published them and made so much money out of them that he wrote to Dvorak and asked him for a set of Slavonic Dances on the same lines as Brahms’s enormously popular Hungarian Dances for piano duet. The first series of eight Slavonic Dances, Op.46, was completed in 1878 for a fee of 300 marks and - having established the composer’s international reputation and having made the publisher’s fortune - it was followed by a second series, Op.72, eight years later for a fee of 3,000 marks.

Although they were to some extent modelled on Brahms’s Hungarian Dances, Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances differ from them in two important ways. One is that, although they were published first as piano duets, the Slavonic Dances are no less orchestral than keyboard in conception, the two versions having been written at the same time. The other is that, whereas Brahms used real Hungarian gypsy tunes, Dvorak wrote his own melodies, though in authentically Slavonic style.

Like its equivalent in the Op.46 set, the second dance of the Op.72 set is based on the Ukranian dumka with a characteristically melancholy first theme in E minor contrasted with a brighter idea in the major: “It’s devilishly difficult to write the same thing twice over,” Dvorak complained, but, encouraged no doubt by the ten-fold increase in his fee, he had no problem in this particular case. The last dance of the Op.46 set, No.8 in G minor, derives from the furiant - a vigorous dance characterised, as the name suggests, by an angry conflict of duple rhythms in triple-time metres. Towards the end the more relaxed middle section is recalled before a final explosion of furious energy.

Gerald Larner ©2003