Antonín Dvořák

Antonín Dvořák is the best-known and most frequently played of all Czech composers. This is no doubt partly because of his exceptional melodic gift, but it is also due to the fact that he composed prolifically and skillfully in every genre. He wrote ten operas (more if one includes major rewrites), several large-scale choral works, nine symphonies, 14 string quartets, and a great deal of other chamber, solo piano, and vocal music. His Slavonic Dances made his reputation abroad and have remained among the most popular small orchestral works in the repertoire. His Cello Concerto in B minor is played by all leading cellists and is arguably the finest of concertos for that instrument.

Early Years: From Humble Beginnings

All this came, however, from humble beginnings. Dvořák was the son of a butcher and innkeeper in the small town of Nelahozeves, on the River Vltava ten miles north of Prague. But, as was common among young children in Bohemia, he was taught the violin from the age of six. He quickly showed an exceptional musical gift, which led to an early professional career, mainly as a violist—initially in a dance band, then in the orchestra of the Provisional Theater in Prague. At the same time, he studied piano and organ, and even, for a time in the 1870s, worked as a church organist. Until his thirties his life was that of a working musician in a provincial capital of the Austrian Empire. He was also composing, but largely in private, and it wasn’t until the early 1870s that his music started to be performed, even in Prague, while remaining for some time unknown elsewhere.

Dvořák: Quintet in A minor for Two Violins, Two Violas, and Cello, Op. 1

These early works, many of which he subsequently destroyed, include a string quintet, the first four string quartets (preserved from their individual parts), the first two symphonies, a song cycle called Cypřiše (Cypresses, 1865), and a couple of operas. They show flashes of individuality but are also sometimes laborious and overwritten—the Third Quartet (1869–70) lasts well over an hour—and it was only when his music began to be played that he took stock, withdrew most of what he had composed, and examined the bases of his style. Up to this time he had been working within the Germanic mainstream, incorporating even Wagnerian elements and cyclic forms (with linked movements based on the same themes) inspired by Franz Liszt and Robert Schumann. He now began to absorb Slavonic folk materials and idioms into a more lucid, balanced language that brought classical disciplines to bear on musical ideas of wonderful, unique freshness: the “Dvořákian style” of his most popular works.

Middle Period: The Dvořákian Style

It was at this point that his music emigrated from Bohemia by way of a series of stipends from the Austrian State. His successful first portfolio for the 1874 Austrian State Stipendium was impressive enough, since it was made up of a long list of unpublished, unperformed works—symphonies, songs, and chamber music. But his application in 1875 was to prove more significant, because that year the panel included Johannes Brahms, whose influence would transform Dvořák’s entire career. In fact Brahms was so impressed that in 1877 he recommended Dvořák to his own Berlin publisher, Fritz Simrock, who not only agreed to publish Dvořák’s Moravian Duets, for two voices and piano (1876), but also commissioned what became the first set of Slavonic Dances, initially for piano duet, although soon orchestrated. These works were an instant success, both in the amateur marketplace and with orchestras. The Slavonic Dances were programmed by orchestras as far afield as London and New York; a set of Slavonic Rhapsodies specifically for orchestra soon followed, and by 1879 Dvořák was fielding commissions from all sides: a symphony for the Vienna Philharmonic (his Sixth, in D major, 1880), a string quartet (No. 10, in E-flat major, 1879), a concerto (1879) for the great violinist Joseph Joachim, who in November of that year led the first performance of Dvořák’s String Sextet (1878) in Berlin.

