{"id":556,"date":"2014-08-05T21:40:40","date_gmt":"2014-08-06T01:40:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=556"},"modified":"2014-08-05T21:40:40","modified_gmt":"2014-08-06T01:40:40","slug":"dvoraks-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2014\/08\/dvoraks-america.html","title":{"rendered":"Dvorak’s America"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"naxos<\/a>
\nThe current Times Literary Supplement<\/em> (UK) features my latest rant on Dvorak as an American composer, as follows:<\/p>\n

Earlier this summer, Ivan Fischer came to New York with his Budapest Festival Orchestra to offer two memorable concerts of music by Antonin Dvorak. The repertoire included Dvorak\u2019s last two symphonies: no. 8 in G major, and no. 9 in E minor (\u201cFrom the New World\u201d). On the web, Fischer commented in a filmed English-language interview: \u201c[Dvorak] came out of the nineteenth century patriotic emotional group of composers. And at that time, one has to stress, being in love with your country had nothing negative — it wasn\u2019t like the nationalism of a later period. Dvorak the absolute lover of Bohemia gives us an insight into East European culture \u2013 the feeling people had at the time \u2013 like nobody else.\u201d<\/p>\n

To a New Yorker, Fischer\u2019s statement seemed chiefly notable for two omissions. The first, conveyed loudly but implicitly, was of something Hungarian: that Dvorak, the benign nationalist, rebukes the combative nationalism of Hungary\u2019s governing Fidesz party, which Fischer opposes. The second omission was of something American. Fischer overlooks an understanding I take for granted: that Dvorak\u2019s Ninth has more to say about New World than Old World identity \u2013 an understanding that bears on the nature of patriotic sentiment in music generally.<\/p>\n

When Fischer mentions \u201cthe nationalism of a later period,\u201d he could of course equally have had in mind Hitler or Mussolini or Stalin: all music-lovers. Also relevant, from a much earlier period, is Plato\u2019s anxiety about the capacity of music to stir mass sentiment. Certainly in Dvorak\u2019s time \u2013 the late nineteenth century \u2013 musical nationalism was not invariably wholesome.<\/p>\n

In late nineteenth century America, the central authority on music and race was the New York music critic Henry Edward Krehbiel. Krehbiel wrote about American music, Czech music, Hungarian music, all kinds of music. And he admired it all \u2013 including Jewish music. He also wrote (in 1914) the first book-length treatment of African-American folk song, in which he chastised \u201cone class of critics\u201d for \u201ctheir ungenerous and illiberal attitude\u201d toward black Americans. Krehbiel\u2019s allies in New York included a visionary music educator: Jeannette Thurber, who in 1892 lured Dvorak from Prague to head her National Conservatory of Music. Thurber\u2019s conservatory admitted all black students on full scholarship. She wanted them around because she was convinced of the power of \u201cplantation song\u201d to stir constructive national feeling. When Thurber handed Dvorak a mandate to help found an \u201cAmerican school\u201d of composition, Dvorak fixed on the African-American and Native-American as representative embodiments of \u201cAmerica.\u201d Krehbiel supported and championed this endeavor. One result was the \u201cNew World\u201d Symphony.<\/p>\n

From the moment of its premiere at Carnegie Hall on December 16, 1893, Dvorak\u2019s symphony was both influential and controversial in America. The question asked and re-asked was: \u201cIs it American?\u201d New York said yes. But the music critic Philips Hale, a central arbiter of Boston taste, denounced Dvorak as a \u201cnegrophile.\u201d For Boston, \u201cAmerica\u201d meant the Mayflower. New York, by comparison, was a melting pot. New York critics admired in the \u201cNew World\u201d Symphony a plethora of \u201cblack\u201d and \u201cred\u201d allusions. The third theme of the first movement and the Largo\u2019s English horn tune seemed self-evidently inspired by African-American song. (The former practically quotes \u201cSwing Low, Sweet Chariot.\u201d The latter was transformed after Dvorak\u2019s death into \u201cGoin\u2019 Home\u201d \u2013 an ersatz spiritual so pervasive that to this day many Americans assume it is a slave song quoted by Dvorak.) Dvorak\u2019s absorption of Native American music and lore was also noted \u2013 not least because Dvorak himself told members of the New York press that the middle movements of his new symphony were inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow\u2019s \u201cThe Song of Hiawatha\u201d (1855), in 1893 still the best-known, most-read work of American literature. <\/p>\n

