The sources of Antonin Dvorak's music.

Antonin Dvorak (8th of September 1841 - 1st of May 1904), one of the most world-famous, admired and also beloved of Czech composers, was born 165 years ago in the village of Nelahozeves in Central Bohemia. Dvorak's biography and his importance for the music culture of his homeland and the whole world at large is well known. We shall not therefore go over it, or list all the composer's achievements. Instead, let us pose a question to which the numerous and often otherwise thorough works on his life and work have offered only unsystematic and partial answers. What were the sources, the musical wellsprings of Dvorak's work?

After all, no composer--not even the greatest master--composes and refines his music just ex nihilo and from nothing more than the inner resources of his own imagination. Each composer starts out against a background of music in the sense of whatever works by predecessors or contemporaries surround him. Moreover, the most important creative talents have often been precisely those who reacted the most sensitively to the stylistic, formal technical and imaginative stimuli of the music they have grown up with or get to know later. Creativity always involves a tension between the remoulding of inspirations taken from outside--whether consciously or unconsciously--and the composer's own imagination.

Leos Janacek put it beautifully in his study Modern Harmonic Music (Hudebne teoreticke dilo 2, Prague 1974, 7-14): "What primeval images are lodged in the storehouse of our souls! No single outstanding work of music has escaped the composer's attention. He has discerned everything and willingly or unwillingly stored it well in his soul. Musical material of this kind, inherited to some degree and then replenished, is the germ of our own motifs: our soul is bound by it as we compose. Whether we ponderously adhere to clear models or distance ourselves from them, as from pictures in a mist ifloating in the mindi, like it or not our faces are always turned to what we once have heard ..." It is interesting that Janacek immediately illustrates this idea with a reference to Dvorak: "Dvorak is reforging Liszt's Elizabeth with his Saint Ludmila, Berlioz's Requiem with his own Requiem: quartets are built on quartets, a sonata on a sonata, choral pieces on choral pieces. The weak talent sticks to the inherited forms, the intense talent shatters them."

It is no accident that Janacek's reflections led him to remark on different degrees of composing talent. What really defines sovereign talent is the individuality with which a master synthesises external impulses with his own imagination, producing a picture that is full of originality, and the prerequisite for any distinctive new and unique style. This is the hallmark of a genius we recognise in only a few dozen of the most important composers in the entire history of classical music. And we know that Antonin Dvorak is one of them. Let us try and trace all the elements that contributed to the individuality of his musical expression, and the way in which he made external inspirations his own and reforged them.

He came to the musical profession as an extraordinary talent from a Central Bohemian village. Behind the broad face and stocky figure of a village butcher (the trade for which he had once been destined), he hid the sensitive soul of a musician of genius, one of the most imaginative creators of 19th-century Romantic music. Nonetheless, evident in his face is the stubborn perseverance with which, after graduating from organ school, he set himself to master the techniques of composition. He studied the works of Schubert and Beethoven, and these studies were reflected in the ambitious structure of the 1st Symphony in C minor "The Bells of Zlonice" and the emotional depth of the song cycle Cypress Trees. He embraced the national sentiments of Smetana and enriched them with the lyricism of the patriotic Hymn on Vitezslav Halek's Poem, The Heirs of the White Mountain and the earthy humanity of his early operas; affinity with Smetana bore further fruit with the ardent Czech sentiments of the Symphony no. 8 in G major, The Jacobin, and Amid Nature. He made the archaic charm of folk modality his own in Moravian Duets and Symphonic Variations, and the other Slav cultures provided him with powerful inspirations for Slavonic Rhapsodies, Slavonic Dances, The Dumkas, and his opera Dimitrij. He managed to infuse even works without programmatic titles with folk inspirations of the same kind, as in Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in A minor, Symphony no. 6 in D major and no. 7 "The Great", and various chamber works. In America he became interested in the musical cultures of the ethnic groups on the continent, and he infused Symphony no. 9 "From the New World", Biblical Songs and other works with melodic inspirations from African-American and Indian sources. Closest to his heart, however, was the poetry of Czech fairytales, which he made his own and recast in profound form in the symphonic poems based on Erben's ballads and the operas Kate and the Devil, and Rusalka.

