Composer of the Month
The Czech’s masterpieces are so fluent and beguiling that it is easy to overlook their other extraordinary qualities, says Stephen Johnson
Stephen Johnson on the overlooked qualities of Dvo k
Does Dvo ák need any special advocacy? Surely he’s about as ‘canonic’ as it gets. At least three of his symphonies, his Cello Concerto, the opera Rusalka and several of his chamber works are unshakeable favourites. The recent revamping of a hugely popular TV commercial for an iconic brand of bread has ensured that the cor anglais melody from his From the New World Symphony is one of the few classical themes known way beyond the concert hall. Yet, while the rest of Dvo ák’s huge output is marginalised, the very popularity of those favourites has the effect of obscuring their beauty and originality for those who think of themselves as cognoscenti. And the old prejudice still prevails: can anything that popular really be that good?
In Dvo ák’s case, this kind of thinking prevents a lot of people from appreciating just how wide-ranging his achievement was, and in more than one sense. Let’s start with a label most frequently applied to him: nationalist. Dvo ák loved his native Bohemian folk music and folk traditions, and was keen to play his part in establishing what he considered an authentically ‘national’ voice in a country – yet to gain independence – struggling to find an identity after centuries of political and religious turmoil and oppression.
The pioneering example of his countryman and precursor, Smetana, was crucial. But unlike Smetana, and indeed unlike many of the leading 19th-century musical nationalists, Dvo ák didn’t have a formal middle class education. His father was a village butcher and folk musician. Folk culture and, significantly, the sound of its native language, was in his blood. Smetana, like most of the middle classes in what later became Czechoslovakia, grew up speaking German – essential for any aspiring citizen of the Austrian Habsburg territories – and had to learn Czech later (it’s said he never entirely mastered it). Dvo ák spoke it as a native, and didn’t begin to learn German till he was 13.
One consequence of this – for obvious reasons not readily appreciated by nonczech audiences – was that Dvo ák’s setting of his native language is beautifully
In the ‘Song to the Moon’ the fusion of words and music is so fluid it seems entirely natural
idiomatic. In the gorgeous ‘Song to the Moon’ from Rusalka the fusion of words and music is so fluid that it seems entirely natural, but many of Dvo ák’s nationalist contemporaries had to struggle to achieve anything comparable. And when his haunting cycle of Psalm-settings, Biblical Songs, was published with translations into German, English and French, these had to be fitted to a second, significantly modified vocal line: the music of the Czech setting could not be reproduced in any of these non-slavic languages without extensive rhythmic and melodic adaptation. It has been argued that Janá ek, whose researches into the innate music of the Czech language led him to transcribe everyday conversations he overheard into a musical notebook, learned more about how to set it from Dvo ák than from any of his other classical forebears.
Dvořák’s cultural ‘home-schooling’ also meant that when it came to national identity he had nothing of the ‘zeal of the convert’. To an extent, Smetana defined himself musically by reacting against the prevailing Germanic symphonic and operatic tradition. Dvořák, instead, sought to reconcile what he knew and loved in his ‘own’ musical heritage with the purposeful Classical-romantic symphonic thinking he revered in the great totemic Germanic figure Brahms (who later became a vitally important friend, mentor and champion). Communist Czechoslovakia, with its strongly nationalist-populist agenda, therefore accorded Dvořák a semiofficial ‘second place’ to the purportedly ‘purer’ Smetana; in the West, meanwhile, overfamiliarity with Dvořák’s most famous works blunted appreciation of the magnitude of his achievement.
But that achievement was remarkable. It’s true that to some extent Brahms steered Dvořák’s development, but the older composer’s approach from the first was based on both profound admiration and recognition of still greater potential.
One thing Brahms did for Dvořák was to help him tame his almost riotous fertility. ‘You’re supposed to make a penny do the work of a shilling,’ Brahms told another composer who sought his advice, ‘and here you are throwing away gold sovereigns for nothing!’ Dvořák had to learn this lesson. He was never at a loss for ideas, which in his earliest works tumble out in breathtaking profusion. His first attempt at a symphony (unpublished in his lifetime) easily fills 70 minutes playing time; a roughly contemporary string quartet has a first movement that’s as long as some of Haydn’s quartets in their entirety. Even later, the first movement of the Eighth Symphony has so many marvellous ideas that Dvořák appears to forget to bring one of them back in the recapitulation section. But by then he’d learned one important lesson from Brahms: that less can be more. The Seventh Symphony concentrates on developing a relatively small number of significant and striking motifs. The result is a structure as taut as it is gripping, in which everything, in true Brahmsian fashion, seems to grow from the pregnant opening theme.
