Most of Franz Schubert's short life was spent in either the city of Vienna or its immediate outskirts, but during the summers of 1818 and 1824, Schubert accepted the job of teaching music to Count Esterházy's two daughters in their summer home at Zseliz (the Count was of the same noble Hungarian Esterházy family for whose court, decades earlier, Schubert's musical ancestor Franz Josef Haydn was Kapellmeister). These were profoundly unhappy summers for Schubert, as letters from the composer to his friends make entirely clear—homesickness and longing for his many dear friends he had in Vienna were the worst of the problems, but during the second of those two summers, Schubert's growing affections for the Count's daughter Caroline (affections the composer knew could lead only to turmoil) made a situation he found uncomfortable nearly insufferable. None of this unhappiness led to a corresponding creative atrophy, however: during the summer of 1818, Schubert himself claimed to be "composing like a god," and during the summer of 1824, his production was not much less. At Zseliz, Schubert was of course introduced to all kinds of Hungarian and gypsy music-making, and in one tiny work composed during the first week of September 1824—just a couple of weeks before Schubert returned to Vienna—Schubert allows this colorful new musical idiom to inflect his own style. That work is the Hungarian Melody in B minor for solo piano, D. 817, unpublished and unknown to the public until a full century after the composer's death.

The Hungarian Melody, as it turns out, is the very same music—a wild Magyar dance, tamed by Schubert into a somewhat less high-fevered allegretto shape—that Schubert used in the finale of the Divertissement à l'hongraise, D. 818, composed around the same time. Most of the piece is saturated with a rubberband-like dotted rhythm that in characteristic, even stereotypical Eastern-European folk fashion puts the metric stress on the offbeats; those spots where this defining rhythm lets up for a beat or two—spots perfectly selected by the twenty-seven-year-old composer—breathe life into the phrases. The piece falls into four broad sections, the first of which is to be repeated. During the second paragraph of music, Schubert largely abandons the dotted-rhythm idea in favor of a new syncopated thought and a twice-given, grace-note laden bit of gypsy fire. The third section of music is identical to the first save that it begins in E minor and modulates back to the original B tonic (whereas in the opening, the music moved from B minor to F sharp minor/major). A coda follows, beginning enigmatically with a highly dissonant rendition of the grace-note laden idea from the second section but eventually finding its way back down to the warmest of B majors—a long, drawn-out final pedal-point in which we can clearly hear the voice of Schubert's still-unborn musical descendent Johannes Brahms.

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