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Even such a cursory view of his creative life and best known compositions provides a sense of the complexity of Antonin Dvorak's artistic development and the range of important impulses from the world of music and other aspects of culture that influenced his direction as a composer. Let us first look at those successive influences that may be considered milestones marking out phases in his career, and that allow us to divide Dvorak's output chronologically into a number of basic periods.

His serious and systematic career as composer was, of course, preceded by his elementary experience of musical life in Zlonice, especially in the choir and with dance music. He obtained a more systematic education at the organ school in Prague, where he mastered harmony, counterpoint and fugue and musical forms, and an advanced standard of play on the organ including improvisation. It is quite possible that he wrote some of the polkas preserved under his name in the repertoire of the bands of rural Central Bohemia while still in Zlonice. His studies in Prague, however, led him to systematic composition, in which he had to observe the rules, form and structure of pieces longer than dance genres and governed by different conventions. Deep study of the scores of the old masters, which were the models for his first serious pieces, was essential for the knowledge of these rules and conventions. First and foremost he explored and mastered the music of the Vienna classics, especially Ludwig van Beethoven, and the early romantic Franz Schubert. In Dvorak's day this was an unusually fortunately choice for a young composer starting his career. The entire preceding development of treatment of theme and motif was concentrated in Beethoven's work, structurally adapted to ensure that the overall architectonics of a piece were tight and compact, with effective use of gradations and falls in the compositional line, contrast and antithesis. The mature Schubert was also a distinguished architect when it came to large musical forms, but his contribution to the young Dvorak's development was rather different, and lay in his genius as a musical poet, a melodist with an inexhaustible imagination and feeling for the lyrical potential of highly charged emotional images. The study of the Vienna classics led Dvorak to compose his first major instrumental works: string quartets and string quintet, the first two symphonies, the early (unfortunately never orchestrated) Cello Concerto in A major. Schubert's example led to the first mature flowering of Dvorak's imagination as a song-writer, with the cycle Cypress Trees. Beethoven and Schubert were indeed to influence all Dvorak's subsequent work: throughout his life he was to strive for tight and thoroughly worked structure in his compositions, and a unique melodic imagination, lyrical and otherwise, fired by and comparable with the genius of Schubert, was to be his right up to his final works. While still in America, and when he was long past fifty, he made his only published comment on the work of another composer; it was an article on Schubert which praised precisely his qualities as a unique melodist and creator of vivid harmonies. Dvorak dwelt particularly on the way Schubert alternated between major and minor without intermediate modulation (not only between parallel keys, but especially between major and minor), believing this to be a typical expression of Slav identity, even in the case of a purely Viennese composer with only remote ancestors from Moravia. It is hard to agree with these rather rash views on musical genetics, but they are important authentic testimony to the elements Dvorak had taken from Franz Schubert, made his own and used as a foundation. The polarity of the same key in major and minor, and alternation between the two in brief passages, is one of the basic characteristics of Dvorak's own Slav-influenced works.

