Hungarian Dances Nos. 1 and 5 Johannes Brahms Born in Hamburg, May 7, 1833; Died in Vienna, April 3, 1897

Hungarian Dances Nos. 1 and 5 Johannes Brahms Born in Hamburg, May 7, 1833; died in Vienna, April 3, 1897

As a teenager Brahms fell in love with Hungarian/Gypsy music through meeting Eduard

Reményi, a talented violinist who had been forced to leave Hungary for political reasons. They played together frequently between 1850 and 1852, and in 1853 made a tour of North German towns, always closing their concerts with a group of dazzling Gypsy pieces. The two soon parted company and never met again, but their spheres collided some fifteen years later when

Reményi accused Brahms of plagiarism in connection with the Hungarian Dances.

Having begun writing Hungarian Dances in the 1850’s, Brahms became even more interested in the music of Hungary on concert tours there in 1867. That year he offered six of his Hungarian Dances as piano duets to Budapest publisher Dunkl, who lost out on a fortune by turning them down. Two years later Simrock published Brahms’s first set of ten, whereupon a storm of international proportions broke over his authorship of these tunes. Brahms had explicitly stated to Simrock that these were arrangements, refusing to allow an opus number for this reason. “I offer them as genuine Gypsy children which I did not beget, but merely brought up with bread and milk.”

In 1872 Brahms made solo piano versions, and in 1874 he orchestrated No’s. 1, 3 and

10. (All the others were later orchestrated by other composers.) For years Simrock begged

Brahms to capitalize on the success of the first set, and finally he obliged with eleven more, which Simrock published in 1880. As with the first set, Brahms never claimed his themes were original, except for No’s. 11, 14 and 16; all the others in both sets he derived from popular

Gypsy melodies. He made no distinction between Hungarian and Gypsy music as modern scholars do. He firmly stated that they came either from the Gypsy bands that played in

Hamburg (No’s. 3 and 7) or from music played by Reményi, all of which he noted down by ear.

At the request of Béla Bartók on the 100th anniversary of Brahms’s birth, Erwin Major tracked down the sources of the Hungarian Dances—information Brahms had never known— and they turned out to be by popular Hungarian composers from the 1840’s and 1860’s.

Nonetheless, the pieces all bear Brahms’s stamp and are responsible for making his name a household word. They also made him a fortune—the first composer to do so from published music.

No. 1 in G Minor

Brahms based his first Hungarian Dance on the “Divine Csárdás,” a melody attributed to

Ferenc Sárkozi. In three-part form, the dance maintains its tempo and key in the central section, unlike many of the other dances, but the swirling, passionate melody of the outer parts contrasts nicely with the lightly dancing middle.

No. 5 in G Minor (originally F-sharp Minor)

The ultra-popular No. 5 enchants with its impassioned minor-mode main theme that changes into a capricious mood, then slows seductively before speeding up again. The middle section also contains its share of sudden tempo changes, leading back to a spirited reprise of the opening section. Conductor and composer Albert Parlow (1824–1888) made the present orchestral arrangement at Brahms’s request.

A fascinating historical footnote involves this dance: Brahms recorded part of it—his only recording—on December 2, 1889, on a wax cylinder under the supervision of Thomas

Edison’s agent, Theo Wangemann. Though scratchy, the recording shows the rhythmic freedom and even certain improvised melodic touches that Brahms brought to his “Gypsy children.”

Brahms’ scores call for two flutes and piccolo; two oboes; two clarinets; two bassoons; four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, triangle, bass drum, cymbals, and strings.

The Miraculous Mandarin Suite, BB 82, Op. 19 Béla Bartók Born in Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary (now Sînnicolau Mare, Romania), March 25, 1881; died in New York, September 26, 1945

What possessed Bartók to write a ballet—or more accurately a pantomime—that would almost never be performed in its original form? The Miraculous Mandarin, composed between

1918 and 1919, is based upon Menyhért Lengyel’s frightening, lurid story set in a brothel room.

Three seduction scenes transpire in which a girl is coerced by three thugs to lure in men, whom they then beat and rob. Most cities refused the work, but the premiere took place in Cologne on November 27, 1926. The audience left in a huff, the remaining performances were canceled, and the conductor was admonished by the City Council. The Miraculous Mandarin achieved some success the following year in Prague, but when it was finally scheduled in Budapest in

1931 to celebrate Bartók’s 50th birthday, it was banned after the dress rehearsal. Another projected performance in Budapest 10 years later was prohibited by the clergy even after some doctoring of the libretto. The first performance in Hungary finally took place in 1946, the year after the composer’s death.

Why this libretto then? The work was partly an outgrowth of the taste for horror and atrocity that had entered the literary world at the turn of the century in the works of Poe,

Wedekind and Wilde. In his student days Bartók had been greatly excited by Strauss’s Salome, which is based on Wilde’s play. (Salome had caused much righteous indignation itself.) The

Mandarin may also have been, as some have suggested, Bartók’s protest against war—as destroyer of culture and all human values—and may further show his belief that love, in the midst of death and destruction, is still the prime force. And, he may have been attracted to the libretto’s elemental passions as an ideal vehicle for his musical style, which was moving toward its peak of harshness and dissonance, influenced by the music of Schoenberg and Stravinsky— particularly the latter’s Rite of Spring.

Whatever Bartók’s motivation, we can only be thankful he made a concert suite from the work in 1927. In this version—roughly the first two-thirds of the pantomime with a concert ending—the music has received its well-deserved attention. Recent commentators have ranked

The Miraculous Mandarin as a masterpiece equal to Stravinsky’s Rite for its power and originality, saying it was denied its rightful place in history only because of the circumstances of the original staging.

