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Here is Dvořák at the peak of his abilities: a haunting opera overture, a cello concerto that demands virtuosity in huge proportions, and his symphony from the New World a composition that provocatively defines an egalitarian America. Rising start cellist Julie Albers makes her SRS debut.

 

Program Notes
by: Steven Ledbetter

All-Dvořák Program

Antonín Dvořák was born in Nelahozeves (Mühlhausen), Bohemia, near Prague, on September 8, 1841, and died in Prague on May 1, 1904.

Prelude to Rusalka, Opus 114

Dvořák composed Rusalka between April and November 1900; it was premiered at the National Theater of Prague on March 31, 1901.The music to be performed here actually runs into the first act and offers the music of the water sprites singing and sporting by the light of the moon. (The three female soloists and women’s chorus are replaced by instruments in this performance.) Dvořák’s love of nature and his ability to suggest it in his music provides a wonderfully fresh opening for his fairy-tale opera. The score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, triangle, cymbals, bass drum and strings. Duration is about 4 minutes.

Though Dvořák composed about a dozen operas, few of these are ever performed outside of Czech-speaking regions. The only one that can be called anything like a repertory work is the next-to-last, Rusalka, based on several earlier romantic stories of a water nymph who falls in love with a human being (Fouqué’s Undine and Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid are principal sources). Though that kind of fairy-tale material was not really much in demand for operatic subjects at the turn of the century, it drew from Dvořák gloriously sensual music in its expression of the natural world, and this, as much as anything, has kept the opera alive. The brief prelude is an example of this, anticipating the shimmering moonlight and the play of waters (where the nymphs live).

Concerto in B minor for Cello and Orchestra,
Opus 104

Dvořák composed his B-minor Cello Concerto in New York, beginning the first movement on November 8, 1894. He completed the full score on February 9, 1895, but revised the ending, following his return home, in response to the death of his sister-in-law Josefina Kaunitzova. The final date on the score is June 11, 1895. The score is dedicated to the cellist Hanus Wihan; the first performance was given by Leo Stern with the London Philharmonic Society at Queen’s Hall under the composer’s direction on March 19, 1896. In addition to the cello soloist, the score calls for two flutes (second doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, three horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, and strings, plus triangle in the last movement only. Duration is about 39 minutes.

Dvořák came to America in September 1892, after prolonged urging from Mrs. Jeannette Thurber, who finally persuaded him to serve as the director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York. There he became a close friend of the chairman of his cello faculty, Victor Herbert, a German-trained Irishman who was the principal cellist of the Metropolitan Opera and would soon become America’s most popular and versatile composer for the Broadway stage (his works include Babes in Toyland and Naughty Marietta), but in the early 1890s his attention was almost totally directed to the creation of concert music. It was the first performance of Herbert’s Second Cello Concerto, with the New York Philharmonic under Anton Seidl on March 9, 1894, that proved epoch-making for Dvořák. Naturally Dvořák attended the premiere of this major work by his friend. After the performance, Dvořák ran up to the composer-soloist in the green room and shouted enthusiastically, “Terrific, absolutely terrific!”

Dvořák had left an earlier cello concerto unfinished—with the orchestral part in piano score—out of fear that the cello was too delicate and too low in pitch to compete successfully with an orchestra. Herbert’s concerto persuaded him otherwise. The following year he began his own Cello Concerto, the final large composition of his American years. After completing the work in New York, he made one substantial change after returning to Prague: When he heard of the death of his sister-in-law, Josefina Kaunitzova, whom he had once hoped to marry, Dvořák cut four bars of music just before the end and replaced them with a substantial new section of poignant character.

The concerto has always been popular for its warm melodies, the brilliance of Dvořák treatment of the solo instrument, and the skillful way in which he manages to employ his substantial orchestra without overpowering the soloist. The themes all have their own character, yet sound well whether played by the orchestra or the soloist. Moreover, since the development is almost entirely taken up by a magical treatment of the first theme in a distant key, Dvořák begins his recapitulation with the second theme, allowing the final return of the first theme to lead directly to the brilliant fanfares that close the movement.

