Antonín Dvořák

Antonín Dvořák: The Butcher's Son Who Wrote America's Symphony

On the evening of December 15, 1893, a public rehearsal drew an overflow crowd to Carnegie Hall; the next night, when Anton Seidl raised his baton for the actual premiere of Symphony No. 9, the composer sat in a box seat while the audience applauded between movements, an informality that would have been unthinkable in Vienna. The man they were cheering had learned music on a tavern zither and butchered meat for his father's shop before anyone thought to call him a genius. Antonín Dvořák's path from a Bohemian village to Carnegie Hall is the rare case of a composer whose greatest triumph came not in his own country, but in explaining, to Americans, what their own music could become.

A Tavern Keeper's Son

Dvořák was born September 8, 1841, in Nelahozeves, a village on the Vltava River north of Prague. His father ran the local inn and butcher shop and played zither well enough to be locally known for it; the boy was expected to take over the family trade. Instead, an aunt and uncle helped send him at about age twelve to Zlonice, where a local organist and choirmaster gave him serious instruction in organ, piano, and violin alongside German-language schooling meant to prepare him for commerce. The compromise did not hold. In 1857 he enrolled at Prague's Institute for Church Music, graduating two years later second in his class, and from 1862 to 1871 he earned his living as principal violist in the orchestra of the Provisional Czech Theatre in Prague, composing symphonies and quartets in near-total obscurity on the side while giving piano lessons to make ends meet.

Recognition, Marriage, and Loss

Dvořák's personal life carried its own reversals. He fell in love with one of his piano students, Josefina Čermáková, who did not return his feelings; in 1873 he married her younger sister, Anna, instead. The marriage was happy, but the couple's first three children all died in infancy by September 1877 — a grief compressed into a single devastating year before six more children were born and survived. Dvořák's public breakthrough arrived around the same period: in 1877 the composer Johannes Brahms, serving on an Austrian state stipend committee, championed his work to the influential Berlin publisher Fritz Simrock, and the 1878 publication of the Moravian Duets and the Slavonic Dances made Dvořák an international name almost overnight. The Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick, another early backer, helped ensure his music found audiences well beyond Bohemia. Over the following decade Dvořák produced the Stabat Mater, the brooding Seventh Symphony in D minor, and the Piano Quintet in A major, building a catalogue that mixed Czech and Moravian folk idiom with the structural discipline of the Austro-German symphonic tradition he had absorbed as an orchestral violist.

The Conservatory Experiment

In 1892 the American philanthropist Jeannette Thurber lured Dvořák to New York with an extraordinary offer: $15,000 a year — many times his Prague salary — to direct her National Conservatory of Music of America, an institution unusual for its time in admitting Black and female students. Thurber's project had a mission beyond teaching counterpoint: she wanted a European master to help midwife a distinctly American concert music. Dvořák took the assignment seriously. He sought out African American spirituals through his student Harry T. Burleigh, who sang them to him at length, and he investigated Native American melodies as well, telling an interviewer in May 1893 that American composers should look to "the negro melodies" for the foundation of "a great and noble school of music" — a claim that ignited a public argument among American musicians about where their national voice, if it existed, actually lived. He also famously advised that "nothing must be too low or too insignificant for the musician," urging composers to listen to "every whistling boy, every street singer."

From the New World

The symphony that resulted, sketched in the final weeks of 1892 and completed by May 24, 1893, was published with the subtitle "From the New World" — added, by most accounts, almost as an afterthought before printing, and never intended by Dvořák as a claim that the music was itself American folk material rather than an outsider's Bohemian response to it. Anton Seidl led the New York Philharmonic in the December 16, 1893 premiere at Carnegie Hall; the Boston Symphony gave its own performance under Emil Paur two weeks later, and the piece spread with startling speed. During the same American sojourn, spent partly in the Czech immigrant farm community of Spillville, Iowa, and on trips to Chicago, Omaha, and Niagara Falls, Dvořák also composed the "American" String Quartet, Op. 96, and String Quintet, Op. 97, both shot through with pentatonic melodies inspired by what he had been hearing.

Return and Final Years

Homesickness and Thurber's mounting financial troubles brought Dvořák back to Bohemia for good in 1895. He completed his Cello Concerto in B minor — still a cornerstone of the repertoire — before leaving America, and in Prague he turned increasingly to opera, producing Rusalka in 1900, the fairy-tale work now his most performed stage piece outside the symphonies. Honors accumulated: Cambridge University awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1891, and in 1901 Emperor Franz Joseph named him to the Austrian House of Lords, the same year he became artistic director of the Prague Conservatory, the institution that had once trained him as an unknown church-music student. He died in Prague on May 1, 1904, of a stroke brought on by complications of influenza and kidney disease.

Why Antonín Is Called a Genius

Dvořák's gift was not conceptual in the way a scientific breakthrough is; nobody credits him with inventing a musical system. What he had, to a degree his contemporaries recognized as extraordinary, was an almost inexhaustible melodic fluency combined with the orchestral fluency of a working violist who had spent a decade inside an orchestra rather than merely composing for one — he wrote instrumental lines that felt idiomatic because he had played their equivalents himself for years. That combination let him absorb the folk material of Bohemia, and later the spirituals and melodies he encountered in America, and refashion them within symphonic and chamber structures without either sounding academic or dissolving into pastiche — a synthesizing skill, more craft and ear than raw abstraction. Brahms, no easy grader, thought enough of the unpublished young composer to hand his manuscripts personally to Simrock, and Hanslick's advocacy carried real critical weight in Vienna. The honest counter-case is that Dvořák was, by his own account and his biographers', not a theorist or an innovator of harmonic language the way Wagner or later Debussy were; his advocates today argue he has been undersold precisely because he got filed as a "national" composer rather than judged, as one biographical assessment insists he should be, "against the standards of all Western culture" generally.

Legacy

Dvořák's American semester left a lineage that outran his own three years in New York: Harry T. Burleigh went on to become a pioneering arranger of spirituals in concert form, and later composers, including Duke Ellington, worked in the long shadow of the argument Dvořák started about what American music was allowed to sound like. In Prague, his student Josef Suk carried his teaching forward, while the New World Symphony itself became one of classical music's most performed and recorded works — carried into orbit, famously, aboard the Apollo 11 mission a lifetime after the butcher's son from Nelahozeves first sat down at a tavern zither.

Achievements

• Notable work: Symphony No. 9
• Notable work: Stabat Mater
• Notable work: Saint Ludmila, Op. 71, B. 144
• Notable work: Requiem
• Affiliated with Provisional Theatre, Church of Saint Adalbert and National Conservatory of Music of America
• Educated at Pipe Organ School in Prague
• Worked as classical composer, organist and professor