Four Slavic Dances (for piano / for four-handed piano / for orchestra)

The arts public today, unfortunately, is still insufficiently acquainted with the life and music of Antun Vancaš (Zagreb, February 14, 1867 – Zagreb, October 27, 1888), an exceptionally talented Croatian composer who met a tragic fate. His works have never been printed, nor is there any book about him in which information about his life, education and works of music has been systematically compiled. Vancaš died when he had only just turned twenty and had not managed to develop his great potentials as a composer. At the Vienna Conservatory, he first studied counterpoint, music theory and harmony in the class of Franz Krenna; after this he studied music at the Paris Conservatory (Conservatorie national supérieur de musique et de danse de Paris), where he was admitted into the composition class of the renowned French composer Jules Massenet. He fell seriously ill after a year and a half of studying in Paris and was forced to return to Zagreb, where he soon died. Antun Vancaš composed his four Slavonic Dances in 1887. Very likely he had before his eye as he composed the celebrated dances of the same name by Antonín Dvořák. This can be seen not only from the name but also in their formal structure and certain typical composing techniques. The harmonic language of the dances is characteristic of the period of musical Romanticism of the first half of the 19th century. In accord with the simplicity of the melodic lines of the dances and their latent harmonies, the composer harmonised them simply and perspicuously. He orchestrated only the first three Slavonic Dances. The last and fourth in this edition was orchestrated by composer Ante Knešaurek after the version for four-handed piano, while Felix Spiller arranged Slavonic Dances no. 2 and no. 3 for piano after the version for orchestra. The Slavonic Dances of Antun Vancaš, particularly in view of the relatively small production of orchestral work in the Croatia of the time are valuable and important musical testimonies in which in a characteristic way stylised Croatian folk music was used. Unpretentious, cheerful and playful, they also show the undoubted musical talent of the young composer whom death deprived of the rich harvest of ripe fruits of the art of music that this little dance cycle, however incomplete, undeniably heralded, but which, as fate would have it, was never fulfilled.