Antonín Dvořák

Czech composer

• Born: September 8, 1841
• Birthplace: Nelahozeves, Bohemia (now in Czech Republic)
• Died: May 1, 1904
• Place of death: Prague, Bohemia (now in Czech Republic)

One of the most notable European composers of the nineteenth century, Dvořák became one of the chief creators of the Czech national style of music and also had a profound influence on the development of American music.

Early Life

Born into the family of a butcher-innkeeper in a small Bohemian village, Antonín Leopold Dvořák (DVOHR-zhahk) did not seem destined to a musical career. As was the case with other young men at that time, Antonín was expected to carry on the family business, which his father had inherited from his own father. In spite of these expectations, Antonín began to play the violin with his father, who performed with the village orchestra at various rustic festivals and ceremonies. The young Dvořák soon proved more capable than his father at the bow, and his musical promise attracted the notice of the local schoolmaster, a musician named Josef Spitz.

From Spitz, Dvořák learned the elements of the violin. In 1853, Dvořák was sent to his maternal uncle’s house in Zlonice to continue his studies. There, under the tutelage of Antonín Liehmann, Dvořák gained familiarity with the viola, organ, and figured bass. Liehmann tutored the boy in modulation as well as extemporization, which he called “brambuliring.” It was with Liehmann that Dvořák first came into contact with the German language, which, as Bohemia was then part of the Austrian Empire, was an important prerequisite to further study. In order to perfect his German, he was sent to live with a German family in the nearby village of Ceske Kamenice.

In Ceske Kamenice, Dvořák continued his musical progress under the choirmaster at St. Jakub’s Church, for whom he frequently substituted at the organ. Liehmann’s suggestion that the boy continue his musical studies at Prague was received unfavorably by Dvořák’s father, who asserted that there was no money to finance such an undertaking. At Liehmann’s insistence, however, Dvořák’s childless uncle agreed to pay for the boy’s schooling at the Organ Conservatory in Prague, which Dvořák entered in 1857. Dvořák’s musical talents rapidly developed at the conservatory under the guidance of such men as Josef Leopold Zvonaŕ (voice), Josef Bohuslav Foerster (organ), and František Blazěk (theory). Many of these men laid the initial foundations for the national style of Czech music.

During his days as a student, Dvořák found an extracurricular outlet for his creativity in the orchestra of the musical society Cecilia, in which he played viola. He participated in the weekly rehearsals of the society, which was at that time under the direction of Antonín Apt, an ardent admirer of Robert Schumann and Richard Wagner.

Life’s Work

Dvořák’s musical career began at the end of the Romantic era in Bohemia. After the cultural renaissance of the Czech nation, the národní obrození, during which time poets such as Jan Kollár, František Celakovsk , and, above all, Karel Hynek Mácha carved out a wide area of cultural autonomy for the Czech nation, it became common for poets, musicians, and artists to find inspiration for their work in national hagiography and legend. During the 1860’s, however, the vivid élan of Romanticism was slowing into the less revolutionary, nostalgic era of the Biedermeier. It is helpful to keep this literary distinction between Romantic and Biedermeier in mind when one speaks of the music of Dvořák. For, like the poet Karel Jaromir Erben, Dvořák, in this early period of his career, composed works suffused with languor and a certain fin d’époque melancholy. In addition to two symphonies that date from this period—the Bells of Zlonice in C minor and the Second Symphony in B flat major—Dvořák set Moravian poet Gustav Pfleger’s “Cypress Trees” to music as a song cycle.

When the Czech National Opera opened in 1862, the members of the Cecilia society’s orchestra formed its backbone. The contemporary atmosphere inspired Dvořák to compose his first venture for the musical stage: Alfred (1938), based on the lyric epic poem by Vítězslav Hálek. This work, however, was never produced onstage. Its overture was published in 1912—eight years after Dvořák’s death—and is noted for its technical finesse.

Much of Dvořák’s work predating 1870 was destroyed by Dvořák himself. In 1872, he took a curious journey back to the period of literary Romanticism in Bohemia. It was in this year that he set to music a few songs from the Ossian-like “Old Czech” forgeries of Václav Hanka—the Rukopis královédvorsk and Rukopis zelenohorsk . Like the literary works themselves, Dvořák’s adaptations of the Rukopisy achieved some measure of fame beyond the borders of Bohemia. In 1879, they were published in German and English translation.

