It was the “Slavonic Dances for Piano Duet” op. 46 which brought Antonín Dvorák unexpected international fame. An unerring business instinct led Fritz Simrock, at the beginning of 1878, to ask the Czech composer for some works for piano duet into which Dvorák incorporated musical themes from where he grew up. Following in the footsteps of Brahms’s “Hungarian Dances”, Dvorák refrained from a literal portrayal of individual kinds of dance. As a result, he created unique masterpieces of European mu...