The German composer Johannes Brahms composed the famous Hungarian Dances.
The Hungarian composer Bela Bartok composed the (not as, but still reasonably) famous Romanian Dances.
Can anyone continue the chain in either direction? Ideally with other “dances”, but anything with a nationality in the title will work. (Disclaimer: I can’t, so don’t expect a definite answer to be coming.)
Hmm, does a polka by Enescu hand it off to a Polish composer?
Gioachino Rossini composed the operas The Turk in Italy and The Italian in Algiers.
I always thought he should have completed the circuit with The Algerian in Turkey.
Back to the thread topic: the Austrian composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed Three German Dances.
If we allow these, then we can possibly complete the circle by noting that the Polish composer Chopin wrote a piano piece called “Souvenir de Vienne”.
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Relying heavily on Google and Wikipedia, I found that Max Schönherr’s most (possibly only) famous piece was Austrian Peasant Dances. He was born in what is now Slovenia, but what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire … so that’s problematic. I say we count it though, and if there are any Slovenian dances or, fudging it even more, Yugoslavian dances, then I think we can keep the chain going.
“The Polovtsian Dances, or Polovetsian Dances (Russian: Половецкие пляски, romanized: Polovetskie plyaski), form an exotic scene at the end of act 2 of Alexander Borodin’s opera Prince Igor… The name Polovtsian Dances refers to the Cumans (Polovtsy), who were nomadic invaders of Russia; the Cumans capture Igor in the opera and then entertain him with dances.[2]” - Polovtsian Dances - Wikipedia
This music is heard in the 1931 German film Congress Dances, a piece of Viennese schmaltz I endured because it was one of my mom’s favorite movies (primarily owing to the performance of Conrad Veidt as Metternich).
Ah, that’s a good one. One of those dances provided the tune for Stranger in Paradise, an old standard that’s probably mostly forgotten now. I didn’t know Polovitsian was a nationality, but it is more-or-less.
Borodin was Russian, so we need a way to get there. The only Russian Dance I know of is from The Nutcracker, and Tchaikovsky’s also Russian, damn him. If we could get to Russia we could also get to China and “Arabia” by the same source.
Does Antonin Dvorak bring us anywhere in the chain with his Slavonic Dances?
I thought of that, but I think those were mostly based on Czech dances, and he’s Czech, so no chaining there. Let me know if I have that wrong though.