In 1873, Dvořák turned to a mode of composition that was to reward him with much musical success—the composition of quartets. One of the most beautiful of these works—written in this year of Dvořák’s marriage to his former student Anna Cermáková—is the String Quartet in F Minor, Op. 9. A growing sense of self-confidence, spawned perhaps by conjugal satisfaction, inspired Dvořák to resign from the National Opera and take a post in St. Vojtěch’s Church. Then came the Symphony in D Minor, Op. 13, which, however, was to lie dormant for a full twenty years.

The lure of the opera continued to be strong, and the year 1874 brought Dvořák’s return to the operatic stage with the adapted puppet show King and Collier . The work was an immediate success, and Dvořák was hailed as a promising representative of a revivified Slavic music. Dvořák followed this event with another quartet, this time in A minor. Dvořák’s career began to take off in earnest after these successes. In 1875, he was awarded a generous stipend from the Austrian government for his musical achievements; on the award’s selection committee was Johannes Brahms, later to become Dvořák’s lifelong friend. More chamber pieces and another collection of folk songs (the Moravian Duets ) followed, as did the Symphony in F, Op. 24, which was to add greatly to Dvořák’s renown abroad.

Personal tragedy struck Dvořák at the zenith of this fecund period. In 1876, while Dvořák was at work on another opera (Wanda , based on an ancient Polish legend), his daughter became sick and died. This painful occurrence inspired Dvořák to create one of his greatest musical works, the Stabat mater . This work made Dvořák’s name famous in Great Britain, where he conducted the work himself to rave reviews in 1884.

Dvořák’s steady, conquering march on the musical world was continued with his Slavonic Dances . Curiously enough, critics initially looked upon these works with coolness, as they were commissioned by the German music publishing firm of Simrock. However, time has proven the great value of these sterling compositions, and the critics were soon silenced by voices such as Hans Richter’s, who praised Dvořák’s “God-given talent” after hearing the earlier Symphonic Variations for Orchestra (1877).

Dvořák consolidated his leading position among composers of the Czech national school during these years with the composition of various pieces of music deeply imbued with patriotic feeling. Such works are the Hussite Overture (1883), which contains as a theme the famous Hussite hymn “Ktoz jste Bozí bojovníci” (“You Who Art the Warriors of God”), and the tone poem suite Ze Šumavy (From the Bohemian Forest ). Of special interest to the adept of comparative arts is Dvořák’s chorale adaptation of Erben’s Bürgeresque ballad Svatební košile (The Spectre’s Bride ).

About this time, Dvořák’s fame began to burgeon in the Anglo-Saxon countries. In England, for example, his Stabat mater was hailed as “one of the finest works of our times” by a musical critic when it was performed for the eight hundredth anniversary of Worcester Cathedral under the baton of Dvořák himself. For the next few years, Dvořák was to divide his time between the British Isles and his native Bohemia, where he had just acquired a peaceful, rustic cottage as a quiet retreat for composition.

Dvořák’s Symphony in G, Op. 88, although dedicated to the Imperial Bohemian Academy for the Fine Arts, has become known as the “English Symphony,” as it was published uncharacteristically in London. His popularity in England is attested by the Birmingham Festival’s invitation to set John Henry Newman’s Dream of Gerontius to music for the year 1891. Dvořák opted instead for something less literary: the Requiem Mass, Op. 89. This work was again received favorably when performed at the festival yet did not win for Dvořák the same high accolades as the seemingly unsurpassable Stabat mater.

Dvořák soon put the pen aside for conservatory instruction. In 1891, he accepted the chair of composition at the Prague Conservatory and embarked on a teaching career that was to last for five years and carry him across the ocean. Only one year after his appointment to the Prague professorship, he was granted a leave of absence by the institution to undertake similar duties at the New York Conservatory for what was at that time a generous salary.

Dvořák was to remain in the United States until 1896. From this stay in New York came what is perhaps his most recognizable work to the American ear, the Symphony in E Minor, Op. 95, known popularly as the New World Symphony. As George Gershwin was to do in the next century, Dvořák infused new blood into the musical scene by incorporating heretofore exotic musical elements—of Indian, African, and American flavor—into his strong European musical heritage. This last great work of his had enormous consequences for American symphonic music. Karel Hoffmeister goes so far as to suggest—with some justification—that Dvořák’s impact on American music can be compared to that of George Frideric Handel on the music of England.

Dvořák returned from the United States to the hero’s welcome that had greeted him constantly in these last few years of artistic grandeur. As his stay on American soil seemed to have affected his composition by introducing new motifs and styles in his European background, so his return to Bohemia reawakened his Slavic muse. Among his greatest successes from this last period of his life are the symphonic poems he composed, based on Erben’s highly popular collection of folk-styled ballads titled Kytice (The Wreath ) and his final great opera Rusalka (The Water-Nymph ).

