ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK SYMPHONY NO. 9, OP. 95

ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK

SYMPHONY NO. 9, OP. 95, B. 178, E MINOR “FROM THE NEW WORLD

INSTRUMENTATION: Solo violin and 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets in A, 2 bassoons; 2 natural horns crooked in D, and 2 natural horns crooked in E, 2 trumpets in D, timpani, and strings

DURATION: About 38 minutes

PROGRAM NOTES

Antonín Dvořák’s arrival in America on September 26, 1892, was a triumph of persistence for Jeannette Thurber, founder of the National Conservatory of Music in New York. She hoped that the appointment of this colorful nationalist with a wide reputation both as composer and teacher would put her institution on a firm footing and eventually produce American composers who could vie with any in the world. Dvořák had at first been unwilling to leave his beloved Prague and undertake the rigors of a sea voyage to the New World for so uncertain a venture, but Mrs. Thurber’s repeated offers eventually wore down his resistance. She also hoped that, in addition to teaching young American musicians, he would compose new works especially for American consumption. One potential project was an opera based on Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha, which Dvořák had enjoyed in a Czech translation years before. The opera never materialized, but the subject influenced the first large work Dvořák composed here, his most famous symphony.

Dvořák and his wife were accompanied by Josef Jan Kovarik, a young American violinist of Czech ancestry who had just finished his studies at the Prague Conservatory and who served as a kind of private secretary to the composer during his American years (Kovarik later played in the New York Philharmonic for many years and in the late 1920s he wrote down his recollections of Dvořák’s American period for the composer’s biographer Otakar Sourek).

Finding hotel life too expensive and busy for their tastes, the Dvořáks rented a house on East 17th Street, only a few blocks from the Conservatory, and the composer enthusiastically entered into his new position. The initial months were hectic: first there were official welcomes, then a concert and banquet in his honor. Then there were performances: his Te Deum for the first time in New York, his Sixth Symphony in New York, and his Requiem at a Cecilia concert in Boston with the composer conducting.

It was already clear to Dvořák that he was more than a celebrity; great things were expected of him. He wrote to a Moravian friend in mock terror that what the American papers were writing was “simply terrible—they see in me, they say, the savior of music and I don’t know what else besides.” But after a few months he wrote to friends in Prague more equably:The Americans expect me...to show them the promised land and kingdom of a new and independent art, in short to create a national music. If the small Czech nation can have such musicians, they say, why could not they, too, when their country and people is so immense. Forgive me for lacking a little in modesty, but I am only telling you what the American papers are constantly writing. It is certainly both a great and splendid task for me and I hope that with God’s help I shall accomplish it. There is more than enough material here and plenty of talent. I have pupils from as far away as San Francisco. They are mostly poor people, but at our Institute teaching is free of charge, anybody who is really talented pays no fees! I have only 8 pupils, but some of them very promising.

For the first few months there was no time to compose, although he did orchestrate a cantata, The American Flag, which he had written during the summer before coming to New York. But shortly after writing the letter quoted above, he began a sketchbook of musical ideas and made his first original sketches in America on December 19. The next day he noted on the second page one of his best known melodic inventions: the melody assigned to the English horn at the beginning of the slow movement in the Symphony “From The New World.” In the days that followed, he sketched other ideas on some dozen pages of the book, many of them used in the symphony, some reserved for later works, and some ultimately discarded. The eighth page of the sketchbook has the theme of the first Allegro (the idea stated by the horns), but here in F major instead of the final choice of key, E minor!

Finally, on January 10, 1893, Dvořák turned a fresh page and started sketching the continuous thread of the melodic discourse (with only the barest indications of essential accompaniments) for the entire first movement. From that time until completion of the symphony on May 24, he fitted composition into his teaching as best he could.

As the summer approached, the Dvořáks decided not to return to Europe for the vacation, but rather to visit Kovarik’s parents in the predominantly Czech community of Spillville, Iowa. The composer sent for his children (who had stayed in Prague in the care of his sister‑in‑law) to join them for the summer. Just as he was writing the final page of the symphony in full score, he received a telegram with news that they were about to embark for New York from England. So great was his excitement that he forgot to write in the trombone parts on the last page but noted at the bottom: “The children have arrived in Southampton. A cable arrived at 1:33 in the afternoon.” He signed the page with his customary “Praise God! Finished on the 24th of May, 1893. Antonín Dvořák.” It was only at some later time that the missing trombone parts were brought to his attention and filled in.

 No piece of Dvořak’s has been subjected to so much debate as the Symphony “From the New World”. The composer himself started it all with an interview published in the New York Herald on May 21, just as he was finishing the last movement. He was quoted as having said:

I am now satisfied that the future of music in this country must be founded upon what are called Negro (sic) melodies. This must be the real foundation of any serious, and original school of composition to be developed in the United States. When I came here last year I was impressed with this idea, and it has developed into a settled conviction. These beautiful and varied themes are the product of the soil...There is nothing in the whole range of composition that cannot be supplied with themes from this source.

