To this day, Brahms’ Hungarian Dances number among his most popular works although he didn’t even write them! As he expressly noted on the title page of the first edition, he “only compiled them for piano duet.” What he meant was that he had taken Hungarian dance tunes, fused them into a larger entity and then had the results published, first in an arrangement for piano duet, since the performance of such duets was extremely popular back then. The first two volumes containing the Dances 1-10 were printed in 1869, and two further volumes with the Dances 11 21 were added by Brahms in 1880.