While short, Dvorak's second developmental phase,--his Neo-Romantic orientation at the turn of the 1860s and 70s--was nonetheless important. It was associated with his first encounter with the works of Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner, which were performed in Prague at the time and which he played as an orchestral viola player. It is very probable that he was playing at all three events that brought Neo-Romantic music to Prague and were considered sensational as revelations of the new possibilities of music. They were Smetana's Prague premiere of Berlioz's dramatic symphony, Romeo and Juliet, presented as part of the celebrations of the 300th anniversary of the birth or William Shakespeare in the 1864-65 season, Liszt's Oratorio St Elizabeth and a Zofin Academy concert with a programme of vocal and orchestral excerpts from the operas of Richard Wagner. It was clear to Dvorak that this music was the expression of his time, the most recent and supreme contribution to the development of composition. It seems to have made him aware that his models were increasingly slipping into the category of legacy of the past as compared with the new movements. While not abandoning the principles by which his masters had enriched European music, he no longer stuck to their particular musical idioms. He began to cultivate opera, a typical neo-Romantic genre, and to project the innovations of the new style not only into his operas Alfred and the first version of The King and the Charcoal Burner, but into quartets and other chamber pieces as well. Interestingly, however, he showed absolutely no sign of taking up the main new feature introduced by the Neo-Romantics, that is to say programme music, not even in the sense of the programme recasting of established genres, such as the programme symphony and programme overture (when he presented the overture to his first opera Alfred as an independent concert piece he simply called it Dramatic Overture and for the purposes of non-theatrical performance did not explicitly connect it with the title or plot of the opera or any related story), and nor was he yet moved to write a single work in the new programme genre known as the symphonic poem. Yet this influence had a deep effect on Antonin Dvorak, although insofar as it found expression at this time or even earlier, it did so in latent form. The title Symphony no. 1 in C minor, "The Bells of Zlonice" suggests a markedly depictive element of the piece drawing on Dvorak's experiences from his youth, including a stylisation of the actual sound of the bells, even though Dvorak did not convey such experiences by means of any stylised literary programme. Since this was a work that the composer never heard played and wrote off after losing it, we know little about it, of course, but certainly the title provided a general situating context, an indication of general character in the same way as such titles as Beethoven's Eroica, or Destiny, Mendelssohn's Scottish, Italian, Reformation, of Schumann's Spring or Rhine. The influence of the Neo-Romantic discovery of programme music therefore only came to the fore in Dvorak's work after a considerable time lag, not until the 1890s. It is well known that his symphonic poems met with general surprise in their time, but if today we recognise how important the music of the Neo-Romantics was for the composer's development, we can more easily understand this sudden change in Dvorak's musical poetics.

At the beginning of the 1870s Antonin Dvorak was literally carried away by a movement that went far beyond music. Czech society experienced a wave of ardent, militant patriotism after the Habsburg emperor denied Czechs the promised, "constitutional settlement" having granted it to the Hungarians. The party known as the Young Czechs organised huge protest demonstrations celebrating the writer Karel Havlicek Borovsky as a national martyr, while Bedrich Smetana worked feverishly on the patriotic opera Libuse. In 1872, the year in which Libuse was completed, Antonin Dvorak started another major phase in his career with the cantata Hymn on a Poem by Vitezslav Halek: Heirs of the White Mountain. It was a phase dominated by a sense of discipleship to Bedrich Smetana. This was a very powerful influence, which not only affected Dvorak's choice of subjects (the first cantata and then the Six Songs on the Kraluv Dvur Manuscript of October 1872 and later the comic operas Tvrde palice [The Stubborn Lovers] and Selma sedlak [The Cunning Peasant] with their themes from rural life, following on from the style of the Bartered Bride), but also led him to adopt some of Smetana's musical idioms, so that Smetana's influence becomes manifest in Dvorak in a deeper and broader sense, and not simply in pieces with patriotic subjects using Czech rural themes. Dvorak's music becomes warmer as it takes on Smetana's lyricism, as is clear not only in the Hymn mentioned above, but also in purely instrumental works like the String Quintet with Double Bass in G major, the Serenade in E major for string orchestra, the next two symphonies, No. 3 in E flat major and No. 4 in D minor (sometimes known as the "small symphony") and other pieces. We also find the patriotically celebratory intonations of the march and the fanfare entering Dvorak's music, and an energetic flow of fast music with very pronounced dynamics. These elements are not only strikingly employed in the Hymn but had a major impact, for example, on the tectonic conception and form of the Symphony no. 3 in E flat major. Alone among Dvorak's nine symphonies this has three movements (the others have four) and it is a symphony of strongly finale type (whereas with the others it is the first movement that is the most important, longest and structurally the most complex and full of conflict, and the finale is at most a secondary and lower kind of climax, which may perceptibly raise the tectonic line of the cycle but not to the level of the 1 st movement, as for example in the No. 8 in G major or in the No. 9 in E minor "From the New World"). In the Third the emphasis is very strikingly on the march (or if you prefer the "processionary"--ceremonial finale, which as interpreted by listeners of the period was a symphonically generalised image of undaunted ascent, and can be considered a musical stylisation of mass demonstration for sacred national goals. It was no coincidence that the work was introduced and the premiere conducted by Bedrich Smetana himself, in the year before he went deaf. This Smetanian, and in the narrower sense of the term Smetanian nationalist developmental phase was something that left permanent traces on the work of Antonin Dvorak and would later from time to time lead to a powerfully Smetanian eruption, for example in the Hussite, The Jacobin and other pieces or passages.

