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| GYPSY FIRE |  | Johannes Brahms
Hungarian Dances No. 1, 3 & 10
“It is hard to write down what one has been improvising wildly for a long time,” wrote Johannes Brahms to his publisher Simrock. Brahms had become familiar with Hungarian and Gypsy melodies in 1853, while on tour with the Hungarian violinist Eduard Remény. He often played them at his concerts and sporadically wrote them down. His challenge now was to cast them in the formal language of classical music without destroying their freshness and folksiness. Attuned to the great demand for music for home entertainment – since a well-used piano in the parlor was the symbol of the cultured family before the phonograph turned people into musical couch potatoes – he set these dances in a piano four-hand versions.
Brahms compiled the dances in four books. Books I and II, containing together 10 dances, were published in 1869, the rest in 1880. According to a list published in Vienna’s Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in 1874, the melodies of Books I and II were by Hungarian composers of popular music – except for No. 7, which is a true folk melody. The eleven melodies of Books III and IV are probably mostly by Brahms himself. In naming these pieces “Hungarian Dances,” Brahms may have fallen for the common practice in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of creating artificial nationalistic cultures by purported “rediscoveries” that were invariably fabrications. Four of the first ten dances, for example, are called czárdás, supposedly a Hungarian peasant dance, but actuality invented – name and all – by a nationalist aristocrat early in the nineteenth century. The peasants had never heard of it.
Brahms himself transcribed the first ten Hungarian Dances for solo piano and Nos.1, 3 and 10 for orchestra. Virtually all information about the original composers of the tunes on which the dances are based has been lost. Each dance is in a standard ABA form with a contrasting melody for the middle (B) section.
No.1 in G minor: The melody, Isteni Csárdás (Sacred Czardas), is by Sárközy Pecsenyanski. 
No.3 in F Major: The melody, Tolnai Lakadalmas (Wedding Dance), is by J. Rizner.
No.10 in E Major: Melody derived from the same popular song as No. 3, Presto. |
| | | Béla Bartók
Romanian Folk Dances
By the end of the nineteenth century, classical music based on ersatz Hungarian folk music had come to a dead end. The extreme nationalism that had swept Hungary, beginning with the failed revolution of 1848, revived interest in the authentic folk culture and inspired the search for authenticity in clothing, food, language, literature and music.
Born in the midst of this revival, Béla Bartók began his musical career in the classical vein, his early compositions emulating Brahms, Richard Strauss and Liszt. But he was swept up in the nationalist movement and, together with his friend Zoltán Kodály, became one of the first modern ethnomusicologists. In 1906 the two began collecting the peasant folk songs of Hungary and Romania, using that newfangled invention, the Edison wax cylinder. Bartók was tireless in his pursuit of authentic melodies and dances, often traveling to the farthest backwaters to record local variants. His research contributed to the understanding of how long poems, such as the Homeric epics, are retained in collective memory over the centuries as part of an oral tradition through the use of verbal and melodic formulae. In later years he extended his collecting to other Eastern European and North African countries, making his final trip to Anatolia in 1936.
The folk music Bartók collected strongly influenced his musical output. He edited and published many of the melodies he had recorded, while others he incorporated into his own compositions. In his original works, such as his concerti or string quartets, he used the modes, rhythms and style of the folk music, but composed for them his own themes.
In the seven Romanian Folk Dances, composed in 1915 as piano pieces and orchestrated in 1917, Bartók directly used folk material from the over 1,100 tunes he had collected from that region alone. He made simple settings of peasant flute and fiddler tunes, letting the unfamiliar modalities and snappy rhythms speak for themselves. They quickly became Bartók’s most popular work.
Listeners familiar with the composer's later transformations of indigenous folk music will note that these dances are more tuneful, in our Western European sense, than the later ones. The difference is largely due to Bartók's development as a composer; his own personal idiom and musical language affected the way in which he composed his own melodies in the folk styles that he collected and studied.
The Dances are short, each characterized by its own instrumentation and characteristic rhythm. The incipits of each define the essence of the entire dance. The last three dances flow into each other without pause. The final Dance serves as a rousing coda:
1. “Stick Dance”
2. “Round Dance” or “Sash Dance”
3. “In One Spot” or “Stamping Dance”
4. “Horn Dance”
5. “Romanian Polka”
6. “Short and Sweet” or “Fast Dance”
7. “Short and Sweet”
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| | | Zoltán Kodály
Dances of Galanta
Composers have always loved to integrate folk melodies into their works both for popular appeal and to show their ability to manipulate a simple tune. The practice was already common in the Middle Ages. However, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they often made the mistake of equating the popular music of the day with authentic traditional folk melodies. The melodies Brahms and Liszt used in their Hungarian dances and rhapsodies, for example, were not indigenous melodies, but were in reality the popular street and café music of their time – often played by Gypsy bands.
