Brahms and the Style Hongrois

Resumo

The focus of this essay is Brahms’s use of the so-called style hongrois in his piano music. Style hongrois is a problematic concept, because the real practitioners of the style were not ethnic Hungarians but rather Hungarians Gypsies. The style hongrois denotes both a repertory and a performance tradition, wherein Gypsy musicians freely incorporated outside influences into their own music. Moreover, composers such as Brahms adapted features of the style to their own creative ends. In order to better define Brahms’s style hongrois, then,
I shall compare it with that of earlier composers – such as Schubert and Liszt – and offer biographical and analytical evidence for such a definition.