In the mid-1870s, Dvorak's creative world was expanding. Of course, at this stage he wrote music that still referred back to one or more of the sources and earlier phases already mentioned, for example in the essentially Beethovian stylisation of the solo part in the Piano Concerto in G minor, although the musical ideas are entirely distinctive and Dvorakian. It was also at this stage that he composed the Stabat mater, a piece that drew on sources other than those that we have mentioned (see below), and can seem like a jewel from a different world entirely. Nevertheless, in 1879 Dvorak found a new source which he rapidly employed and developed and applied on a broad front, and which for two years entirely dominated his work. Here Dvorak is entering his "Moravian Period". The impulse behind it is sometimes considered to have been sheer accident. The merchant Neff, whose family Dvorak used to visit to accompany singing on the piano, gave him a chance to look at Susil's collection of Moravian folk songs, with a view to arranging some of them for vocal duet and piano. Dvorak was very taken with the songs, some of them based on material known as "church modes" and some on other modes that can be considered combinations of different church modes or modulate--melodically--from one to the other. He submerged himself in the material and finally brought the Neffs two-part songs that were not just arrangements but independent compositions, sometimes employing modal approaches and sometimes peculiar and unconventional modulations that drew on folk modality, lively rhythms, and ingeniously declaimed folk texts, but above all melodically and harmonically original and fresh. Neff was enchanted and wanted to have the Moravian Duets printed immediately. Encouraged, Dvorak added the cycle to the major compositions that he was submitting with his application for a state stipend. Johannes Brahms, who was sitting on the Vienna commission assessing the applications, was enthusiastic and recommended the Moravian Duets to his own publishers, Simrock in Berlin, and Simrock agreed to print them as publicity for the young composer, without offering a fee. Especially after an excellent review from Louis Ehlert, the work was a tremendous success with critics and on the market, and opened Dvorak's path to the catalogue of an important music publisher and European fame.

Dvorak sensed that the new style to which folk modal melodics had led him need not be just a chance excursion in his music. In any case he soon felt at home in it, since he had affinities with the world of folk music, even if earlier this had been mainly the differently structured Bohemian folk music based on classical tonality and periodic melodic construction. He had grown up with folk music, lived its original life in village conditions and very often in Prague, where there was still a nationalist vogue for it. Nor was the old modality based on the so-called church modes entirely new to him. Back in organ school he had taken a course called Harmonisation in Church Modes. Organists who graduated from the school and were hired to play in Roman Catholic services had to learn to accompany Gregorian chant, which had a primarily modal structure. Some techniques, for example the phrygian cadence with which he several times enlivens and varies the two-part song Zajata [Captive], had been well-known to him since his youth, and now, with his experience in composition, he could employ it in different musical contexts.

He therefore did not leave Moravian Duets as an isolated episode in his work but found other opportunities to work with modal material, employing it in choral works on Moravian folk texts that he also took from the Susil collection, and for poetry written in artificial folk style of the Adolf Hejduk kind. All these the composer brought together in cycles four mixed and four male choirs. The most impressive and most successful was the song for male choir Ja jsem huslar [I am a fiddler] with its strikingly lyrically graduated chant at the beginning. In its melody he soon recognised an idea with such potential that he made it the theme of a new orchestral work, Symphonic Variations in C major. In my view, in this piece together with the Symphony no. 5 in F major that he wrote shortly before, what we see here is Dvorak emerging as a mature symphonist of genius for the first time. With 27 variations on this theme, culminating in a grandly expansive fugue, he brilliantly combines a solid structure with an apparently inexhaustible imagination in terms of style, mood and instrumentation: here an exquisite and exciting theme acquires ever new forms, and is illuminated from every new angles, while the vivid mosaic thus created is also structurally a superb, monumental musical unity. It is precisely here in the context of the influence of Moravian folk music, that Dvorak the musical architect of genius is born.

