Brahms - Hungarian dances for cello and piano. You can download the sheet music Brahms - Hungarian dances for cello and piano on this page. The Hungarian Dances owe their real fame - and they are among his most popular works — to the orchestral versions, in which the music reveals its brilliance more fully than in the piano versions. This is due not simply to the greater variety of colour which an instrumental ensemble gives, but also to specific effects which are inevitably more subdued on the piano: the typical string tremolos, for example, the rapid crescendos and diminuendos, or the rhythmic accents which are an important characteristic of the Hungarian idiom.
This book contains 1-5 Hungarian dances.
To download PDF, click the "Download PDF" button below the appropriate sheet music image. To view the first page of Brahms - Hungarian dances for cello and piano click the music sheet image.
Video: Brahms - Hungarian dance N1 for cello and piano
The ancestor of these works of Brahms is not, of course, real Hungarian folk music: it was not until the early twentieth century that that became the subject of serious study, by Bartók, Kodály and others. Rather the line of descent is from the captivating sound-world of gypsy music, through the music of Haydn's and Schubert's day, where it had become a favourite means of colouration with the tag "alia ungarese". The idiom of that ancestry, though symphonically stylized, remains audible not only in the sound of Brahms's dances but also in the atmosphere. They vary in mood between high-spirited vitality and melancholia. For the most part Brahms used existing gypsy melodies, which he had collected since his youth, but a few are his own invention. The first set, nos. 1—10, has on the whole the livelier tunes, while melancholy is more prevalent in the second set. The music owes much of its unique character to the agogic fluctuations, the switch from restraint to explosive energy, the alternation of mounting tension and relaxation. At the same time the score permits, indeed, it demands a great degree of creative freedom from interpreters; ever new melodies and motivic relationships succeed each other in continually changing lights, which makes every performance of the Hungarian Dances a tour deforce of musicianship.
