Learning the Bartok Romanian Folk Dances: A Practical Guide
The six Romanian Folk Dances were composed in 1915, extracted from folk melodies Bartók and his wife Marta collected during a trip to Transylvania. The original scoring is for violin and piano, and they remain one of the more approachable entries in the solo violin repertoire. I've taught these repeatedly over the years, and I'll walk through what actually works rather than what looks good on paper. The scores are in the public domain in most territories. You can find them at IMSLP. The Editio Musica Budapest version (EMB) is the urtext standard and cheaper than the Boosey & Hawkes print edition. If you're playing from a piano reduction without the full violin part, double-check against IMSLP because some arrangements silently alter the ending bars. I lost a week to that on movement four once, thinking my edition was wrong when it was actually a different arrangement entirely. All six dances are in a minor or modal framework, drawn from regional styles like the grai, brâncovenesc, and hoinar. The folk source material uses irregular phrase lengths — 7, 8, and sometimes 11-beat groupings — which Bartók preserved rather than smoothing into four-bar symmetry. This means your practice workflow needs to treat phrase boundaries differently than you would for Baroque or Classical repertoire. Counting becomes essential before any bowing decisions.
Brazu (1) — Fast, in 2/4, G minor. Starts with a descending scale figure that establishes the Dorian flavor. The challenge is maintaining articulation through the repeated notes without sounding mechanical. Bătuta (2) — Moderate tempo, Dorian mode. More lyrical than it appears at first glance. The inner voice in the piano part carries counterpoint that the violinist should internalize, not ignore. Skip that and the dance collapses into monody. Buciumeasca (3) — Slow, in E minor with a harmonic ascent and Phrygian descent. This is where the rubato matters most. The folk tradition here is flexible; playing it metronomically strips the character. I use a loose ~72 BPM feel as a starting point but adjust by ear each rehearsal.
Pe loc (4) — Fast, 2/4, F-sharp minor. Driving and repetitive by design. The difficulty is endurance — keep the same attack on every stroke through forty-four measures of continuous sixteenth-note motion. Poarta-Alba-Iuliei (5) — Moderate, 3/8 or 6/8 depending on your edition. The folk tune is straightforward; the piano harmonies are what make it interesting. The violin plays long tones over syncopated piano accents, which creates a tension that's easy to underplay. Legana (6) — Quick, 2/4, A minor. Double-stop passages appear early and recur throughout. The opening double-stop leap is where most beginners fracture — they rush the shift and land flat. Practice it isolated at quarter note = 60 until the intonation is consistent, then build.
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Performance and preparation
If you're performing all six, plan for about ten to twelve minutes total. Audiences generally expect some of the faster ones — Brazu and Legana tend to land. Buciumeasca works best when you don't over-romanticize it; it's a lullaby, not an elegy. I see performers drag it to sixty seconds when thirty-five seconds is the natural arc. For the violin part specifically, check whether your edition matches the 1915 original or the later orchestrated version. The orchestrated version (1917, revised 1928) has slight differences in certain bar endings and dynamic markings. The IMSLP scan of the autograph manuscript clarifies ambiguities that printed editions sometimes paper over.
A common pitfall with the piano reduction
When rehearsing with a pianist who hasn't studied folk music, they will straighten out the rhythms. The folk dances rely on asymmetrical stress patterns that feel "off" to someone trained on standard Western notation. My workaround is simple: I print the folk melody source on a separate sheet and lay it next to the score. The pianist can see that Bartók didn't make a mistake in movement two, bar fourteen — he transcribed a 7/8 accent pattern faithfully. This saves about ten minutes of rehearsal per piece and prevents the resentment that builds when a pianist keeps "correcting" your part.
Recording and listening reference
For a clean reference, the Perlman and Backhaus recording on Sony Classical is well-balanced. For a more folk-inflected approach, the Ghrek and Bratosin version shows how close to the original material the tunes sit. The Balogh and Földes EMI recording is also worth hearing for tempo choices — Balogh takes Brazu noticeably slower than most, which reveals the Dorian contour more clearly.
Limits of the repertoire
These dances are short and idiomatic, which is why they're so frequently programmed. But they're also short enough that a single weak performance exposes every flaw in tuning or rhythm. There's nowhere to hide. If you're assembling a recital and only have time for three, I'd drop Pe loc and keep the others — it's the most repetitive and the least distinctive harmonically. The remaining five hold together better as a set.
Sheet music alternatives
EMBUdapest Music Publishing sells a perforated study copy if you want to mark it up directly. The Schirmer library reprint is adequate for casual study but has some typos in the double-stop bar lines in movement six. I caught one in the 2018 edition where the left-hand fingering in bar 22 of Legana doesn't match the actual written notes — a quick comparison with the EMB score resolves it.