Viewed in a longer perspective, the use and development of melodic and harmonic impulses from Moravian folk music was in fact the beginning of a much more vital and longer-lasting tendency in Dvorak's work, one which had a strong intellectual motivation from outside music itself but involved distinctive aspects of musical expression. In 1878, the idea of Slav solidarity revived as a subject of ardent interest in Czech society. Russia had just liberated Bulgaria from Turkish rule, and Czech political passions were also stirred up by the emperor's refusal grant the Bohemian part of the monarchy more constitutional autonomy when the success of the Hungarians was enshrined in the change of the state's official name to Austria-Hungary. There was renewed talk of Austro-Slavism, i.e. the solidarity of Slav nations living in the empire. The Old Czech politicians, whose leading figure Frantisek Ladislav Rieger was trying to win Antonin Dvorak over to his side, were once again considering putting their hopes in Russia, a strategy that had earlier been emphatically rejected by Karel Havlicek Borovsky on the grounds of the tyrannical nature of the Russian Tsarist regime. As citizen and patriot Antonin Dvorak was intensely interested in these developments, and it is not suprising that a Slav orientation soon became manifest in his music we well, all the more so when stimulated by Simrock's commission for Slavonic Dances. Musically, for pieces with Slav themes as well as in non-programme works that had a Slav orientation, Dvorak drew on three sources. The first was the folk music of the other Slavonic peoples. This often had common roots with Moravian folk music, since for example some of the South and East Slavs used melodics based on modal tonal material, but Dvorak was also inspired by the differences, nationally characteristic genre and dance types. Modality, or at least hints of modality, an affinity to modality, appears in some passages of his pieces of the period, but above all his work now bubbled over with the genre or intonational characteristics of the music of the other Slav nations. At this point Dvorak became particularly interested in the Ukrainian lyrical genre known as the dumka. First he took it up in isolated cases, for example as a piano piece of the slow movement of what is known as the Slavonic String Quartet in E flat major, but later, in 1890 he created a whole six-movement cycle for piano trio under the title Dumkas. The Polish Mazurek inspired him to create a virtuoso piece for violin with orchestra or piano, and he used several dance types of different Slav nations in the 2nd series of Slavonic Dances of 1886, including a fierily spectacular Serbian Kolo (wheel dance). For Dvorak it was of course self-evident that his own nation, the Czechs, were part of the great Slav family, and so at this point he made much more frequent use of impulses from Czech musical folklore. This was the source of seven out of the eight Slavonic Dances of the 1st series. In 1879, when his enthusiasm for all things Slav was at its height, he composed the Czech Suite, and a year later the Symphony no. 6 in D major, which has a distinctively Czech character crowned by the furiant instead of the scherzo movement--the first such substitution for the traditional scherzo or minuet from the abundant legacy of national dances in major world classical music. At this period he also employed furiant-style movement in the finale of the Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in A minor, and we find strongly Czech folk moments in such entirely non-programme and pure, uncharacterised music as the String Quartet in C major and others. The third musical source behind Dvorak's Slavism was not derived from any folklore but was more intellectual. Pan-Slav identity of the Romantic epoch was conceived--just like Wagner's Germanism, the national awareness of the Scandinavian countries as Bedrich Smetana had encountered it in Sweden, and mutatis mutandis of all European countries--as having its roots in a supposed ancient common origin of all Slavs and a historical-mythical background, eagerly elaborated in authentic or less authentic tales of heroes, epic battles and erotic episodes sung by bards and rhapsodists and entering the historical memory of nations. Naturally Dvorak had plenty of models and material for this kind of concept of Slavhood, and relating them as closely as he did to his Czech patriotism, Smetana's Vysehrad was clearly the closest. Dvorak's first creative work of this kind consisted of the three Slavonic Rhapsodies, and the context to which we have just alluded makes sense of the way Dvorak draws on the symphonic poem Vysehrad in the harp introduction of the Slavonic Rhapsody no. 2 in A flat major, although unfortunately this reference annoyed Bedrich Smetana. The source of inspiration for the Legends lay in the generalisation of similar ideas. These were not legends in the original sense of the term, i.e. stories from the lives of saints, but a matter of the epic atmosphere of deeds from the Slavonic past. Dvorak employed Slavonic historicism in his own way in an opera on an episode from Russian history, Dimitrij, and a few years later he produced an even more distinctive, striking vision of Slav pagan deities and their defeat by Christianity in the oratorio St Ludmila.