The furious introduction represents the rush of traffic outside the girl’s room. After silence and a timpani roll, the curtain rises on a back street room where the three thugs urge the girl to dance (clarinet solo) at the window to attract their victims. The first to respond is an aging but penniless gentleman, who courts the girl with comic posturing (muted trombone glissandos). He is beaten and thrown out when he becomes violent, and the girl is forced back to the window. The second victim is a shy, confused youth who is also thrown out when he is discovered to have no money. At this point the Mandarin appears (pseudo-“Eastern” theme for trombones). The girl, at once fascinated and repelled, begins her erotic dance, waltz-like at first, while the Mandarin watches. The dance grows more and more frenzied as he chases her around the room. Finally he catches her and they struggle. The Suite ends here with a brief concert ending.

To understand the story, though, we should add that the pantomime continues with the thugs pouncing on the Mandarin, robbing him, and trying to suffocate him. His longing, however, keeps him alive. They then try stabbing him and at last hang him from the ceiling.

Only when the girl embraces him do his wounds begin to bleed and, sated, he is able to die.

Though Bartók’s own condensation omits this final scene, his pointed musical illustration, which rivals Strauss’s tone poems, is fully apparent in the Suite. Especially striking are the depictions of bodily sensations, as when the Mandarin “begins to tremble in feverish excitement” as he looks at the girl—slashing glissandos and quivering tremolos in the horns and winds achieve the effect.

Instrumentation for The Miraculous Mandarin is two flutes and piccolo; two oboes and English horn; two B-flat clarinets, an E-flat clarinet and bass clarinet; two bassoons and contrabassoon; four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, snare drum, tenor drum, triangle, tam-tam, xylophone, and strings.

Piano Concerto No. 3 in D Minor, Op. 30 Sergei Rachmaninoff Born in Semyonovo, April 1, 1873; died in Beverly Hills, March 28, 1943

During the summer of 1909 Rachmaninoff wrote his Third Piano Concerto in preparation for his first American tour—he was to perform over twenty concerts of his own works as conductor and pianist. When he left for the United States in October, he carried the manuscript of the just-completed work and a dummy keyboard so he could practice aboard ship. He premiered the Concerto on November 28 with the New York Symphony Orchestra conducted by Walter Damrosch and performed it again a month and a half later with the New York

Philharmonic under Gustav Mahler. Rachmaninoff was so impressed by Mahler’s painstaking rehearsal of the new score that he recalled the incident years later:

The rehearsal began at ten o’clock. I was to join it at eleven, and arrived in good time. But we did not begin to work until twelve, when there was only half an hour left, during which I did my utmost to play through a composition which usually lasts thirty-six minutes [most performances take even longer]. . . . We played and played. . . . Half an hour was long past, but Mahler did not pay the slightest attention to this fact. . . . Forty-five minutes later Mahler announced “Now we will repeat the first movement.” My heart froze within me. I expected a dreadful row, or at least a heated protest from the orchestra. This would certainly have happened in any other orchestra, but here I did not notice a single sign of displeasure. The musicians played the first movement with a keen or perhaps even closer application than the previous time.

Many commentators have remarked on the ingenuity of Rachmaninoff’s construction in this Concerto—the degree of thematic integration stands out among his works. The quiet pulsing rhythm that opens the Concerto, for example, becomes one of its unifying features. The lyrical main theme, of very narrow range, has been likened to a Russian folk song or something liturgical, possibly the Russian monastic chant “Thy tomb, O Savior, soldiers guarding.” Any likeness, however, was subconscious, for Rachmaninoff stated explicitly that it was “borrowed neither from folk songs nor from church sources. It simply ‘wrote itself!’ . . . I was thinking only of sound. I wanted to ‘sing’ the melody on the piano as a singer would sing it.”

Rachmaninoff positioned his unusually lengthy and difficult cadenza at the end of the development. He published two versions of the first part of this cadenza, one (most frequently played, following Rachmaninoff and Horowitz’s example) light and fleet, the other more weighty and chordal. Having treated both main themes extensively in the development and in the cadenza, he foreshortens the recapitulation to the point that it seems like a coda.

The slow Intermezzo presents a sorrowful, even tragic main theme characterized by a distinctive falling third. Rachmaninoff treats it rhapsodically rather than in strict variations. His scherzo-like interlude provides thematic integration, not only in the clarinet and bassoon solo which transforms the first movement’s main theme, but in the piano filigree, also based on the opening theme.

Connected to the preceding movement without pause, the dramatic finale relates to the opening rhythmic motive in both of its main ideas. The second theme’s pounding quality unexpectedly opens out into a broad lyrical theme, which Rachmaninoff, master of the “big tune,” uses with apotheotic quality at the movement’s end—one of the most memorable moments in the Romantic concerto repertoire.

The Third Concerto, one of the most demanding of all virtuoso showcases, was held at arm’s length by critics, audiences and pianists for at least two decades, in the shadow of the more popular Second. Rachmaninoff had dedicated it to the Polish pianist Josef Hofmann, who never performed it, partly perhaps because of his small hands, but largely because he thought it

“cut up” and lacking in form. The Third finally came to rival the Second in appeal, primarily through Horowitz, who, despite the age difference, formed a great friendship with the composer. Rachmaninoff considered Horowitz the greatest pianist of the century; Horowitz considered his mastery of the Third Concerto his proudest achievement.

Rachmaninoff’ score calls for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombone, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, snare drum, and strings.