Brahms loved the sound of Hungarian Gypsy music. All his life he relished that richly ornamented, virtuosic and fiery style that was wildly popular in Europe during most of the 19th century. He first came into contact with it during his teens, while on tour with Hungarian violinist Eduard Reményi. He learned to improvise piano accompaniments to Reményi's Gypsy fantasies, and entertained Robert and Clara Schumann's children (as one of them later recalled) with “wonderful, melancholy Hungarian melodies.”

Brahms was deeply affected by this music, which provided a welcome counterweight to the often tragic and somber tone of his own works. Hungarian Gypsy melodies found their way into many of Brahms's large-scale compositions (the Piano Quartet in G minor, the Violin Concerto, the Double Concerto, to name but a few). Gypsy music appears in the finales of each of those works, bringing relief after much more serious goings-on.

In the Hungarian Dances, Brahms indulged his love for this music totally and exclusively. He rarely let his hair down as completely as he did in these dances, originally written for piano duet. (The three dances heard at the present concert are the only ones orchestrated by Brahms himself.)  Listening to these dances, it is not hard to picture Brahms, the aging bachelor, as Jan Swafford depicted him in his 1997 biography: “He could…sit for hours under the trees at the Café Czarda in the Prater [in Vienna], nursing mugs of beer and listening to gypsy bands, who seemed to play with particular fire when the Herr Professor showed up.”