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. Dvořák had at first been unwilling to leave his beloved Prague and undertake the rigors of a sea voyage to the New World for so uncertain a venture, but Mrs. Thurber’s repeated offers eventually wore down his resistance. She also hoped that, in addition to teaching young American musicians, 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 enjoyed in a Czech translation years before. The opera never materialized, but the subject did have an influence on his most famous symphony, composed here.

It was only too clear to Dvořák that he was more than a celebrity. Great things were expected of him. He wrote to a Moravian friend in mock terror that what the American papers were writing was “simply terrible—they see in me, they say, the savior of music and I don’t know what else besides.” But after a few months he wrote to friends in Prague more equably: “The Americans expect me . . . to show them the promised land and kingdom of a new and independent art, in short to create a national music. If the small Czech nation can have such musicians, they say, why could not they, too, when their country and people is so immense.”

For the first few months there was no time to compose. But by the end of autumn he began a sketchbook of musical ideas. On December 19 he made his first original sketches in America. 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 slow movement in the New World Symphony. 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 a fresh page and started 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 completion of the symphony on May 24 he fitted composition into his teaching as best he could.

No piece of Dvořák’s has been subjected to so 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:

I am now satisfied that the future of music in this country must be founded upon what are called 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 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...There is nothing in the whole range of composition that cannot be supplied with themes from this source.

At another time Dvořák complicated the issue by claiming to have studied the music of the American Indians and even to have found it strikingly similar to that of the Negroes. This view was surely mistaken, or at least greatly oversimplified—and it probably has more to do with the composer’s own mental link between this symphony and his unfinished Hiawatha opera than it does with actual musical quotation.

In any case, Dvořák’s comments attracted much attention. Diligent American reporters buttonholed European composers and asked them for their views, then wrote that most composers felt Dvořák’s recommendations to be impractical if not impossible. Thus, when the new symphony appeared six months later, everyone wanted to know if he had followed his own advice. Claims appeared on all sides that the melodic material of the symphony was borrowed from black music, or from Indian music, or perhaps both. In another interview just before the first performance, Dvořák emphasized that he sought the spirit, not the letter of traditional melodies, incorporating their qualities, but developing them “with the aid of all the achievements of modern rhythm, counterpoint, and orchestral coloring.”

Despite the composer’s disclaimer, accounts of his tracking down sources for the music became progressively embellished, and by the end of the century one could read, even in the program notes of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, for example, that the symphony’s “thematic material is made up largely of Negro melodies from the Southern plantations.”

And yet there are witnesses who merit credence for some claims of ethnic influence. One of these is Victor Herbert, then known as a conductor and as the leading cellist of his generation (he had not yet started composing the operettas that were to make him famous). Herbert was head of the cello faculty at the National Conservatory and worked in close proximity to Dvořák during his first year at the institution. Herbert recalled later that the young black composer and singer Harry T. Burleigh, then a student at the Conservatory, had given Dvořák some of the tunes for the symphony. He added, “I have seen this denied—but it is true.” Certainly on a number of occasions Burleigh sang spirituals for Dvořák, who took a great interest in him as one of the most talented students at the school. Whether or not he gave Dvořák any actual melodies, Burleigh certainly familiarized him with the characteristic melodic types of the spiritual, including the frequent appearance of the pentatonic scale.

The title that Dvořák appended to the symphony—almost at the last minute—has also been heavily interpreted, probably over-interpreted, in discussions of the work’s national character. The composer’s assistant, a young Czech musician named Kovařik, wrote, “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.”

All in all, then, the American influence seems to be, for the most part, exotic trimming on a framework basically characteristic of the Czech composer. Today, nearly a century after the first performance of the piece, we don’t get so exercised over the question of whether or not the symphony is really American music; the point is moot now that American composers have long since ceased functioning as imitators of European art. Still, there is little reason to doubt Dvořák’s evident sincerity when he wrote to a Czech friend during the time he was composing it, “I should never have written the symphony ‘just so’ if I hadn’t seen America.”

One of the most lovable characteristics of Dvořák’s best works is his seemingly inexhaustible supply of fresh melodic invention. The apparent ease with which he creates naively folklike tunes conceals the labor that goes into the sketches: refining, sorting and choosing which ones will actually be used, often recasting them in quite substantial ways from first idea to end result. Still, Dvořák does not agonize over the invention of thematic ideas so much as he worries about how to link them together. (His occasional uncertainty at this stage of building his movements shows up sometimes in the sketch drafts, where he may break off precisely at the linking of themes for further preliminary sketching.)

After a slow introduction that hints at the main theme, the horns play a soft, syncopated fanfare over a string tremolo. This theme is one of several that will recur throughout the symphony as one of its main unifying elements. The dotted rhythmic pendant to the horn figure leads the harmony to G minor for a theme of narrow compass (introduced in flute and clarinet) over a drone. This in turn brightens to G major and the most memorable moment in the Allegro: a new theme (perhaps an unconscious reminiscence of Swing low, sweet chariot) presented by the solo flute in its lowest register; the first four notes of this tune, too, will recur many times later on.

The two middle movements, according to Dvořák, were inspired in part by passages in The Song of Hiawatha. The slow movement was suggested by the funeral of Minnehaha in the forest, but at the same time Dvořák instilled a deep strain of his own homesickness for Bohemia (perhaps it is no accident that the text that afterward came to be attached to this melody was “Goin’ home”). The introduction to the slow movement is one of Dvořák’s most striking ideas: in seven chords he moves from E minor, the key of the first movement, by way of a surprising modulation to D flat, the key of the second movement. A similar chord progression, though not modulating, reappears at the close to frame the movement.

Dvořák’s image for the third movement was the Indian dance in the scene of Hiawatha’s wedding feast. This must refer to the dance of Pau-Puk-Keewis, who, after dancing “a solemn measure,” began a much livelier step:

      Whirling, spinning round in circles,
      Leaping o’er the guests assembled,
      Eddying round and round the wigwam,
      Till the leaves went whirling with him...

but it is nearly impossible to find anything that could be considered “Indian” music in this very Czech dance. The whirling opening section has 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, but Dvořák stays close to home base, harmonically speaking, and uses surprisingly square thematic ideas. Recently scholar Michael Beckerman has shown that it is possible read Longfellow’s poetic account of the climactic battle between Hiawatha and his arch-foe Pau-Puk-Keewis rhythmically in time to the music of this opening section, and he suggests that this poetry was clearly in the composer’s mind as he wrote. Toward the very end, elements of the three earlier movements return in contrapuntal combinations (most stunning of these is 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 strong whiff 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 stirring close. —© Steven Ledbetter