Johannes Brahms isn’t always considered a lighthearted composer—after all, his 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. As a teenager, Brahms was active in the local Hamburg music scene, performing as a pianist in modest local venues (and perhaps even a few immodest locales, though the notion that he played dance music in bordellos has been generally discredited). By the time he performed his first solo concert in September 1848, Europe was in turmoil. Political events in their homeland led many Hungarians through Hamburg en route to the United States, and refugee musicians gave many public performances to earn money for their passage. This was most likely the way Brahms first heard Romani—or “gypsy”—music. In 1853, he accompanied one of the major interpreters of this style, violinist Eduard Hoffman (known as Reményi), on a concert tour. Personally, the trip profoundly impacted his life. In Gӧttingen, Brahms met Joseph Joachim, who became a close friend; in Düsseldorf, he met Robert and Clara Schumann. 

Hungarian music itself had a less profound but equally lasting impact on Brahms’s musical idiom, and it is from this wellspring that the Hungarian Dances came.  Brahms reportedly enjoyed improvising upon Hungarian melodies for fun and entertainment at private performances. A fine pianist, Clara Schumann took up some of these early dances at her concerts in the 1860s. The first complete performance of what we know today as the first ten Hungarian Dances for four-hand piano took place in 1868 with Brahms and Clara Schumann as the soloists. Published in 1869, the pieces were immediate hits. Seizing the moment (and almost certainly with the blessing of his publisher, Fritz Simrock, who essentially made his fortune on the works), Brahms arranged the dances for solo piano in 1872 and orchestrated three the following year (Nos. 1, 3, and 10). Simrock persuaded Brahms to compose even more dances to capitalize on the works' success and asked other composers to create orchestral arrangements. In 1880, Simrock published eleven more dances—and riding on the success of his own Slavonic Dances, Dvořák orchestrated the last four.  Not only are the Hungarian Dances among the most beloved of Brahms’s works, but they were by far the most lucrative for the composer.  As Malcolm McDonald writes of the Hungarian Dances, “Brahms takes full advantage of the rhythmic freedom, the opportunities for cross-rhythms and rubato, the popular melodic style and exotically inflected cadences, that the [Hungarian] idiom offered.”

—©Jennifer More, 2025