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

The F-major String Quartet is one of half a dozen works that the Czech composer Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904) wrote and completed in the US during a two-and-a-half-year stint (between September 1892 and April 1895) as director of the (now defunct) National Conservatory of Music of America, in New York City. The common factor in these works (which also include the New World Symphony [Symphony No. 9] in E minor, Op. 95, and the E-flat String Quintet, Op. 97 [both 1893]) is Dvořák’s attempt to create an American national style out of materials gleaned from spirituals, southern plantation songs, and Native American songs, in combination with his own native Czech musical language.

Introduction

The so-called “American” string quartet (not Dvořák’s title) is both one of the shortest and one of the most transparent of all Dvořák’s chamber works. Its four-movement form is essentially Classical, and above all it shows most clearly the American influence, in a succession of themes built from the pentatonic (five-note) scale common in music of various cultures, including African American and Native American. (The simplest example of the scale is provided by the black notes of the piano; a well-known musical example is the spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”)

History

The invitation to Dvořák to come to New York City as titular head of the NCMA—to teach, compose, and conduct, at an annual salary of $15,000 (as compared to his Prague Conservatory salary of about $600)—came in 1891 from Jeannette Thurber, the wife of grocery millionaire Francis Beatty Thurber. Mrs. Thurber founded the Conservatory in 1885, and was preparing to celebrate, in 1892, the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of America. The idea of an American national music seems also to have been hers, and the choice of Dvořák to have been influenced by his fame as a composer in a specifically national style. Dvořák completed two full academic years at the Conservatory but cut short the third year—partly because of homesickness, partly because of the so-called financial Panic of 1893, which undermined Thurber’s finances and blocked the payment of Dvořák’s salary.

The composer spent his first American summer (1893) in Spillville, Iowa—a village inhabited mainly by expatriate Czechs—and here he composed both the F-major string quartet and the E-flat-major string quintet, in rapid succession, in June and July. He had completed the New World Symphony in May, and the three works belong very audibly to the quest for an American idiom. The symphony had its first performance in New York City, in December of that year, by the New York Philharmonic Society under Anton Seidl’s baton, and the quartet was premiered in Boston, two weeks later, on New Year’s Day 1894, by the Kneisel Quartet.

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

Form

The four movements are superficially conventional. A sonata-form first movement (“Allegro ma non troppo”) is followed by a slow movement (“Lento”) in a simple song form in D minor, then a dance-like scherzo (“Molto vivace”) in F major, with two alternate sections in F minor, and a rondo Finale (“Vivace ma non troppo”) in F major. The treatment, however, is always individual. The most striking thing about the work (as often with Dvořák) is the astonishing fertility of invention. Starting with what might almost be a folk tune—pentatonic, and with a characteristic syncopation—the music spins off idea after idea within a consistent idiom that seems to combine the American influences with the composer’s own native manner: a reflection, no doubt, of his sense of partial homecoming among the farming Czech-speaking community of rural Iowa.

Analysis

In the first movement both the first and second themes are pentatonic (apart from the D-natural in the closing figure of the second theme). Both are played by the first violin, and while Dvořák (who himself liked to play the viola part in chamber music) does, from time to time, hand important thematic material to the other instruments, a sense of melody always dominates over process in his sonata-form thinking. Even in the development section, mainly concerned with the first theme, the fragments of melody, whoever plays them, are usually supported by accompanying figurations, with relatively little to-and-fro of brief thematic motives.

The beautiful, slightly soulful, Lento is actually more or less constructed as melody, with long phrases for the first violin, repeated by the cello then later taken up as a duet with the second violin—all the time accompanied by harmonic figurations, and with virtually no development in the usual Classical sense. Here, the melodic writing is purely in Dvořák’s own natural Bohemian (Czech) manner. The nostalgic flavor is unmistakable.

The third movement opens in the character of a rustic dance, with a simple pentatonic main theme that ends with a twist—first up, then down—which is then repeated playfully, like a children’s game. The trio section in F minor comes twice, each time with the main theme in augmentation (longer note durations) against a new countertheme, making an A–B–A–B–A form for the movement as a whole.

The rondo finale opens in a nearly pure pentatonic style, both melody and accompaniment. But the main rondo theme is not what we hear in the very opening bars: it arrives in the first violin after a brilliant page of preparation—a classic case of Dvořák’s prodigality of invention. The theme is characterized by its eccentric seven-bar phrase length, complete with an ambiguity of up- or downbeat. Three episodes then follow, of which the third is a slower, more reflective version of the first, while the central episode, in an Aeolian-mode A minor (white notes of the piano)—also slower—reintroduces a melancholy note from the Lento. 

Critical Thoughts

Dvořák retained a lifelong respect for the technical values of the German tradition. But as time wore on, he allowed the folk elements of his Czech background to take on increasing importance, and it is this combination—the Americanisms notwithstanding—that is the great strength of the music he composed in Spillville. The finale of the F-major string quartet illustrates beautifully this fusion of strong method and uninhibited expression. The sheer exuberance of the main rondo theme (extended by slightly zany, inebriated repetitions) is contained by a discreet formal mastery. Johannes Brahms, a German composer to his boots, could find this disconcerting. (“Too much that’s fragmentary,” he remarked of Dvořák’s Eighth Symphony, “incidental, loiters about… musically captivating and beautiful—but no main points!”) Yet it was Brahms who first recommended Dvořák to his publisher; and he remained an admirer, unable to ignore the younger composer’s imaginative brilliance and compositional skill.

Legacy

The F-major has always remained the most popular of Dvořák’s string quartets and is in the repertoire of every serious string quartet ensemble, including many that have never explored any of the other 13. The question of its influence on other composers is more debatable. There are echoes of Dvořák in the early works of Charles Ives, and possibly remote echoes in the “popular” works of Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, and others of the late 1930s and early ’40s. But the main legacy of Dvořák’s US years is in his own music, including the Cello Concerto (1894–95), mainly composed in the latter part of his time in New York and arguably the greatest of all concertos for the instrument.

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Article by Stephen Walsh