Antonin Dvořák (1841 - 1904): Symphony 9 In E Minor, Op. 95, "From The New World" / George Szell & Cleveland Orchestra (1958 - 1960) Much of his time in America was occupied by teaching and organizing performances. But above all else Dvorak was a composer and in his first winter in New York he began to write the symphony that would become his most cherished. (It was completed that summer on vacation in Spillville, Iowa, a colony of Czech immigrants who helped assuage Dvorak's intense homesickness.) Formally, the work fell solidly within European tradition, with a sonata-form opening, a meditative largo broken by restless outbursts, a lusty scherzo with bucolic trios and a vigorous, triumphant finish. In keeping with the emerging trend of cyclical form, its themes all germinated from a common seminal motif and returned in the finale. But beginning with its hugely successful premiere that December, its subtitle "From the New World" generated considerable confusion over its inspiration and thematic content. Resemblance to the atmosphere of Dvorak's prior work suggested to some commentators that the work was most heavily influenced by nostalgia for his beloved Bohemia. But assuming that Dvorak had set out to practice what he preached, others seized upon the prevalence of the syncopated rhythms, pentatonic scales and flattened sevenths of our 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. The composer himself derided as "nonsense" claims that he used actual Indian- or African-American tunes and insisted that he only wrote "in the spirit" of native American music. In a delightful 1956 lecture (included in his The Infinite Variety of Music (Simon and Schuster, 1966)), Leonard Bernstein examined each of the themes,George Szell and the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra -- Columbia LP cover traced their origin to French, Scottish, German, Chinese and, of course, Czech sources, and concluded that the only accurate assessment was to consider the work multi-national. But as New York critic James Huneker pointed out in a 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 our culture generally -- it's made of foreign ingredients but emerges from the cauldron with a clear American flavor. When Dvorak returned home in 1895, he left behind a legacy even greater than Mrs. Thurber had dared to dream -- the very first piece of serious music that, regardless of its traditional form and disputed sources, somehow managed to embody and convey the American spirit. Wildly popular, Dvorak's "New World" Symphony served as an ambassador to legitimize American music to the rest of a dubious world and paved the way to acceptance of our 20th Century cultural exports. Video made by Maarten Kroon @ Hollandsk Gjestehus in Vinstra (Norway). Our guesthouse website link: http://www.hollandskgjestehus.com / tel.: +47 61290045.

• published: 17 Mar 2012
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