At another time Dvořák complicated the issue by claiming to have studied the music of the Native Americans and even to have found it strikingly similar to that of the African Amercians. This view was surely mistaken, or at least greatly oversimplified. His comments indicated that he regarded the pentatonic scale (an arrangement of five pitches without half‑steps, i.e., do, re, mi, sol, la) as the essential link between the two, but relatively few Native American melodies are pentatonic, whereas pentatonic melodies are just as characteristic of European folk song as they are of American ones.

In any case, Dvořák’s comments attracted much attention. Diligent American reporters buttonholed European composers and asked them for their views, then wrote that most composers felt Dvořák’s recommendations to be impractical, if not impossible. Thus, when the new symphony appeared six months later, everyone wanted to know if he had followed his own advice. Claims appeared on all sides that the melodic material of the symphony was borrowed from African American music, or from Native American music, or perhaps both. In another interview just before the first performance, Dvořák emphasized that he sought the spirit, not the letter of traditional melodies, incorporating their qualities, but developing them “with the aid of all the achievements of modern rhythm, counterpoint, and orchestral coloring.”

Despite the composer’s disclaimer, accounts of his tracking down sources for the music became progressively embellished. A particularly instructive example of the way the legend grew can be found in the program notes of the first few performances of the Symphony “From The New World” by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. For the first Boston performance, only two weeks after the New York premiere, the program annotator William Foster Apthorp discussed hypothetically at great length exactly what kind of African American melodies Dvořák might have had in mind (and this before he had even heard the work). Surely, he ventured, they could not be minstrel show songs and other similar tunes by Stephen Foster but rather the “genuine” music “sung by the real African Americans themselves (not their burnt‑cork parodists) on the Southern plantations.” But he was still cautious enough to refer to the presumed original tunes as a kind of folk song foundation from which the composer could draw such elements as suited his needs. But by the time the BSO performed the symphony for the third time, in November 1896, Apthorp said flatly, “Its thematic material is made up largely of Negro (sic) melodies from the Southern plantations.”

Kovarik’s memoirs tell of another incident that occurred when, in preparation for the premiere performance by the New York Philharmonic, he had delivered the score to Anton Seidl, one of the musicians who had taken issue with Dvořák’s statement about the applicability of African American and Native American themes to symphonies. The following day Dvořák and Kovarik paid one of their customary social calls on Seidl:

The two gentlemen talked about all sorts of things but never so much as referred to the Symphony with one single word. I sat through it on tenterhooks! At last half past four approached, the hour they usually parted. Onlythen Seidl took me to one side and told me that he had spent the entire previous evening looking through the score, and added: “Wissen Sie, die Sinfonie ist lauter Indianermusik!” [“You know, the symphony is pure Indian (sic) music!”] When I told the master, on our way back home, what Seidl said, he smiled and replied, “Well, then Seidl has seen the light? There will be more of them.”

Since Dvořák sketched all the thematic material of the symphony during his fourth month in this country, when he had never been south or west of New York, it is hard to imagine what music “from the Southern plantations” he might have heard. And as for Native Amercian melodies, well, there were a few unscientific transcriptions and even a doctoral dissertation published in German, as well as, perhaps, a Wild West show or two.

And yet there are witnesses who merit credence for some claims of ethnic influence. One of these is Victor Herbert, then known as a conductor and as the leading cellist of his generation (he had not yet started composing the operettas that were to make him famous). Herbert was head of the cello faculty at the National Conservatory and worked in close proximity to Dvořák during his first year at the institution. (The two men’s connections were no doubt strengthened by the fact that both had similar warm and congenial personalities, entirely lacking in pretense; Herbert’s Second Cello Concerto, first performed in 1894, is regarded as the principal impetus for Dvořák’s work in the same medium—the last large composition of his American years.) Herbert recalled later that the young black composer and singer Harry T. Burleigh, then a student at the Conservatory, had given Dvořák some of the tunes for the symphony. He added, “I have seen this denied—but it is true.” Certainly on a number of occasions Burleigh sang spirituals for Dvořák, who took a great interest in him as one of the most talented students at the school.

Whether or not he gave Dvořák any actual melodies, Burleigh certainly familiarized him with the characteristic melodic types of the spiritual, including the frequent appearance of the pentatonic scale. Perhaps, then, it was to suggest a particularly “American” quality that Dvořák reworked some of the original themes from his sketchbook to make them more obviously pentatonic. The clearest case of this is the English horn solo at the beginning of the slow movement, which in the original sketch lacked most of the dotted notes and had no pentatonic feeling. A very simple melodic change made the opening phrases strictly pentatonic, perhaps more “American.” The dotted rhythms, which were also an afterthought, may be a reflection of the rhythm of one of Burleigh’s favorite songs, “Steal Away.” Finally, the English writer H.C. Colles, who once asked Burleigh to sing for him the same tunes he had sung for Dvořák, commented that the timbre of his voice resembled no orchestral instrument so much as the English horn, the very instrument that Dvořák finally chose to play the theme, after having planned originally to give it to clarinets and flutes.

