21 Hungarian Dances

Brahms first became infatuated with Hungarian Romani music through his professional partnership with Eduard Reményi, a violin virtuoso with whom he embarked on several concert tours in Central Europe in the early 1850s. Excited by the driving passion of the music he encountered on his travels, Brahms soon absorbed elements of the Roma's distinctive musical idiom into his own compositions. At the same time, he delighted friends at social gatherings with brilliant piano improvisations of this Hungarian-style music. Initially, Brahms was reluctant to write these improvisations down. But his publisher, correctly realising that such material could prove to be a huge commercial success, persuaded Brahms to change his mind. The result was the set of 21 Hungarian Dances published in four books between 1869 and 1880, of which the first and fifth dances attained enormous popularity. Brahms originally intended these works to be performed for piano duet (two performers playing on the same piano) as a means of giving the music a richer sonority than would have been possible with a single player. There is, however, a plethora of other arrangements of these works for different instrumental forces, most notably the composer’s transcription of the first 10 dances for solo piano and an orchestration of the entire set by various arrangers, including Brahms’ instrumentation of three dances and the final four dances transcribed by his friend and colleague, Dvořák.