Zoltán Kodály and his colleague Béla Bartók, both pioneers of modern ethnomusicology, were among the first (in 1907) to use the newfangled invention, the wax cylinder recorder, to collect folk melodies at their source. They traveled extensively to the most rural backwaters to collect their examples and were careful to authenticate their research. Critical to their systematic approach was to seek the variations in music and text from different locales, in the attempt to figure out the origin of the melodies and follow the geographical spread of both music and words. They avoided one of the great pitfalls in authenticating folk music, recognizing the fact that the simpler the melody, the greater the possibility that similar ones arose independently and were not necessarily derived from a common source. Like Bartók, Kodály used many of the collected folk melodies as themes for his compositions. Of the two, Kodály was the more conservative and the more Romantic. While his international reputation is generally overshadowed by that of Bartók, his music has become a national treasure in his native Hungary.
Kodály’s ethno-musicological research notwithstanding, the themes for Dances of Galánta, a tone poem first performed in 1933 for the 80th anniversary of the Budapest Philharmonic Society, did indeed originate from street and café music. Galánta, a small town now in Slovakia, was part of Hungary when Kodály lived there in his childhood. In the eighteenth century Galánta had been a center of sophisticated Gypsy musicians who performed from notated scores, rather than from memory, and played in the orchestras of the gentry. Although their fame had waned by Kodály’s time, the composer wanted to revive the old tradition. The themes for Dances of Galánta came from a historical collection, Selected Hungarian National Dances of various Gypsies from Galánta.
Kodály selected five different melodies and rhythms in the work, giving them a brilliant orchestral dressing that provided a special showcase for the upper winds. The five dances employ different modes, themes and rhythms, but they are strung together in such a way that the final measures of one dance serve as an introduction to the next. The opening dance begins with a long introduction that has the effect of a warm-up or flexing of musical muscles. The first three dances feature an orchestral soloist; in the first movement, the clarinet introduces a slow modal theme that will reappear in later movements to unify the set. The second dance features the flute and is faster and more flowing than the first but returns to the theme from the first dance, finally blending seamlessly into the third, which features the oboe and contains a dialogue between the upper winds and strings. The fourth dance picks up in tempo and pits the violins against the upper winds in a kind of contest as the dance becomes wilder and wilder.
Suddenly everything shifts gear with a new slower, almost humorous, melody in the lower brass and then in the clarinet, slipping into the final dance. Here again the tempo is fast, with the theme bouncing around the entire orchestra and including quotes from the previous dances. A long pause nostalgically brings back the refrain in the upper winds, ending with a cadenza for clarinet “rudely” interrupted by the rest of the orchestra for a rousing conclusion. |
| | | Johannes Brahms
Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 77
One of the marks of great artists is accurate self-assessment, to know their strengths and limitations. Like Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky, Brahms sought the collaboration of a leading violinist when he composed a concerto for the violin, an instrument with which he was not intimately familiar. Brahms’s long-time friend Joseph Joachim, a Hungarian violinist, composer and educator who for over half a century was the world’s dominant violin virtuoso was intimately involved in the concerto’s formation. Needless to say, Brahms dedicated it to him. Joachim gave the premiere on New Year’s Day, 1879.
The initial reception of the Concerto was respectful but cool. Its technical demands deterred many violinists, who dubbed it “Concerto against the Violin and Orchestra.” It is, like the other Brahms concerti, a true partnership between soloist and orchestra; virtuosity for its own sake is totally absent. Although in numerous places Joachim attempted to have Brahms make it easier for the soloist, the manuscript of the violin part in the State Library in Berlin, full of Joachim’s suggestions, shows that, in this respect at least, the violinist seldom prevailed.
The sunny mood of the concerto is close to that of the D Major symphony, written shortly before. The opening movement is necessarily long for the development of each of the themes Brahms employs. While many composers choose to concentrate on developing a single theme, Brahms decided to expand on all of them. The orchestral first exposition introduces the main theme and two secondary themes. & Immediately afterwards, the soloist takes off on a flight of cadenza-like passagework that gradually leads into the formal second exposition propelled by little hints of the main theme in the orchestra. A classicist in form, Brahms writes a new secondary theme for the soloist. Joachim wrote a large cadenza for this movement, which is still a favorite with soloists and audiences, although many violinists have written their own.
Brahms’s original plan was for a concerto in four movements, including a scherzo. But he discarded the scherzo and the original slow movement because their style did not fit with the rest of the work. The slow movement we have today opens with the solo oboe playing one of the most delicate and beautiful melodies in the literature. The violin – entering a full two minutes into the movement – then embellishes this melody with arabesques (florid ornamentation of a theme), continuing to maintain a special relationship with the oboe throughout. The middle of the movement becomes more intense and dramatic, but Brahms never loses sight of the theme.
The fiery rondo-finale exploits the melodies and rhythms played by itinerant Gypsy musicians in the cafés of central Europe. It is one of the few places where Joachim’s intervention attenuated the difficulties for the violinist. He managed to get Brahms to moderate the movement’s tempo by adding “ ma non troppo ” (but not too much) to the tempo indication Vivace. Brahms employs a secondary refrain, as well as the initial rondo theme. The episode turns into a fiery, accelerated coda with cadenza-like passagework for the soloist. |
| | | | Copyright © Elizabeth and Joseph Kahn 2008 | |
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