The title that Dvořák appended to the symphony—almost at the last minute—has also been heavily interpreted, probably over‑interpreted, in discussions of the work’s national character. Kovarik told how the title came to be added after Anton Seidl had asked for, and received, permission to give the first performance:

That was in the middle of November 1893. The following day Seidl informed the master that the symphony would be given at the concert to be held about the 15th of December and that he should send him the score as soon as possible. The same evening, before I set out with the score, the master wrote at the last minute on the title‑page, “Z Noveho sveta” (“From the New World”). Till then there was only E minor Symphony…The title “From the New World” caused then and still causes today, at least here in America, much confusion and division of opinion. There were and are many people who thought and think that the title is to be understood as meaning “American” symphony, i.e., a symphony with American music. Quite a wrong idea! This title means nothing more than “Impressions and Greetings from the New World,” as the master himself more than once explained. And so when at length it was performed and when the master read all sorts of views on whether he had or had not created an “American” music, he smiled and said, “It seems that I have got them all confused,” and added, “at home they will understand at once what I meant.”

All in all, then, the American influence is exotic trimming on a framework basically characteristic of the Czech composer. Today, nearly a century after the piece’s first performance, we don’t get so exercised over whether the symphony is really American music; the point is moot now that American composers have long since ceased functioning as imitators of European art. Still, there is little reason to doubt Dvořák’s evident sincerity when he wrote to a Czech friend when he composed it: “I should never have written the symphony ‘just so’ if I hadn’t seen America.”

Most critics and analysts regard the Symphony No. 7 as Dvořák’s most successful solution to the problems of symphonic construction and No. 8 as a highly original formal evasion of traditional structural concerns, but they have tended to patronize No. 9 as “fabricated.” Audiences, on the other hand, have never failed to embrace the Symphony for a New World wholeheartedly from the very first.

After a slow introduction that hints at the main theme, the horns play a soft, syncopated fanfare over a string tremolo. Originally Dvořák had the cellos doubling the horns here, but the effect is much more striking with horns alone, and he sensibly crossed out the cello part. This theme is one of several that will recur throughout the symphony as one of its main unifying elements. The dotted rhythmic pendant to the horn figure leads the harmony to G minor for a theme of narrow compass (introduced in flute and clarinet) over a drone. This in turn brightens to G major and the most memorable moment in the Allegro: a new theme (an unconscious reminiscence of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot?”) presented by the solo flute in its lowest register; the first four notes of this tune, too, will recur many times later on.

The two middle movements, according to Dvořák, were inspired in part by passages in The Song of Hiawatha. The slow movement was suggested by the funeral of Minnehaha in the forest, but at the same time Dvořák instilled a deep strain of his own homesickness for Bohemia (perhaps it is no accident that the text later attached to this melody was “Goin’ home”). The more Dvořák worked over this movement, the slower he felt the tempo should go. In the autograph score it was marked Andante. During the first rehearsal, Seidl apparently took the movement at a slower tempo than the composer had envisioned, but Dvořák liked it, and when the score was sent off to Simrock for engraving, the tempo was given as Larghetto. Soon Dvořák decided that he wanted it slower still, and sent a letter to Simrock a month after the premiere to instruct him to change the Larghetto to Largo. The introduction to the slow movement is one of Dvořák’s most striking ideas: in seven chords he moves from E minor, the key of the first movement, by way of a surprising modulation to D‑flat, the key of the second movement. A similar chord progression, though not modulating, reappears at the close to frame the movement.

Dvořák’s image for the third movement was the Native American dance in the scene of Hiawatha’s wedding feast. This must refer to the dance of Pau‑Puk‑Keewis, who after dancing “a solemn measure,” began a much livelier step:

Whirling, spinning round in circles,

Leaping o’er the guests assembled,

Eddying round and round the wigwam,

Till the leaves went whirling with him...

But it is nearly impossible to find anything that could be considered “Indian” music in this very Czech dance. The whirling opening section has the same rhythmic shifts and ambiguities as the Czech furiant, and the remaining melodic ideas are waltzes, graceful and energetic by turns.

The last movement is basically in sonata form, but Dvořák stays so close to home base, harmonically speaking, and uses such square thematic ideas that there is not much energy until the very end, when, gradually, elements of the three earlier movements return in contrapuntal combinations (most stunning of these is the rich chord progression from the opening of the second movement, played fortissimo in the brass and woodwinds over stormy strings). Somehow in these closing pages, we get the Czech Dvořák, the Americanized Dvořák, and even a strong whiff of Wagner (for a moment it sounds as if the Tannhäuser Venus is about to rise from the Venusberg) all stirred into a heady concoction to bring the symphony to its stirring close.

Steven Ledbetter