In a tour de force of musical journalism, the New York Times<\/em>\u2019 W. J. Henderson \u2013 a close colleague of Krehbiel \u2013 filed a 2,000-word review that remains one of the most eloquent descriptions of the \u201cNew World\u201d Symphony ever written, one which clinches the twin pathos of the Indian and the slave as polyvalently conveyed by Dvorak. Henderson called the Largo \u201can idealized slave song made to fit the impressive quiet of night on the prairie. When the star of empire took its way over those mighty Western plains blood and sweat and agony and bleaching human bones marked its course. Something of this awful buried sorrow of the prairie must have forced itself upon Dr. Dvorak\u2019s mind.\u201d Of \u201cthe plantation songs of the negro\u201d — songs which inspired Dvorak as they had \u201cstruck an answering note in the American heart\u201d \u2013 Henderson had clarion words: \u201cIf those songs are not national, then there is no such thing as national music.\u201d<\/p>\n

But in decades to follow, this first reception of the \u201cNew World\u201d Symphony was forgotten. The symphony was canonized as a Slavic masterpiece whose sadness conveyed \u201cHeimweh\u201d \u2013 homesickness for Bohemia. In 1966, Leonard Bernstein (for whom an \u201cAmerican school\u201d began only with Copland) preposterously claimed that Dvorak\u2019s Largo \u201cwith Chinese words could sound Chinese.\u201d A program note by Michael Beckerman for Ivan Fischer\u2019s \u201cNew World\u201d Symphony performance concluded differently: \u201cSome have argued that there is nothing American about the work, that Dvorak could have just as easily written the work at home. They are wrong.\u201d <\/p>\n

And they are. America\u2019 s leading Dvorak scholar, Beckerman has tirelessly excavated the intimate relationship binding the \u201cNew World\u201d Symphony with \u201cThe Song of Hiawatha.\u201d Dvorak testified that the beginning of his Scherzo \u2013 the symphony\u2019s third movement \u2013 was inspired by the scene \u201cin which the Indians dance\u201d in Longfellow\u2019s narrative poem. There is only one such scene: it is \u201cHiawatha\u2019s Wedding Feast.\u201d The wedding dancer, Pau-Puk-Keewis, begins by \u201ctreading softly like a panther,\u201d then whirls, stomps, and spins \u201ceddying round and round the wigwam,\/till the leaves went whirling with him,\/like great snowdrifts o\u2019er the landscape.\u201d This idealized, mythic mega-dance is the hurtling main theme of Dvorak\u2019s scherzo, with its incessant tom tom and exotic drone, and the \u201cprimitive\u201d five-note compass of its skittish tune. Never mind that real Indian dances don\u2019t sound like this. Dvorak saw and heard dancing Indians in Manhattan and in Iowa. He knew Krehbiel\u2019s specimens of Indian song. He was not attempting to retain the flavor of indigenous music \u2013 as Bartok would, and as would Arthur Farwell in the wake of Dvorak (about which more in a moment). The other main events of the Wedding Feast are the gentle song of Chibiabos and a legend told by Iagoo. As Beckerman as incontrovertibly demonstrated, Dvorak builds these episodes, too, into his Scherzo. It is a de facto Hiawatha tone poem.<\/p>\n

Beckerman has also tracked down evidence that Dvorak\u2019s Largo \u2013 in addition to evoking prairie desolation, which Dvorak found \u201csad to despair\u201d; in addition to evoking the sorrow songs of the plantation \u2013 drew inspiration from the death in winter of Hiawatha\u2019s wife, Minnehaha. This is the funereal passage with pizzicato double basses and piercing violin tremolos, shuddering with the chill of Longfellow\u2019s \u201clong and dreary winter\u201d \u2013 a threnody of the most exquisite poignancy. The very end of the symphony comprises another dirge (with timpani taps), then an apotheosis, then \u2013 a conductor\u2019s nightmare \u2013 a dying final chord requiring the winds to diminish to triple-piano. Although Beckerman does not here propose a Hiawatha correlation, this coda is plainly extra-musical: it requires a story. The story at hand fits: it is Hiawatha\u2019s leavetaking, sailing \u201cinto the fiery sunset,\u201d into \u201cthe purple mists of evening.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last spring, Beckerman and I completed a 35-minute \u201cHiawatha Melodrama\u201d<\/a> for narrator and orchestra (in musical parlance, a \u201cmelodrama\u201d mates music with the spoken word). It can be heard on a new \u201cDvorak and America\u201d Naxos CD. Combining passages from \u201cThe Song of Hiawatha\u201d with excerpts from the \u201cNew World\u201d Symphony, it maximizes the symphony\u2019s programmatic content. It glimpses the unrealized \u201cHiawatha\u201d opera or cantata that was Dvorak\u2019s crowning ambition during his American sojourn. \u201cFrom the New World\u201d was a step in this direction. It is not itself a \u201cHiawatha\u201d program symphony: the Hiawatha episodes are not in proper sequence. And \u201cHiawatha\u201d is a sporadic presence, not ubiquitous. Rather, this last Dvorak symphony transitions to the folkloric tone poems he would compose upon returning to Prague: pieces in which every detail tells a story as well-known to his Bohemian audience as \u201cThe Song of Hiawatha\u201d was known to Americans. <\/p>\n