In this context, in his non-programme music, the 1st movement of his Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in A minor is particularly remarkable; here repeated quasi cadence passages of the solo violin over a sequence of D minor - E major triads sound like archaic phrygian cadences (although in the framework of the overall harmonic plan they may also be related to the key of A minor as a sequence of subdominants and dominants, with the tonic not uttered for a long time); together with the predominance of "rhapsodic" scoring this music likewise creates an image that can be taken as mythic narration.

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It is no accident that when looking at the techniques adopted by Dvorak in his first flush of Slavonic enthusiasm I have often mentioned pieces actually written in the following decade. This is because the composer's Slavism soon flowed, via numerous richly inventive works, into the broad current of his output of the 1880s. These were compositions that drew on the whole range of inspirations mentioned above including Slavism, Czech national ideology and folk culture, but they also present some distinctively new approaches and situations in whole groups of pieces. One instance is the striking episode in the years 1883-85, when Dvorak mainly wrote music full of struggle and tragic exaltation. The episode begins with the Piano Trio in F minor, and a recently discovered sketch for the piece shows the composer's strenuous efforts to achieve dramatic uplift of this kind. It then continues in the darkly combative symphonic image of the Hussite dramatic overture and the Symphony No. 7 in D minor, known as "The Great", which is structured around conflict and contrast to a greater extent than any other Dvorak symphony. The longest piece that Dvorak wrote during this episode is the balladic cantata the The Spectre's Bride, based on the poem by Karel Jaromir Erben.

Another comparably compact developmental episode in the 1880s was the wave of folk-based and sometimes Smetanian Czech sentiment in his output of roughly 1887-91. This had been prefigured in the earlier 1880s by the orchestral prelude Muj domov [My Homeland]--music commissioned for Josef Kajetan Tyl's play, but at this point it was an isolated instance. Now the interest burgeoned in the song cycle V narodnim tonu [In a Folk Tone], which integrated entire folksongs into larger wholes and was thus a highly individual development of the approach taken by Pavel Josef Krizkovsky in his choral works. Perhaps the most beautiful crystallisation of this particular lyrical sensibility, inspired by Czech folk culture but also distinctively personal, is the Symphony no. 8 in G major where, in the first movement Dvorak makes space for the full exploitation of a broadly conceived introductory lyrical theme by choosing an unusual formal design for the whole work. We hardly need emphasise that the composer himself did not write the subtitle English on the score, and that it refers not to the musical content of the piece but to the circumstances in which it was performed. Another important work in this phase was the opera, The Jacobin where the story set in a small Czech town lends itself to a Smetana-style Czech folk treatment, and in V Prirode [Amid Nature], from the free cycle of symphonic overtures Priroda, zivot a laska [Nature, Life and Love]. Just one major piece, the dark and inwardly contemplative Requiem of 1890, deviates from the overall mood of tranquillity and ease.