But there’s something in the Seventh Symphony that’s quite un-brahmsian, and
that is its fusion of Germanic symphonic thinking with a musical nationalism that goes way beyond ‘local colour’. Its terrific Scherzo third movement uses the rhythm of the furiant, a Bohemian dance which excitingly side-steps between two kinds of three-time: it can be either One-two-three Two-two-three, or One-two Two-two THREE-TWO. What in Smetana would have been picturesque, in Dvo ák becomes a musical power source, generating tremendous momentum and firing off new developments in all directions.
Another national dance, the dumka, again provides Dvo ák opportunities to demonstrate his mastery of this entirely personal ‘national-symphonic’ style. In essence, the dumka embodies moodswings: a melancholy slow dance alternates with something much faster, perhaps joyous, perhaps wild, perhaps both. The wonderfully flavoursome ‘Dumky’ (plural) Piano Trio, Op. 90, is Dvo ák’s most famous celebration of this half-dance, halfcharacter study. But still more impressive is what he does with it in the slow movement of his glorious Piano Quintet No. 2: the emotionally cyclical nature of the dance is preserved, but at each return of the slow opening section the music is developed, subjected to new harmonic or melodic perspectives, so that the dance seems to ‘learn from experience’; alternation results ultimately in a kind of synthesis. The following ‘Scherzo Furiant’ appears both a release of tension and a celebration of this highly original achievement.
It is important to stress however, in an age when ‘nationalism’ has acquired all sorts of ominous overtones, that Dvo ák’s nationalism was far from exclusive, still less xenophobic. During his term as director of New York’s newly formed National Conservatory of Music (189295), he applied himself to the question of how this new country might find its own musical voice. His answer, set out in a series of newspaper articles not long after his arrival in the US, caused fury in some quarters: it was the music of the persecuted and marginalised Native Americans, and of the oppressed Black American former slaves, that provided the soil in which this new growth could find nourishment.
Dvo ák probably didn’t realise how controversial his assertion would be, but when he embodied his claims in music, the response was much warmer. We may fail to identify specifically American musical elements in the String Quartet Op. 96, but his first audiences certainly thought they heard them (the Quartet soon acquired the nickname ‘American’). It’s another matter in the case of the Ninth Symphony, entitled From the New World. Encounters with Native American ceremonies and Black American spirituals – understanding deepened through hearing them sung by his black student Harry Burleigh – left deep imprints on the Symphony’s melodic and dance elements: it is said that Dvo ák chose the cor anglais for the famous slow movement theme because it reminded him of Burleigh’s voice.
What’s perhaps most remarkable about the New World Symphony, however, is how Dvo ák manages to integrate these melodic and cultural vistas – one can almost imagine long cinematic tracking shots taking in huge rural spaces – with the symphonic thinking he learned from Brahms. Hollywood film scores, the symphonic works and ballets of Aaron Copland, even the great panoramic jazz albums of Duke Ellington, Miles Davis and John Coltrane – all, in their different ways, are indebted to what Dvo ák achieved in From the New World. It used to be routine for critics either to dismiss the Ninth Symphony or to damn it with faint praise. Perhaps we’ve got over that now, at last.
Half-a-century after the Ninth’s triumphant premiere, Schoenberg wrote a polemical essay, Folkloristic Symphonies, in which (no doubt with Dvo ák’s Ninth firmly in his sights) he argued that the idea was impossible, an absurd oxymoron. But then Schoenberg had a rather more questionable nationalist agenda of his own. Dvo ák’s achievement, not just in From the New World but in just about every musical form he touched, argues eloquently and persuasively that Schoenberg was wrong – and, perhaps more importantly, that love of one’s native soil and its native growths doesn’t have to mean exclusivity, defining oneself against: it can lead to a wider, more humane, inclusive embrace.
Dvo ák’s nationalism goes way beyond ‘local colour’ and was far from xenophobic