Two Minuets, Op. 28, B58

These two little pieces were probably influenced by Schubert’s piano dances. They adopt a simple formal arrangement and, rather than minuets, are closer in character to the Czech folk dance “sousedska” (slow dance in 3/4 time). This point had already been taken up in a review printed in Dalibor magazine on 10 February 1882, which expressed reservations that “the title does not correspond with the content. It almost seems as if the composer has raised a foreign banner; one cannot understand why.” The work was published in Prague in 1879 by Emanuel Stary. The first of these minuets bears a note regarding some form of instrumentation, which suggests that there was also an orchestral version; we have no record of this today, and the autograph of the piano version is also no longer in existence.