This generally radiantly melodious mood was interrupted--or perhaps more accurately complicated, since it was to reappear in subsequent works--by Dvorak's preparations for travel and his period in America in 1892 to 95. Dvorak was compelled to sideline his earlier creative plans and focus on cantatas for the celebrations of the 400th anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America. The Americans were late sending the texts and so Dvorak began to work on a neutral celebratory Te Deum, but Joseph Rodman Drake's words for the cantata The American Flag arrived before the Te Deum had taken even fragmentary form. In the end Dvorak was to finish both pieces, but only the Te Deum was ready in time for the celebrations. It was a piece based on the style of his earlier sacred works, while the text on the symbolism of the American Flag and panegyric on the individual weapons of the American army failed to engage him at any deep level. The music he wrote for it bears all the external marks of his techniques as a composer, but is lifeless: it has rarely been played and arouses no enthusiasm. Dvorak's imaginative genius depended on his interior feelings, and needed the heat of passionate engagement to ignite it. In America, it was not until Antonin Dvorak discovered the music of the ethnic minorities through his black students, and identified with the problems of the African Americans and Native Americans because they reminded him of the troubles of his own people, that this imaginative fire blazed up to the full. The inspiration that he took from negro spiritual and native American melody in pieces from the Symphony No. 9 in E minor "From the New World" to the Concerto for Cello and Orchestra in B minor is very well known. On the other hand, today we are often reminded that Dvorak refused the honour of being declared the founder of American national music and considered the Americanisms in his music to be simply the fruits of a Czech composer's view of America. In any case, however, what is perceptible and easily analytically demonstrated is that the symbiosis and interplay of Czech and American impulses in these works represents real synthesis, not just charming juxtaposition. The famous melody at the beginning and end of the Largo in the New World Symphony is undoubtedly based on negro spiritual pentatonics, as has been pointed out many times, but in the middle section, the radiant climax is conspicuously and movingly Czech (using a melodic progression VIII-VII-VI on a subdominant harmony--a device we find in numerous Czech folksongs). The Scherzo movement has a distinctively Red Indian dance at the beginning and end, but the trio shines with a recollection of the homeland, Czech intonation and a trill passage associated by tradition with Dvorak's beloved doves at Vysoka. And to take a third example: the secondary theme of the 1st Movement of the Concerto in B minor, carried in the orchestral exposition by the cello, is structured almost entirely out of the material of Gospel pentatonic, but the line in the basic melodic segments corresponds to the melodic types of Czech lyrical folksongs. Furthermore, the nostalgic charge of the music is literally raised by a striking deviation from pentatonic: the chromatic passing note of raised dominant fifth evokes the harmonic nexus of the "Smetana dominant", particularly familiar from Smetana's patriotic and nature lyrics. This duality in the handling of American and Czech musical inspirations and their synthesis can also be found in Biblical Songs, The Sonatina for Violin and Piano in G major, The String Quartet in F major known as the "American" and other pieces. The last piece that Dvorak composed in America, the Concerto for Cello and Orchestra in B minor already has predominantly Czech intonation, and includes a quotation and variations of the melody of the song Kez duch muj sam from his own cycle Cypress Trees. Dvorak used the quotation in the 2nd and 3rd movements of the work as a memory of his own first--unrequited--love, later his sister-in-law Josefina Kounicova nee Cermakova, whose own life was drawing to a close; this of course was a source of inspiration relating entirely to home.

