Symphony No. 9, From the New World

Dvořák wrote his Ninth Symphony in New York City beginning in late 1892 and completed it the following May. The first performance took place on December 16, 1893, by the New York Philharmonic, Anton Seidl conducting. The first BSO performance was later that month, December 30, 1893, Emil Paur conducting. Serge Koussevitzky led the BSO in the first Tanglewood performance on August 11, 1950.

Antonín Dvořák’s arrival in America on September 26, 1892, was a triumph of persistence for Jeannette Thurber, founder of the National Conservatory of Music in New York. She hoped that the appointment of this colorful nationalist with a wide reputation both as composer and teacher would put her institution on a firm footing and eventually produce American composers who could vie with any in the world. She also hoped he would compose new works especially for American consumption. One potential project was an opera based on Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha, which Dvořák had already read and enjoyed in a Czech translation years before. The opera never materialized, but the subject did have an influence on the first large work Dvořák composed here, his most famous symphony.

Dvořák began a sketchbook of musical ideas and made his first original sketches in America on December 19. The next day he noted on the second page one of his best-known melodic inventions: the melody assigned to the English horn at the beginning of the New World Symphony’s slow movement. In the days that followed he sketched other ideas on some dozen pages of the book, many of them used in the symphony, some reserved for later works, and some ultimately discarded. Finally, on January 10, 1893, Dvořák turned to a fresh page and began sketching the continuous thread of the melodic discourse (with only the barest indications of essential accompaniments) for the entire first movement. From that time until the completion of the symphony on May 24 he fit composition into his teaching commitments as best he could.

No piece of Dvořák’s has been subjected to as much debate as the Symphony From the New World. The composer himself started it all with an interview published in the New York Herald on May 21, just as he was finishing the last movement. He was quoted as having said “the future of music in this country must be founded upon what are called the Negro melodies…. These beautiful and varied themes are the product of the soil [with] nothing in the whole range of composition that cannot be supplied with themes from this source.” At another time he complicated the issue by claiming to have studied the music of American Indians and even to have found it strikingly similar to that of African Americans. Dvořák’s comments attracted much attention, and when the new symphony appeared, claims appeared on all sides that the melodic material of the symphony was borrowed from African American music, or from Native American music, or perhaps both. One credible witness, Victor Herbert, who was then the head of the cello faculty at the National Conservatory and a close associate of Dvořák’s, recalled later that the young African American composer and singer Harry T. Burleigh, then a student at the conservatory, had given Dvořák some of the tunes for the symphony and on a number of occasions sang Black spirituals for Dvořák, who took a great interest in him as one of the most talented students at the school.

Perhaps, then, it was to suggest a particularly “American” quality that Dvořák reworked some of the original themes from his sketchbook to make them more obviously pentatonic. The clearest case of this is the English horn solo at the beginning of the slow movement, which in the original sketch lacked most of the dotted notes and had no feeling of pentatonic quality. A very simple melodic change made the opening phrases strictly pentatonic, perhaps more “American.” The dotted rhythms, which were also an afterthought, may reflect the rhythm of one of Burleigh’s favorite songs, “Steal Away.”

Dvořák added the words “Z Nového svˇeta” (“From the New World”) at the head of the title page in the middle of November 1893, just before his assistant Josef Jan Kovaˇrik delivered the manuscript to Anton Seidl, who was to conduct the premiere. Many years later Kovařik commented: “There were and are many people who thought and think that the title is to be understood as meaning ‘American’ symphony, i.e., a symphony with American music. Quite a wrong idea! This title means nothing more than ‘Impressions and Greetings from the New World’—as the master himself more than once explained.” Nevertheless, there is little reason to doubt Dvořák’s evident sincerity when he wrote to a Czech friend while writing the piece: “I should never have written the symphony ‘just so’ if I hadn’t seen America.”

According to the composer, the two middle movements were inspired in part by passages in Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha. The slow movement was suggested by the funeral of Minnehaha in the forest—though at the same time, Dvořák instilled a deep strain of his own homesickness for Bohemia (no accident, perhaps, that the text that came to be attached to this melody was “Goin’ home”). Dvořák’s image for the third movement was the dance in the scene of Hiawatha’s wedding feast, though it is nearly impossible to find anything that could be considered “Indian” music in this very Czech dance. The whirling opening section has many of the same rhythmic shifts and ambiguities as the Czech furiant, and the remaining melodic ideas are waltzes, graceful and energetic by turns.

The last movement is basically in sonata form, generating a great deal of energy particularly at the very end, when, gradually, elements of all three earlier movements return in contrapuntal combinations (most stunningly the rich chord progression from the opening of the second movement, played fortissimo in the brass and woodwinds over stormy strings). Somehow in these closing pages we get the Czech Dvořák, the Americanized Dvořák, and even a touch of Wagner (for a moment it sounds as if the Tannhäuser Venus is about to rise from the Venusberg), all stirred into a heady concoction to bring the symphony to its close.

STEVEN LEDBETTER

Steven Ledbetter, a freelance writer and lecturer on music, was program annotator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1979 to 1998.