Dvořák’s last effort in this field, the opera Armida , built around Jaroslav Vrchlický’s libretto, ended in fiasco. It seems strange that the brilliant career of such an artist should end in failure, yet this is indeed what happened. Falling ill toward the end of March, 1904, Dvořák died on May 1. As a sign of the great esteem in which the Czech people held him, Dvořák was laid to rest on the grounds of the royal castle of Vyšehrad in Prague on May 5, 1904.

Significance

Antonín Dvořák is lauded as one of the greatest composers of the modern era. A technical genius whose absolute devotion to music gave birth to unforgettable symphonies, operas, and chamber works, Dvořák influenced and was highly regarded in his own day by colleagues such as Brahms and Richter. As pedagogue, he left his unique mark upon musicians such as Oskar Nedbal, who came under his tutelage at conservatories in Prague and New York. Nevertheless, Dvořák is most widely known as the one composer who, more than anyone else during the late nineteenth century, popularized Slavic themes and musical styles to European and American audiences unaccustomed to the fertile region of East and Central Europe. In this, Dvořák can be compared to Frédéric Chopin, who preceded him during the early part of the century.

Dvořák is also remembered as a musical innovator who introduced American rhythms to the older traditions of Europe. He is unique in modern musical history as a composer who has had a profound effect on at least two, if not three (counting Germany), musical cultures—that of Bohemia and the United States—and deserves to be held in honor by the American, as well as the Czech, public as an illustrious founder of a musical culture that might have developed in a radically different fashion had he not participated in its nurturing.

Bibliography

Beckerman, Michael. Dvořák and His World. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993. The first part of this book contains essays about various aspects of Dvořák’s life and music, including the reception for his work, his relationship with Brahms, his operas, and his visit to the United States. The second part includes Dvořák’s correspondence, unpublished reviews and criticism from Czech newspapers, and other documents that have been translated into English.

Clapham, John. Dvořák. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979. Clapham’s biography contains a wealth of information concerning Dvořák’s life and compositions; the book is particularly valuable for students interested in Dvořák’s American years and British successes. Some illustrative musical annotation, a “Catalogue of Compositions,” a generous bibliography, and a helpful “Chronicle of Events” make this biography an excellent and easy-to-use reference tool. Black-and-white photographs.

Fischl, Viktor, ed. Antonín Dvořák His Achievement. London: L. Drummond, 1943. Reprint. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1970. A helpful and enlightening collection of essays written by critics such as Edwin Evans, Thomas Dunhill, and Harriet Cohen. Topics discussed in the eleven papers cover every aspect of Dvořák’s creative work, from his orchestral works and opera to his chamber music and sacral creations. An excellent text for both initiates and musically refined students because it presents Dvořák’s life and compositional heritage in well-written, logically arranged sections.

Hoffmeister, Karel. Antonín Dvořák. Edited and translated by Rosa Newmarch. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1970. This is a well-constructed biography, divided into two main sections. The first introduces Dvořák as a person and the second proceeds to a detailed discussion of his works, with generous snippets of musical notation which exemplify and reinforce the critical commentary. The reader, however, should be aware of a few minor miscues that detract from an otherwise excellent work. Hoffmeister at one point refers to a period in Dvořák’s life as being quite “stormy and stressful,” thus creating a misleading reference to the German literary period Sturm und Drang (late eighteenth century). Also, the author suggests that the Czech national revival began during the mid-nineteenth century, when it actually began as early as 1785.

Honolka, Kurt. Dvořák. Translated by Anne Wyburd. London: Haus, 2004. English translation of a book originally published in 1974. A brief introduction to Dvořák’s life and work, setting his life against the backdrop of the political and social tensions in the final years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Moore, Douglas. A Guide to Musical Styles: From Madrigal to Modern Music. New York: W. W. Norton, 1942, rev. ed. 1962. Although not totally devoted to Dvořák, Moore’s book is a concise, excellent introduction to the European musical heritage, with generous commentary on composers and musical styles that had a profound influence on Dvořák. Aids greatly in understanding the composer and his place in, and significance for, music. The book’s generous use of musical annotations, easy style, and helpful definitions make it an indispensable tool for both beginning and advanced students of musical history.

Schonzeler, Hans-Hubert. Dvořák. New York: Marion Boyars, 1984. A more illuminating biography of the composer than Hoffmeister’s work (see above), featuring many excerpts from Dvořák’s letters and writings. A good book for readers who wish to know Dvořák as a person rather than a composer. Contains sixty-seven well-chosen black-and-white photographs.