Next comes a songful Adagio, the mood of which is colored by the disturbing news Dvořák had received in New York of the serious illness of his beloved sister-in-law. Recalling that she was especially fond of one of the songs, “Kez duch muj sam” (“Leave me alone”), from his Four Songs, Opus 82 of 1887‑88, he worked the melody into the slow movement.

The rondo tune of the finale is exuberant, though tempered by the lyricism of the interludes. Dvořák’s dedicatee, the cellist Hanus Wihan, who worked with the composer on details of the solo part, desired to add an extensive cadenza to the finale, but Dvořák refused. He wished, rather, to make the closing section something of a memorial to Josefina, who had died a month after his return to Bohemia. The extended slow section that he worked into the close of the movement contains a poignant reference to the main theme of the first movement and another recollection of the song from Opus 82 (high in the solo violin, accompanied by flutes) before it is sung once more by the cello. The final burst of high spirits brings in (in the words of Dvořák’s biographer Otakar Sourek) “a note of almost incoherent happiness at being home at last in his beloved Bohemia.”

Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Opus 95,
From The New World

Antonín Dvořák began sketching themes for the Symphony No. 9 during the last two weeks of 1892; the finished score is dated May 24, 1893. The symphony was first performed by the New York Philharmonic under the direction of Anton Seidl on December 15, 1893. The score calls for two flutes (one doubling piccolo) two oboes and English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, cymbals, and strings. Duration is about 40 minutes.

For the first few months he was in New York, Dvořák found no time to compose. But by the end of autumn he began a sketchbook of musical ideas. On December 19 he made his first original sketches in America. 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 New World Symphony. 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.

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.

No piece of Dvořák’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 melodies. This must be the real foundation of any serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States… 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 he complicated the issue by claiming to have studied the music of the American Indians and even to have found it strikingly similar to that of the Negroes. This view was surely mistaken, or at least greatly oversimplified—and it probably has more to do with the composer’s own mental link between this symphony and his unfinished Hiawatha opera than it does with actual musical quotation.

In any case, Dvořák’s comments attracted much attention. And 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 black 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 all the techniques of modern music.

Despite the composer’s disclaimer, accounts of his tracking down sources for the music became progressively embellished. And yet there are witnesses who merit credence for some claims of ethnic influence. One of these is Victor Herbert, the head of the cello faculty at the National Conservatory, as we have seen. He 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.

The title that Dvořák appended to the symphony—almost at the last minute—has also been heavily interpreted in discussions of the work’s national character. The composer’s assistant, a young Czech musician named Kovarˇik, wrote, “This title means nothing more than ‘Impressions and Greetings from the New World’—as the master himself more than once explained.”

All in all, then, the American influence seems to be, for the most part, exotic trimming on a framework basically characteristic of the Czech composer. Today, nearly a century after the first performance of the piece, we don’t get so exercised over the question of whether or not 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 during the time he was composing it, “I should never have written the symphony ‘just so’ if I hadn’t seen America.”

One of the most lovable characteristics of Dvořák’s best works is his seemingly inexhaustible supply of fresh melodic invention. The apparent ease with which he creates naively folk-like tunes conceals the labor that goes into the sketches: refining, sorting and choosing which ones will actually be used, often recasting them in quite substantial ways from first idea to end result. Still, Dvořák does not agonize over the invention of thematic ideas so much as he worries about how to link them together. (His occasional uncertainty at this stage of building his movements shows up sometimes in the sketch-drafts, where he may break off precisely at the linking of themes for further preliminary sketching.)

After a slow introduction that hints at the main theme, the horns play a soft, syncopated fanfare over a string tremolo. 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 (perhaps 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 that later came to be attached to this melody was “Goin’ Home”). 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 Dflat, 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 Indian 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 close to home base, harmonically speaking, and uses surprisingly square thematic ideas. Recently, scholar Michael Beckerman has shown that it is possible to read Longfellow’s poetic account of the climactic battle between Hiawatha and his arch-foe Pau-Puk-Keewis rhythmically in time to the music of this opening section, and he suggests that this poetry was clearly in the composer’s mind as he wrote. Toward the very end 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 (www.stevenledbetter.com)

 

 

 

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