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Antonin Dvořák and the responses to the musical idiom of his American
compositions
In the late nineteenth century many Americans believed that the idiom of Negro
melodies, with their pentatonic scales and syncopated rhythms, had purely influenced the
musical language used in the Czech composer Antonin Dvořák’s American compositions. Music
critics, musicians and audiences reacted in different ways to the seemingly new and exotic
musical language used in the works Dvořák composed in America. Until then no major European
composer had considered Negro melodies as a source of inspiration for major works such as
symphonies, quartets, quintets or concertos.
Dvořák expressed his ideas about Negro melodies and on the new idiomatic language of
his American compositions in several newspaper articles. His ideas caused various reactions.
Dvořák’s ideas were not always clear; some of his later letters written to publishers contradict
some early interviews published in newspapers. Perhaps part of the confusion was caused by the
fact that Dvořák was not an English native speaker and was not always able to express his
thoughts clearly. However, what we know for sure is that the works Dvořák composed in
America caused controversy. Some music critics in Boston wrote harsh articles in response to
Dvořák’s ideas concerning Negro melodies.
On the other hand Iowans were mesmerized by the new musical idiom of Dvořák’s
American compositions, partly because they had had the privilege to host the composer during
the summer of 1893. Dvořák made good impression on Iowans and soon the press begun to
discuss his new musical ideas. Iowans were welcoming and open-minded to the composer’s new
ideas. After the composer left Iowa various music clubs started analyzing Dvořák’s works and
his new compositions very often performed in Iowan concert halls.
1
In 1892 Dvořák was asked to come to New York City to be the new Director of the
National Conservatory of Music. For a quarter of a century after its opening in 1885, the
conservatory was America's leading music school, adopting a special mission of encouraging
talented women, minorities, and the handicapped. Its program became a model for curricula now
typical in post-secondary American music schools.1 With the help of her husband, a wealthy
grocery merchant, society matron Jeannette Thurber endowed the school. Thurber was
determined to acquire a celebrated 'name' in music as the new director. After much deliberation,
Dvořák agreed to come for a specified time.2
Prior to his career in America, Dvořák was already well known as a nationalistic
composer. The second half of the nineteenth century saw a blossoming of national styles, as
countries looked to their cultural roots to celebrate their heritage through music that evoked
nationalistic themes and drew on folk melodies. As a composer of humble origins, Dvořák was
familiar with the folk melodies of his country, and his compositions reflected the spirit and
energy of these melodies.
Along with his wife and two of their six children, Dvořák arrived in New York City on
September 26, 1892 to take over his duties which included teaching composition and
orchestration to the most talented students as well as conducting the orchestra. Dvořák was also
asked to conduct six concerts of his own compositions during the academic year. His
appointment was greeted with much interest in the music circles of the city and was just what
1
Irwin Spector, “Dvořák’s American Period,” Historical Musicology 5 (1971): 9.
2
Miroslav Ivanov, In Dvořák’s Footsteps (Missouri: The Thomas Jefferson University Press,
1995), 38.
2
Mrs. Thurber had desired. Dvořák’s mandate, in his own words, was to "discover what young
Americans had in them, and to help them express it."3
In New York, Dvořák was introduced to African American spirituals through his
friendship with one of his students Harry T. Burleigh, who later became his personal assistant.
Burleigh shared with Dvořák many of the songs his grandfather used to sing to him, and the
composer encouraged Burleigh to transcribe and perform many of these melodies.4 He eagerly
absorbed the musical idiom of the spirituals and Stephen Foster songs Burleigh sang for him.
During this period Dvořák started working on a symphony in part due to Mrs. Thurber’s
suggestion that he “write a symphony representing his experiences and feelings in America.”
Dvořák believed that his new symphony was considerable different from previous works.
Around the same time period, he also publicly espoused that the musical style of the Negro
melodies were a valuable and interesting source of material for serious compositions. He
considered these melodies as native from America and thought that their musical language could
be used to represent the American musical identity. In an article from the New York Herald
written by James Creelman on May 21 (three days before the completion of the Symphony From
the New World) Dvořák expresses some of his ideas regarding the Negro melodies:
I am now satisfied that the future of this country must be founded upon what are
called the Negro melodies. This must be the real foundation of any serious and
original school of composition to be developed in the United States. When I first
came here last year I was impressed with this idea and it has developed into a
settled conviction. These beautiful and varied themes are the product of the soil.
They are American.5
3
Spector, “Dvořák’s American Period.”
