Well I must admit were it not for this blog inadvertently forcing me to discover new works and composers, I would have most definitely have posted all the Beethoven and Tchaikovsky Symphonies by now, and that would not be any fun. Nor very interesting as one composer all the time does have the tendency to grab your annoying tendencies and stretch them slightly, as I witnessed with my attempted "Mozart Month."

So as obviously last week I posted on one of my perpetual favorites, the Tchaikovsky Fifth, this week I shift to a work and a composer I still know very little about. What I do know of Antonin Dvorak is that he was as great as Beethoven and Tchaikovsky when it came to the Symphony, keeping alive such an important genre of music in the transition into the twentieth century.

With this post I start off with his most famous work, Symphony No.9 in E Minor "From the New World" Op.95. Written a year into his visit to the United States in 1893, the Symphony is an eclectic mixture of various nuances and cultural ideas that structure themselves into the idea of America's multicultural melting pot.

1. Adagio - Allegro molto


While Dvorak is rooted heavily in Czech tradition, a born and raised Bohemian peasant, the idea of American nationalism spreading from the Ninth Symphony came through the ideas and beliefs he obtained from his trip to the United States. Dvorak was strictly Czech in his roots, the old saying goes how you can take the boy out of the country but you can't take the country out of the boy. He loved the simple pleasures to life, the long journey by train, and casual conversation. Dvorak brought Czech music to the world's attention by showcasing its inherent appeal. Dvorak's music is one of a kind, one quote saying "you could feel the fresh rustic breeze and smell the hale country air." A true nationalistic appeal.

Influenced and inspired by his compatriot Bedrich Smetana, Dvorak had achieved great fame as an ardent champion of his beloved Czech music, fluently melding folk-tinged melodies into classical forms. But unlike Brahms, Liszt and other composers who studied folk music from an academic distance and used it as a fleeting exotic diversion, Dvorak's “Moravian Duets,” “Czech Suite,” “Slavonic Dances” and other cornerstones of his early fame were the very essence of his being.

2.Largo

Part 1. I have an email friend who plays the Oboe and Cor Anglais in France who claims it's her lifelong goal to perform this movement for only the opening solo


Part 2

The story of the "New World" Symphony begins with one woman's attempt to revitalize an aging feeling of American nationalism in music, foster it into the new millennium with a new grace of urgency. The woman was Jeanette Thurber, who had founded in 1888 the National Conservatory of Music, a pioneering venture which opened its doors in 1888 to promising African-American musicians but needed strong leadership. She found it in Antonin Dvorak.

Lured to New York in 1892 by the promise of a fee twenty times his salary in Prague, and was heavily energized by Ms. Thubert's objective. Early on he proclaimed:

"I am convinced that the future music of this country must be founded on what are called Negro melodies. These can be the foundation of a serious and original school of composition, to be developed in the United States. These beautiful and varied themes are the product of the soil. They are the folk songs of America and your composers must turn to them."

True to his word, Dvorak immersed himself in African-American music. He was particularly drawn to one of his students, Henry Burleigh, who often sang for Dvorak in his home and who later recalled that Dvorak “saturated himself in the spirit of these old tunes.” While he was consistently busy with teaching and organizing performances, Dvorak was still foremost a composer and he had already begun work on what would become the cherished symphony his first winter in New York. It was completed that following summer on vacation in Spillville, Iowa, a colony of Czech immigrants to helped diminish Dvorak's intense homelessness.

Dvorak embraced both worlds from his he had experienced in writing the symphony. Formally the work was outlined by heavy European tradition, with a sonata-from opening, a meditative largo broken by restless outbursts, a hearty schzerto with bucolic trios and a triumphant, but vigorous finale. The work began to foster in new characteristics with the cyclical form embodied in the symphony. The themes all stemmed from a common seminal motif and returned in the finale.

3. Scherzo: Molto vivace - Poco sostenuto


There is however much dispute over the context from the subtitle of the work, "from the New World." While the similarities to the atmospheres provided by Dvorak's earlier works suggests that the symphony was inspired by a deep sense of nostalgia for his native Bohemia. However one would assume that Dvorak set out to practice what he was preaching, a deep examination of the work discovers the prevalence of syncopated rhythms, pentatonic scales and flattened sevenths of the native music to find a closer tie to America.

They noted Dvorak's fascination with the Hiawatha legend and traced the symphony's largo and scherzo to scenes of the funeral and celebratory feast from an opera he had sketched but never pursued. They found especially significant the resemblance of a principal theme of the first movement to “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” reportedly one of Dvorak's favorite spirituals. But such speculation has its dangers – it's hard to find much meaning in the far more striking resemblance of a motif in the finale to “Three Blind Mice.” And subsequent critics who went so far as to assert that Dvorak copied his largo from a hymn, “Goin' Home,” were chagrined to realize that the song arose only decades later when lyrics were grafted onto Dvorak's original theme.

4. Allegro con fuoco

Jaws anyone? An amazing performance but unfortunately not complete

Dvorak himself made short work of the claims that he used actual Indian (African-American tunes) and insisted that he only wrote "in the spirit" of native American music. Leonard Bernstein in a 1956 lecture examined each of the themes and traced their origins to French, Scottish, German, Chinese and of course Czech sources and actively concluded that the only accurate view was to consider the work multinational.

New York critic James Huneker however, pointed out in a rather discerning review of the premiere, the “New World” Symphony was "distinctly American in the sense of being a composite, reflecting our melting-pot society." Indeed, much the same could be said for the American culture generally – it's made of foreign ingredients but emerges from the cauldron with a clear American flavor.

I've never been one to merge music with politics as Huneker did, I let the conductor do the talking, to which he does a tremendous job. Herbert von Karajan and the Vienna Philharmonic deliver another excellent performance. It is a different perspective as an audience member to watch Karajan in his old age and the impact it impedes on his conducting mannerism. The music speaks for itself in his interpretation but to reference the video I posted of Karajan conducting Beethoven's Third Symphony with Herbert in his younger years, the difference is explicitly clear.