Though listening to such late Dvorak tone poems as \u201cThe Wood Dove\u201d or \u201cThe Golden Spinning Wheel\u201d without reference to the Karel Erben ballads that they set (in some passages, word for word) would be a perverse experience, the knowledge that Dvorak\u2019s Scherzo was inspired by the Dance of Pau-Puk-Keewis does not require that we hear it as an Indian dance. That said, the \u201cHiawatha\u201d elements of Dvorak\u2019s symphony remain an essential point of reference. They support the epic, elegiac splendor of the work, which begins with a sorrow song in the low strings and ends with an apotheosis of pain. Obviously, Dvorak\u2019s sadness of the prairie and sadness of the Indian and sadness of the slave resonate with homeward longings (and with who knows that other personal sadnesses). My own experience of \u201cFrom the New World\u201d is of a reading of America drawn taut, emotionally, by the pull of the Czech fatherland.
\nAnd there are other reasons to attend to Dvorak\u2019s \u201cHiawatha\u201d references. They tell us something important about Dvorak the man, and about musical meaning. <\/p>\n

The most startling confession in Igor Stravinsky\u2019s many conversations with Robert Craft is that his Symphony in Three Movements (1945) aligns with pictorial imagery. Although commissioned by the New York Philharmonic as a World War II victory opus, the Symphony is widely considered a prototypically abstract neo-classical exercise affirming Stravinsky\u2019s notorious credo that music can only be about itself. \u201cCertain specific events excited my musical imagination,\u201d Stravinsky told Craft. \u201cEach episode is linked in my mind with a concrete impression of the war, almost always cinematographic in origin. For instance, the beginning of the third movement is partly a musical reaction to newsreels I had seen of goose-stepping soldiers. The square march beat, the brass-band instrumentation, the grotesque crescendo in the tuba \u2013 all these are related to those repellant pictures.\u201d Stravinsky went on to furnish a scenario for the entire six-minute finale. But he concluded: \u201cIn spite of what I have admitted, the symphony is not programmatic. Composers combine notes. That is all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though his most recent biographer, Stephen Walsh, dismisses the pertinence of Stravinsky\u2019s \u201csupposed\u201d testimony to Craft concerning the martial imagery informing the Symphony\u2019s outer movements, Stravinsky\u2019s pictorial narrative for the finale works splendidly \u2013 I happen to know, because (with the video artist Peter Bogdanoff, for California\u2019s Pacific Symphony) I\u2019ve tried it out<\/a>, with actual World War II newsreel clips. And though Stravinsky\u2019s distinction between \u201cprogrammatic\u201d music and music inspired by \u201cspecific events\u201d may sound sophistic, it is not: he was sharing workshop secrets with Craft. <\/p>\n

If even Stravinsky, the modernist scourge of extra-musical meanings, privately resorted to extra-musical inspiration, what about the composers who came before? Their workshops were crammed with pictures \u2013 even for symphonies. Anton Schindler, Beethoven\u2019s amanuensis, testified that Beethoven typically relied upon scenery and events to \u2013 we can use Stravinsky\u2019s phrase \u2013 \u201cexcite his musical imagination.\u201d Dvorak is an extreme case. His ten Legends \u2013 three of which Ivan Fischer conducted in New York with exemplary creative flair \u2013 are plainly miniature tone poems. The slow movement of the G major Symphony \u2013 which Fischer delivered with a revelatory precision of narrative detail \u2013 obviously tells a story. I have no idea what characters and plots Fischer may adduce in these pieces \u2013 because Dvorak, characteristically, left no clues That he conceded that \u201cHiawatha\u201d impregnated the \u201cFrom the New World\u201d may well have been a begrudging response to New York\u2019s importunate critics, who were at the same time \u2013 unlike their European brethren \u2013 proactive daily journalists. Krehbiel, in particular, was granted a \u201cNew World\u201d Symphony audience in Dvorak\u2019s study that he later recalled as one of the supreme satisfactions of his professional career. Dvorak was coy, and said different things to different New York interrogators. But the net confessional was substantial. We are not left in the dark, as with the Legends, the G major Symphony, and countless other Dvorak essays in musical description. We can actually identify the Hiawaha stories he used as a creative spur. Even the pay-off is extra-musical.<\/p>\n