4
Michael Beckerman, New Worlds of Dvořák: Searching in America for the Composer's Inner
Life (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003), 17.
5
James Creelman, “Real Value of Negro Melodies” The New York Herald, May 21 1893, quoted
in Joseph Horowitz ” Dvořák and the New World,” in Dvořák and his World, 74.
3
In the same article Dvořák expressed how versatile the Negro melodies are and explains
why they should be used as material for serious works. He considered the melodies rich in
content because they could express diverse emotions and characters.
In the Negro melodies of America, I discover all that is needed for a great and
noble school of music. They are pathetic, tender, passionate, melancholic, solemn,
religious, bold, merry, gay, or what you will. It is music that suits itself to any
mood or any purpose. There is nothing in the whole range of composition that
cannot be supplied with themes from this source.6
The press soon began to apply what Dvořák said about American music in the
newspapers to his “American-influenced” music. Several music critics began to interpret the
composer’s musical language, especially that of the works partially or completely composed in
the United States, as a call for justice for a race that had suffered and was discriminated against.
The article written by Francis H. Jenks in the Boston Herald on May 28, 1893, and reproduced
two weeks later in the Daily Citizen of Iowa City describes Dvořák’s opinion on Negro
melodies:
The Bohemian composer, Dvořák has made a profound impression by his
suggestion to American composers that they devote themselves to the cultivation
and development of an American school of music by studying the Negro
melodies. He says that these melodies are native born, that they have the flavor of
the soil and of the customs and habits of the people
The article also describes Dvořák’s belief that these melodies are important in order to
create a distinctly American school of music and that these melodies were valuable sources of
inspiration.
Dvořák;s ideas in provoked negatively other music critics especially Philip Hale from
the Boston Journal. This aristocratic and irritable music critic wrote sarcastically of Dvořák as a
“negrophile” seeking musical inspiration in the “jungles of the Bowery and the deserts of Central
6
Ibid.
4
Park.” Other critics in Boston were more supportive of Dvořák’s ideas. In the Boston Herald of
May 28, 1893, the composer John Knowles Paine wrote an article expressing his disapproval of
certain music critics who did not understand Dvořák‘s ideas. Paine was clearly referring to
Hale’s arrogant article.
It is incomprehensible to me how any thoroughly cultivated musician or music
critic can have such limited erroneous views of the true functions of American
composers.7
In the meantime Dvořák continued teaching at the National Conservatory and organizing
concerts. He regularly attended concerts of the New York Philharmonic and some performances
of the Metropolitan Opera, Kneisel Quartet and the Boston Philharmonic. However, Dvořák was
not very fond of social life because these events ended late at night. Dvořák enjoyed getting up
and working during the early hours. Therefore, he preferred to stay at home.8
After a bruising and exhilarating year as the director of the National Conservatory in New
York, the Czech composer craved the society of his countrymen. Dvořák’s secretary, Josef
Kovarik, convinced him that if he traveled not east across the ocean, but west to the rolling green
hills of northeast Iowa, he would find the people he was looking for. And so, in the summer of
1893, Dvořák, his wife and six children arrived to Spilville, Iowa. The village, which had been
founded in 1849, attracted many Czechs longing for a taste of their homeland in America. In
Spillville Dvořák could walk at leisure, compose when he liked, and play the church organ for
pleasure. Here he composed the American String Quartet no.12 in F Major op. 96 and the String
Quintet in E-flat major, Op. 97. 9
7
John Ogasapian, Music of the Gilded Age (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2007), 66.
Miroslav Ivanov, In Dvořák’s Footsteps (Missouri: The Thomas Jefferson University Press,
1995), 108.
9
Klaus Doege, “ Antonin Dvořák (Leopold)” in Grove Music Online,
www.oxfordmusiconline.com. accessed 13 December 2011
8
5
During this summer Dvořák attended the Chicago World Exposition, which was planned
to honor the 400th anniversary of America by Columbus. The exhibition opened on May 1, 1893,
and closed on October 26. During this event the local Bohemians were given the permission to
arrange their own “Day” to celebrate their national character. Dvořák was invited to conduct his
own Symphony no.4, Slavonic Dances and the Overture My Country. Edward D. Chassell wrote
in The Le Mars Semi-Weekly Sentinel shows a recount of Dvořák’s participation in the Chicago
World Exposition10:
After parading through the city streets to the accompaniment of band music and
historical floats the Bohemian born citizens of the United States arrived in a
scattered body at Festival Hall and continued their national celebration with music
of a high order…At the Festival hall Dr. Dvořák conducted his own compositions.
