Hungarian Dance no. 5 in G minor

The fifth of the Hungarian Dances rests on a csárdás by Béla Kéler, Bártfai emlék, whose authorship Brahms did not know — he had taken the tune to be traditional, as he had most of the set. It appeared in 1869 in the first book for piano duet and became the best known of the twenty-one. The orchestration usually played is not by Brahms but by Martin Schmeling. The dances were the most profitable publications of his career: the most practical pieces, he said, that so impractical a man as himself could offer.