Dvorak was a village butcher\u2019s son. He drank beer. He loved birds and kept some, uncaged, in his Manhattan apartment. He wrote to the New York Herald: \u201cIt is to the poor that I turn for musical greatness. The poor work hard; they study seriously. . . . If in my own career I have achieved a measure of success and reward it is to some extent due to the fact I was the son of poor parents and was reared in any atmosphere of struggle and endeavour.\u201d As a Bohemian, Dvorak proudly belonged to a Hapsburg minority experienced in the rigors of marginalization. He refused to move to Vienna or to change his first name to \u201cAnton.\u201d The resisted polishing his German. In America, Dvorak identified with the disenfranchised. The 1890s were not remote from the memory of slavery. The extinction of the red man was a living reality; turn-of-the-century Americans widely believed that he would vanish completely. Dvorak\u2019s African-American assistant, Harry Burleigh, was the grandson of a slave who bought his freedom, who learned to read, who sent his daughter to college; Dvorak knew this saga intimately. Though not a gregarious type, Dvorak in Iowa daily conversed with the members of the Kickapoo Medicine Show. If the \u201cNew World\u201d remains the most beloved symphony composed on American soil, it is partly because as listeners we sense, however subliminally, Dvorak\u2019s compassionate experience of black and \u201cred\u201d Americans. He was not an easy or uncomplicated man. His National Conservatory students often found him daunting and irascible. But the artist in Dvorak was defined by personal humility, sympathetic understanding, and democratic instinct \u2013 qualities that set him apart from such contemporaneous symphonists as Tchaikovsky, Brahms, and Bruckner. What the \u201cNew World\u201d Symphony ultimately imparts is that its composer was a great humanitarian.<\/p>\n

Dvorak\u2019s American legacy remains ponderable. The twin sources for an \u201cAmerican school\u201d that he proposed yielded twin prophecies. He told the New York Herald that \u201cNegro melodies\u201d would foster \u201ca great and noble school of music.\u201d He also espoused a future American music inspired by the Native American. If the second of these predictions proved false, Dvorak was nonetheless a central promulgator of a four-decade \u201cIndianist\u201d movement in American music. And if hundreds of Indianist songs, symphonies, and operas amassed a mountain of kitsch, there is as well some buried treasure. Arthur Farwell, who declared himself the first American composer to \u201ctake up Dvorak\u2019s challenge,\u201d was impelled by the \u201cNew World\u201d Symphony to found a Wa-Wan Press for himself and fellow Indianists. At his best \u2013 in the Navajo War Dance No. 2 for solo piano (<\/a>1904); in \u201cPawnee Horses\u201d<\/a> for eight-part a cappella chorus in Navajo (1937) — Farwell is the closest thing to an American Bartok, honoring the astringency of indigenous sources. This is a truncated Dvorak legacy that deserves to be remembered.<\/p>\n

The \u201cNegro melodies\u201d Dvorak championed of course more than endure: he correctly foresaw a black American musical future. Though it has taken many directions, one is specific to Dvorak and to Harry Burleigh. It was Burleigh, after Dvorak\u2019s death, who transformed plantation song into a genre of art song. Paul Robeson and Marian Anderson sang Burleigh\u2019s version of \u201cDeep River.\u201d It is sung even now. In Burleigh\u2019s lifetime, \u201cDeep River\u201d (not \u201cSwing Low\u201d) was the iconic spiritual, a grave hymn of inspiration and hope. This was a compositional achievement: an earlier \u201cDeep River,\u201d sung by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, was relatively upbeat.<\/p>\n

What inspired Burleigh to recast \u201cDeep River\u201d? Could it have been Dvorak\u2019s Largo, so similar in tone and tempo? Among the versions of \u201cDeep River\u201d that Burleigh crafted, there is one for a cappella male chorus. Its chordal preamble cites the brass chorale with which Dvorak prefaces his English horn tune. We can actually say that this great American folk-song, as known today, would not exist without the influence of a symphony composed by a visiting Bohemian. I cannot imagine a purer example of musical nationalism as a wholesome force. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The current Times Literary Supplement (UK) features my latest rant on Dvorak as an American composer, as follows: Earlier this summer, Ivan Fischer came to New York with his Budapest Festival Orchestra to offer two memorable concerts of music by Antonin Dvorak. The repertoire included Dvorak\u2019s last two symphonies: no. 8 in G major, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-556","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry","8":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QLHN-8Y","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=556"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":557,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556\/revisions\/557"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}