Uncommon AMQS from the great violinist who has penned the opening measures of his arrangement of the Brahms Hungarian Dance Number 2, in F Major. Titled "Hungarian," boldly signed in full and dated April 3, 1896. Creases, mounting remnants to verso, very closely tripped along the upper edge, else fine. 6.4 x 4.3 inches; 16.2 x 11.2 cm.

A recording of Joachim performing this work may be heard here. 

The forty-year friendship between Johannes Brahms, composer and pianist, and Joseph Joachim, violinist and composer, was one of the most significant relationships in nineteenth-century music. It had its problems—each man’s touchiness and insecurity aggravated the other’s, and Brahms soon took care never to live in close proximity to Joachim, whose capacity for morbid negativity and jealousy came to appal him. There was a long period in which they were not on speaking terms, after Brahms chivalrously took the side of Joachim’s wife Amalie when he tried to divorce her on grounds of imagined adultery with Brahms’s publisher Simrock. But their admiration for each other’s artistry was profound and unwavering, and bore sustained creative fruit on Brahms’s side in many compositions of which his Violin Concerto (written for and dedicated to Joachim) and Double Concerto (written for Joachim and the cellist of the Joachim Quartet, Haussmann) are only the most famous examples.

Brahms probably first heard Hungarian gypsy tunes, and started to collect them, from his violinist friend Eduard Reményi, in whose repertoire they featured prominently. His first set of Hungarian Dances, now grown to ten and arranged for piano duet (the most popular medium for home music-making), seems first to have been heard in Oldenburg in 1868, performed by Brahms and Clara Schumann, and did not appear in print until the following year, from Simrock, who had now become his principal publisher. Brahms did not consider the Hungarian Dances as original compositions but as arrangements—which is why he gave them no opus number—and though a few of the melodies may in fact be his own, the bulk of them derive from popular gypsy tunes of the csárdás type, many of which could be found in Hungarian editions attributed to individual composers.

 In 1872 Brahms issued all ten dances in a version for solo piano, presumably worked up from the original form. Meanwhile Joachim’s version of the dances—which Brahms welcomed enthusiastically—had already appeared in 1871, and through his performances of them Joachim did much to spread their fame across Europe.