Many years after that summer of 1893 Iowans, many of whom were of Czech heritage,
continued studying and discussing the works of Dvořák. Some literacy and music organizations
discussed and studied his compositions. The women’s club Apollo of Le Mars, Iowa , dedicated a
study year to Iowa composers. Antonin Dvořák was one of the composers studied during 1927.
They believed that the nature of Iowa had influenced the musical language of Dvořák’s
‘American works.’ Martha Mc. Williams wrote in the Iowa Recorder in October 1927:
Antonin Dvořák although of foreign birth, is claimed as having received the
inspiration to write the widely known composition Humoresque while visiting in
Iowa, at Spillville. Therefore, Iowa claims him for this number.
However, we now that Dvořák did not compose the piece Humoresque in Iowa.
Iowans received enthusiastically the symphony From the New World and its exotic
idiom. However, they believed that the supposedly new exotic idiom of the Symphony
10
Eduard D. Chassell, “Bohemians on Parade” Le Mars Semi Weekly Sentinel, August 14 1893,
www.newspapersarchive.com
6
represented the peaceful prairies of the Iowa as well as the composer’s loneliness and
homesickness. Perhaps Iowans associated the character of the famous arrangement with
Dvořák’s desire to return to Bohemia. Roe Fulkerson wrote in the Waterloo Evening Courier in
January 7, 1922:
Antonin Dvořák, the Bohemian composer, in his “New World” symphony has set down
in exquisite music the life of the pioneer, and it was our own Iowa prairies that gave him
the inspiration. The “Largo” movement of the symphony is said to be a tone picture of
the immigrant’s emotions, his loneliness and homesickness in the little log cabin with the
ley wind howling its challenges, mingling with the coyote’s cry and the wail of the night
bird.11
Throughout the time Iowans kept good memories from Dvořák’s summer stay in
Spillville, and they strongly believed that the composer had recounted the history of the United
States through his famous Symphony. In 1931 during the anniversary of Bohemia’s
independence in Cedar Rapids, Theodore b. Hubucek wrote in The Oxford Mirror:
It remained for Antonin Dvořák to compose the “New World Symphony” a
portrayal of American history set to music, composed in America while Dvořák
was a visitor in Spillville, Iowa.12
Jaroslav Kocian, a Czech violinist born in 1884 who studied composition with Dvořák
had a different opinion about the idiomatic style in Dvořák’s New World Symphony. As he
points out in an interview before a performance with the Thomas orchestra in Chicago in 1910:
The southern melodies,13 in this composition, [Symphony of the New World] are
very beautiful, but Dvořák put into them much Bohemian character14
11
Roe Fulkerson, “Afterthoughts” Evening Courier and Reporter, Waterloo, Iowa. January 7,
1922. www.newspapersarchive.com
12
Theodore B. Hubucek. “Dvořák, the Bohemian composer in Iowa,” The Oxford Mirror, Iowa,
October 15 1931. www.newspapersarchive.com
13
By southern melodies Kocian means negro melodies
14
Jaroslav Kocian “When it comes to music,” Cedar Rapids Evening Gazette, November 3,
1910, www.newspapersarchive.com
7
On December 16, 1893 the New York Philharmonic conducted by Anton Seidl premiered
From the New World at Carnegie Hall in New York City. A day earlier, in an article published in
the New York Herald on December 15, 1893, Dvořák further explained how Native American
music had been an influence on this symphony. However, Dvořák is not very clear in his
statement. The term Native American is very broad and unspecific.
I have not actually used any of the [Native American] melodies. I have simply
written original themes embodying the peculiarities of the Indian music, and,
using these themes as subjects, have developed them with all the resources of
modern rhythms, counterpoint, and orchestral color.15
Later Dvořák himself clarified in a letter to his friend the Bohemian conductor Oskar
Nedbal, that the melodies of his new symphony (referring to the Symphony of the New World)
were merely written in the spirit of the Negro melodies. Jaroslav Salaba-Vojan16, former editor
of the Prague Nova Česká Revue (New Czech Revue) and also Česko-Amerìcké Espistoly
(Czech-American Epistles) published in an article part of that letter in which Dvořák explains
how the spirit of the Negro melodies influenced his Symphony:
Dvořák settled it himself in his letter from February, 1900, written from Prague
to the famous Bohemian conductor Oskar Nedbal: I send you Kretschmar’s
analysis of my symphony (published by Brietkopf and Haertel), but omit that
nonsense that I have used “Indian” and “American motives” because that is a lie. I
tried only to write in the spirit of those American melodies.”17
From this testimony we can understand that Dvořák did not transcribe literally any Negro
melodies but in any case he was influenced by their style.
