Notes for: August 6, 2019
It is 1850. Brahms is 17 years old and living with his family in Hamburg. Into the city comes Eduard Reményi, a political refugee from Hungary. The theatrical Reményi, a virtuoso violinist, begins performing what he describes as gypsy folk music. It isn’t the authentic Hungarian peasant music Bartok and Kodály will discover years later, but the music of urban gypsy bands. It is soulful, driving, and exotic, and it causes a sensation. The teenage Brahms and Reményi begin playing together and eventually take the wildly popular alla Zingarese (in the gypsy style) music on tour. It is the start of Brahms’s lifelong infatuation with the so-called Hungarian style.
Over the years Brahms would eagerly seek out gypsy bands playing in cafes, and he took pleasure in performing his improvised versions of Hungarian-style dances at parties or informal gatherings of friends. Enjoying the improvisational freedom that came with these private performances, he was reluctant to write his dances down. Eventually, however, he agreed to send several to his publisher Fritz Simrock. He wrote them for four hands to give them a fuller sound, and he and Clara Schumann performed the first set privately before Brahms sent them off. Ten Hungarian Dances for piano four hands were published 1869; 11 more followed in 1880.
Although Brahms wrote a few of the dances himself, he insisted on saying on the title page that they were folk songs that had been “arranged by” him. To his publisher, Brahms described these dances as “genuine gypsy children, which I did not beget, but merely brought up with bread and milk.” Most were elaborations of the tunes he had heard over the years, for Brahms had assimilated the style well. The Dances were enormously popular and inspired what amounted to a virtual cottage industry of musical transcriptions. Brahms soon prepared a version for solo piano. Other composers, including Dvořák, orchestrated them. Brahms’s friend the violinist Joseph Joachim transcribed them for violin and piano. Every version was a hit, providing handsome incomes for both Simrock and Brahms.
Each of the dances on today’s program is filled with the fiery melodies, quick shifts of mood and tempo, and irregular rhythms that Brahms loved. Each has its own character, too. No. l is sonorous, soulful, and intermittently fiery; No. 4 is marked by mood swings from melancholy to exuberant to playful; No. 6, with its frequent tempo changes, sounds strikingly improvisatory; No. 7 is playful and capricious. We end with the most famous of the Dances, No. 5, with its suggestion of wild gypsy fiddling.
Fun fact: In 1889 Brahms himself recorded a version of Hungarian Dance No. 1 on an Edison wax cylinder. You can hear it on YouTube.