Dvořák: Sextet in A major for Two Violins, Two Violas, and Two Cellos, Op 48

Brahms’s influence extended to Dvořák’s music without ever threatening to smother it. The Sixth Symphony is like Brahms, with all the windows flung open on a sunny, breezy day. The contrapuntal opening of the Eighth Quartet in E major (1876) might sound Brahmsian but for its sheer lightness of touch. But actual “Czechisms” are elusive. The furiant scherzos of the Sixth Symphony and the Sextet are obvious examples, the alla polka of the Ninth Quartet (D minor, 1877) perhaps another. But folk elements in this musical style as such are mostly discreet. They are more marked in his most accomplished opera of the 1870s, The Cunning Peasant (1877), a comedy about Czech rural life, with echoes of Bedřich Smetana’s The Bartered Bride—the 1866 opera by another great Czech composer—but less consciously ethnic. By this time, however, he had in general perfected an idiom that related tangentially to the German mainstream, with a distinct Slavonic pulse but without overt folksiness.

Ironically it was at just about this time that his music began to suffer in Vienna, and also to some extent in the German-speaking lands generally, from prejudice against any expression of Slavic particularism in music—a response to the growing tension between Austria and the various minority nations of the Empire, and to the nationalist atmosphere of the newly unified Germany. Instead, Dvořák began to receive overtures from the Anglophone world. His Slavonic Dances and Rhapsodies were well known in London, and his Sixth Symphony and a large choral work (the Stabat Mater, 1876–7) had been performed there with success. In 1884 he visited London in person at the invitation of the Philharmonic Society and conducted the Stabat Mater and other works, including the new Scherzo capriccioso (1883). This was only the first of a long series of invitations to attend or conduct major works, including, in 1885, the world premiere of his cantata The Spectre’s Bride (1884) and, in 1886, the oratorio St. Ludmilla (1885–6); in 1891, the first performance of his Requiem (1890); and finally, in 1896, the world premiere of his Cello Concerto (1894–5). To cap all this recognition, he received an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University in 1891.

Meanwhile in 1891, he had taken up a teaching post at the Prague Conservatory, but within a year he had signed a contract to go to New York as the director of the (now-defunct) National Conservatory of Music, at an astronomical salary by comparison with any possible earnings in Europe. He duly crossed the Atlantic in September 1892 and remained in the post in New York until April 1895 when, partly because of the financial crash of 1893 which prevented the conservatory from paying his full salary, partly out of plain homesickness, he returned to Bohemia. But though his American stay was hardly a success for his employer institution, it was highly productive for Dvořák musically. It produced four of his most brilliant works: the “New World” Symphony (No. 9, 1893), the so-called “American” F major String Quartet No. 12 (1893), the E-flat major String Quintet (1894), and eventually the Cello Concerto. The first three works reflect a subsidiary project he had set for himself: of finding the basis for a specifically American musical idiom. His study of spirituals is reflected here and there in all these works, except perhaps the concerto, though the folk coloring may sometimes become confused with a longing for his homeland.

Dvořák: Quartet No. 12 in F major for Strings, Op. 96, ("The American")

Late Period: Returning to His Homeland

In his final years Dvořák branched into yet new fields. He composed a series of four symphonic poems, based on ballads by the Czech folklorist Karel Jaromír Erben: The Water Goblin, The Noon Witch, The Golden Spinning Wheel, and The Wild Dove (all 1896); and four years later he took up another fairy subject for his opera Rusalka (1900), on Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s tragic tale of the water nymph (Undine) who wishes to become mortal in order to marry a prince. Of all his operas, including the very last (Armida, 1902–3), Rusalka was destined to be the only one that would hold the stage.

Watching and Listening

Dvořák is a good instance of a composer whose whole career can be traced through his chamber music. His string quartets came in batches, but in between he turned to other combinations: the piano trio (notably the F minor, “Dumky,” 1883), the piano quartet, and, most famously, the Piano Quintet in A major, Op. 81 (1887, actually his second work of that description and in that key). Less well known, but hardly less fine, are the string quintets—No. 2 in G major (with double bass, 1875) and No. 3 in E-flat major (with extra viola, 1893)—and the String Sextet in A major. The string quartets are best explored in the higher numbers, from No. 8 onwards, but especially the “American” and the more complex No. 14 in A-flat major. Dvořák, like Mozart, preferred to play viola in chamber music, and his consciousness of that instrument gives his string textures a particular warmth and richness; it is no doubt one reason why he excelled in this medium.

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