Johannes Brahms (1833-97) master of the symphonic form, began his career as a pianist, playing in seedy taverns in his native Hamburg.  He was a teen-ager, and he was augmenting his family’s income.

         At seventeen, he heard the Jewish Hungarian Eduard Remenyi play Hungarian Gypsy, or Roma, music on the violin. Brahms liked what he heard.  Three years later, he was accompanying Remenyi on the piano.

         The taste for Roma music remained with Brahms, as did his penchant for piano music.  (He was a keyboard virtuoso.) The two  interests merged to produce, in 1869, 21 Hungarian Dances written for piano four-hands: piano duets to be played by two people sitting at the same keyboard.

         The piano, in the mid-nineteenth century, had become an immensely popular instrument in middle-class households throughout Western civilization.  It held sway as the supreme music source  — there was of course no radio or phonograph to listen to — around which families would gather.  And when pieces  were composed for four hands, it meant that two people could play at once at the same piano.

         Ranging in length from about one minute to four, the Hungarian Dances were a phenomenal success, and were played all over the world in their original form.  Later, Brahms would arrange ten of them for solo piano.  Countless third-party arrangements for individual instruments, ensembles, and orchestras appeared over the years. 

         Albert Parlow, (1824-1888) orchestrated Number Six, which we hear this evening. While doing so, he transposed it from D flat major to D major, for which all string players will be forever grateful.

         (In 1880, Parlow was made Musikdirektor of the Prussian Army.)