When Harry met Antonín Dvořák’s voice of America
Jeannette Thurber didn’t hold back when urging Dvoˇrák to move across the Atlantic and start a new life in the US – as well as offering a salary at the National Conservatory that was roughly 25 times what he was currently on, she also promised that he would be teaching only the most talented pupils. Even so, the composer still hesitated, such was his attachment to his homeland.
Arriving in New York in September 1892, Dvoˇrák would remain in the US for two-and-a-half years, a stay that left him richer not just in pocket but culturally too. Among those whom he met at the National Conservatory was the talented African-american student Harry Burleigh (left), a baritone and double-bassist who would himself go on to become a significant composer. ‘While I was never a student of Dvoˇrák, I was constantly associated with him,’ wrote Burleigh later. ‘I sang our Negro songs for him very often and, before he wrote his own themes, he filled himself with the spirit of the old Spirituals.’
Dvoˇrák told journalist James Creelman that ‘I am now satisfied that the future music in this country must be founded upon what are called negro melodies… These beautiful and varied themes are the product of the soil.’ Though spirituals are not directly quoted in Dvoˇrák’s ‘American’ Quartet – a work largely influenced by the American landscape – they did, according to Burleigh, influence the flat sevenths and syncopation of the ‘New World’ Symphony.