15
Ivanov, Dvořák’s Footsteps, 339.
16
Thomas Capek. The Čechs (Bohemians) in America: a study of their national, cultural,
economic and religious life (New York: Riverside Press, 1920): 216.
17
J.Salaba-Vojan,” Bohemian night of May festival.” The Cedar Rapids Sunday Republican.
May 5, 1912.From w3.newspapersarchive.com
8
J.Salaba-Vojan, also an enthusiastic propagator of Czech music in America, wrote in the
Almanac of New York Newsletters in 1939 an article that explained how the melodies in the
Symphony From the New World were strongly related to Negro melodies:
The five-tone Major scale, the soft Minor scale with flatted seventh, lacking its
sixth step; delays and returns to the tonic note; rhythmical punctuation and
syncopation; these features, always found in Negro spirituals, can ocassionally be
heard in Dvořák’s works which he wrote in America.18
Dvořák apparently did not imagine that the title “From the New World” could cause great
controversy and strong reactions. Perhaps after all, the composer was playing a little joke by
using that title. In a correspondence between Josef Kovarik and Otakar Sourek (Dvořák’s
biographer) dated from 1920, Kovarik describes how Americans believed that the title: “From
the New World” meant “An American Symphony:”
The fact that the Master wrote, at the last moment, the title “From the New
World” onto the title page was simply one of his innocent jokes and does not
mean anything more than “Impressions and greetings from the New World”19
According to the letter Dvořák was not expecting to create confusion and controversy
with the Symphony’s title. The composer believed that such confusion would not occur in his
homeland Bohemia.
When the Master read all those different views after the premiere of the
Symphony concerning the title From the New World he smiled and said: It looks
as if I got them confused quite a bit” and added, “Back at home they’ll know at
once what I meant,”20
The correspondence between Antonin Dvořák and some of his friends in Bohemia, and
the interview he gave to a newspaper in New York City during his stay in the United States show
us that the composer intended to write works in the idiom of Negro and Indian melodies.
However we know that Dvořák did not used African-American or Native American songs or
18
Ivanov, 171.
“The Master’s little joke” in Dvořák and his World ed. Beckerman, 134.
20
Ibid.
19
9
melodies in his ‘American compositions.’ Perhaps Dvořák found the style of these melodies very
similar to the Bohemian style and that is the reason why his ‘American’ compositions contain
melodies in the Negro and Indian idiom. Based on the newspapers of the late nineteenth century
we see that different ethnicities in the United States interpret the composer’s idiom very
differently. African-Americans saw in Dvořák’s composition a tribute to their race and identity,
whereas Iowans believed that Dvořák, had been influenced by the nature of the state of Iowa.
10
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Beckerman, Michael. Dvořák and his World. New Jersey: Princeton University Press,
1993.
------------------------- New worlds of Dvořák: searching in America for the composer's
inner life. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003.
Capek, Thomas. The Čechs (Bohemians) in America: a study of their national, cultural,
economic and religious life. New York: Riverside Press, 1920
Ivanov, Miroslav. Dvořák’s Footsteps. Missouri: Thomas Jefferson University Press,
1995.
Ogasapian John. Music of the Gilded Age. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2007.
Chassell, Eduard D. “Bohemians on Parade” Le Mars Semi Weekly Sentinel, August 14
1893. From www.newspapersarchive.com
Doege,
Klaus
“Antonin
Dvořák
(Leopold)”
in
Grove
Music
Online,
www.oxfordmusiconline.com. Accessed 13 December 2011.
Roe Fulkerson, “Afterthoughts” Evening courier and reporter Waterloo, Iowa. January 7
1922. www.newspapersarchive.com
11
Hubucek, Theodor B. “Dvořák, the Bohemian composer in Iowa” The Oxford Mirror,
Iowa. October 15 1931. www.newspapersarchive.com
Kocian, Jaroslav “When it comes to music” Cedar Rapids Evening Gazette. November 3,
1910. www.newspapersarchive.com
Salaba-Vojan, Jaroslav” Bohemian night of May festival.” The Cedar Rapids Sunday
Republican. May 5, 1912. www.newspapersarchive.com
Spector, Irwin. “Dvořák’s American Period”. Historical Musicology 5 (1971): 5-15.
Williams, Martha Mc. “Apollo Club Notes” The Iowa Recorder, October 5 1927.
www.newspapersarchive.com
12