Marco Schiavo / Sergio Marchegiani JOHANNES BRAHMS Dances

Avoiding both flashy, ornamental virtuosity on the one hand, and vacuous, trivial music for the amateur market on the other, Brahms was known for “the unrelenting seriousness of his piano music” (Leon Botstein). Because Brahms also chose to write ‘absolute music’ (no tone poems, programmatic references or any attempt to tell a story), this further enhanced his serious and somewhat stodgy image. Didn’t he ever let down his hair and have some fun? Critic Thomas May writes that the answer was a resounding ‘Yes!’ “Fun was very much a part of his performing persona, in moments with friends when he wanted to relax...That’s the origin of the Hungarian Dances, which started out as party pieces he would trot out when the mood struck.” When Brahms played these 4-hand duets with Clara Schumann, he entertained her children as “his eyes flash[ed] fire all the while” (Brahms scholar George Bozarth). 

Brahms’s extensive association with the Hungarian professional violinists Edward Remenyi and Joseph Joachim resulted in a love of what he thought were actual Hungarian folksongs and dances. But ‘Hungarian’ in this instance “turned out to be the music played by traveling ‘Gypsy” (Roma) bands. Nonetheless Brahms’s first collection of 10 Hungarian Dances, which he published as 4-hand piano pieces in 1869, are simply a delight. Popular too; Brahms later arranged them for solo piano (1872), and wrote orchestral arrangements for numbers 1, 3 and 10. Later composers, including Dvorak, arranged all 21 dances for orchestra. 

He considered them arrangements, not original compositions, so Brahms published them without opus number. He was unduly modest, as he composed three of the 11 dance melodies in the second set (published in 1880) . Brahms set most of these dances in A B A form, though numbers 3, 4 and 8 extend beyond that format. He constantly varies the tempo from dance to dance, as well as the different sections within each dance. These dances sparkle; listen for the humor in the second strain of the main melody in Dance no. 6, where all the grace notes sound like mistakes the pianist is making. Every theme in dance number 3 features that beloved Hungarian penchant for three-bar phrasing. It crops up in other dances as well, along with the continual rhythmic turns of phrase.

Brahms became one the first composers supported solely by the royalties from his music (and concert income). The three sets of dances he worked on in the 1860s and 1870s – the 16 Waltzes Op. 39 and the first books of the Hungarian Dances and Liebeslieder Waltzes – continued to provide a significant portion of that income for the remainder of Brahms’s life. (Ed Wight)