Johannes Brahms’s anxiety over Beethoven’s symphonic precedent was so extreme that it took him years to produce his first symphony. The Hungarian Dances were born of very different musical experiences, however. Brahms was active in the local Hamburg music scene as a teenager, playing piano in modest local venues —and perhaps a few immodest locales, too. (The suggestion that he played dance music in bordellos has been generally discredited, however.) By the time Brahms performed his first solo concert in September 1848, Europe was in a state of turmoil. Political events in Hungary prompted many Hungarian citizens to leave their homeland. Traveling through Hamburg on their way to the United States, refugee musicians often gave public concerts to earn travel money, and it was through these performances that Brahms probably encountered “gypsy,” or what today we know as Romani, music. In 1853, he accompanied one of the major interpreters of this style, violinist Eduard Hoffman (known as Reményi), on a concert tour. The trip had a profound impact on his life: in Gӧttingen, Brahms met Joseph Joachim, who became a close friend, and in Düsseldorf, he met Robert and Clara Schumann.  

Hungarian music also left its mark on Brahms’s musical idiom, and it is from this wellspring that the Hungarian Dances came. The first complete performance of what is now known as the first ten Hungarian Dances for four-hand piano took place in 1868, with Brahms and Clara Schumann as the soloists. The pieces were immediate hits upon their publication in 1869. Seizing the moment (and no doubt with the blessing of his publisher, Fritz Simrock, who made a fortune on the works), Brahms arranged the dances for solo piano in 1872 and orchestrated three the following year (Nos. 1, 3, and 10). Capitalizing on the works’ success, Simrock asked Brahms for more, even pulling in other composers to arrange them for orchestra. In 1880, Simrock published eleven dances, and riding on the success of his own Slavonic Dances, Dvořák orchestrated the last four. 

Perhaps one of the most popular dances, Hungarian Dance No. 5 was orchestrated by Martin Schmeling (possibly his most lasting artistic legacy). As is true for many of the Hungarian Dances, the fifth dance doesn’t directly quote folk tunes, but instead recasts tunes that 19th-century Roma musicians popularized. In this case, Brahms pulled the primary theme from Béla Kéler’s “Bártfai emlék” (“Memory of Bardejov”). Throughout the dance, off-beat accents, quick shifts in tempo, and sudden changes in dynamic provide supremely entertaining theatrical contrast.