According to influential conductor Hans von Bülow, the German composer Johannes Brahms was one of the “three Bs” of musical composition along with Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven (an accolade that Brahms himself would probably have rejected given his personal veneration for both those composers). He was a virtuoso pianist and a prolific composer of symphonies, chamber music, piano, organ and choral works throughout the second half of the 19th century. However, it’s his early experiences leading to his series of Hungarian dances that interest us here.
By the middle of the 19th Century, scores of Hungarian immigrants and refugees from throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire were flooding into Austria – mostly to Vienna, but also to many other towns including Brahms’s hometown of Hamburg. As a young musician at the beginning of his musical career, Brahms had to play light piano music at taverns to make money. He would also occasionally get hired as an accompanist for a touring musician, and on one evening he had the good fortune to meet one of Hungary’s great touring violinists, Eduard Reményi. Brahms thus learned gypsy music in the intimate musical company of the greatest gypsy violinist of the time.
Forever after cherishing gypsy music, Brahms would go on to publish two sets of Hungarian Dances for two pianos, 21 pieces in all. To this day, however, Hungarian Dance No. 5 is probably the most beloved of his Dances. And rightly so, with its enchanting first theme in a minor key, evoking the swagger and gravitas of a mustachioed Slav lover. The first orchestration of No. 5 was not done by Brahms himself but by Martin Schmeling, but it was this orchestration of Brahms’s transformation of gypsy music that helped it become one of the most treasured pieces in Western music’s repertoire. Enjoy this suitably rousing version, appropriately enough by the Hungarian Philharmonic Orchestra.