The two longest and most famous works of Dvorak's American creative phase also represented a significant moment in terms of the composer's relationship to the concept of programme music, as mentioned earlier. These two pieces are not in fact programme music in the true sense of the word. The characterising subtitle From the New World was one that the composer did not add to his symphony until shortly before the premiere, and it simply indicates the important role played in the piece by the composer's experiences and impressions from America. Dvorak never offered a literary commentary on his works, and for preceding and subsequent pieces linked to non-musical themes or inspirations chose titles informative enough to forestall the need for any further explanation (Muj domov [My Homeland], Husitska [The Hussite], V prirode [Amid Nature], Othello, Karneval [Carnival] and then Symphonic Poems on Ballads from Erben's Bouquet). Here the situation was different in the sense even less specific information was provided, and the composer never offered any additional explanation even when the work became exceptionally famous (as Smetana did in the case of My Homeland, subsequently producing a "Short Sketch of the Content of the Symphonic Poems"). In the circumstances, traditions emanating from people close to Dvorak, and musicological scholarship based partly on knowledge of sketches and other sources, soon linked a number of passages with particular experiences that the composer had in America, or with the specific themes of the pieces for which parts of the music had originally been destined before being incorporated into the symphony. The public and a broad circle of experts and lovers of Dvorak's music then came to accept these associations as authentic. This endowed the work with a kind of programme character, indirect and relating only to certain parts. However unconventional, this was not completely unknown in musical history, i.e. programmatic elements not declared authentic by the composer, but generally considered to be genuine. First and foremost, the introduction to the 1st Movement of the work, where the principal theme appears first in hints and then emerges out of the swelling current of the music to be fully expressed and developed at the beginning of the exposition, is held to depict Dvorak's impressions at the end of his passage across the Atlantic. This means the way the first outlines of the city of New York take shape against the twilight and mist, and the real America comes into view, to be celebrated in the rest of the movement. The composer took the second and third movement of the symphony from a sketch he had written for an opera on a Native American theme with a libretto based on Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha. In the end he abandoned the idea of composing the opera and used his sketch for two scenes as a basis for the middle movements of the symphony. The Largo had initially been conceived for a scene of an Indian burial, and the first and last sections of the Scherzo movement Molto vivace for an Indian ceremonial dance. Lastly, as has been indicated, the passage with trills of strings and woodwinds is often associated with Dvorak's recollection of the cooing of the doves he had left at home in Vysoka.

In the Cello Concerto, to which the composer did not give even the vaguest characterising title, we have also already mentioned passages linked to the memory of Josefina. From the point of view of programme interpretation, we might attach a certain subliminal meaning, a characterisation of expressive purpose, to Dvorak's words in a letter to the publisher Simrock of the 3rd of October 1895: "The finale ends gradually with a diminuendo like breath--with reminiscences of the first and last movement, the solo part drops as far as pp--then a dynamic surge and the orchestra takes up the last bars and produces a stormy finish."

After his return from America Dvorak embarked on the last creative phase of his career. In the string quarters in A flat Major and G Major he seems to be returning to his pre-American predominantly Czech musical poetics, which he then takes further in works on rural folk themes, sometimes of a fairytale kind. He wrote four symphonic poems on ballads from Karel Jaromir Erben's collection Kytice--Bouquet. Here he approached the relationship between the music and the literary programme in quite an unusual way. The inventor of the symphonic poem, Franz Liszt, had seen it primarily as a matter of general reflections on the theme (before he chose the technical term symphonic poem, he had called such pieces philosophical epics). Bedrich Smetana in My Country had looked for the kind of subject that could be clearly and effectively expressed in music, and this was why he adopted an existing story as the programme subject for only one of his six symphonic poems (Sarka) and invented his own programme for the five others. In contrast to both, Dvorak's approach was precisely to follow and musically depict the actions and situations evoked in the poems in the order described by the poems, and this naturally involved the risk that the music would be too dependent on the literary model, and would lack sufficient cohesive structure of its own. In many passages he formulated the musical idea directly to correspond with the declamation of some of Erben's verses or extracts from them: for example in the Vodnik [Water Goblin]: "svit, svit, svit, at mi sije nit" ["shine, shine, shine, to sew me my thread"], "pujdu maticko k jezeru, satecky sobe vyperu" ["I'll go to the lake, mother, to launder my clothes"] and "Nevesely truchlivy jsou ty vodni kraje, kde si v trave pod lekninem rybka s rybkou hraje" [Cheerless, mournful are these watery regions, where fish plays with fish in the green under the lilies"]. Polednice [The Noon Witch] has a repeated menacing motif based on the emphatic declamation "polednice", and Zlaty kolovrat [The Golden Spinning Wheel] starts with a theme based on the verses "Okolo lesa pole Ian, hoj jede, jede z lesa pan" ["Around the woods the fields, look there rides a lord out of the wood"] and so on. Some critics and writers on Dvorak have noted the disadvantage of this approach and seen shortcomings in the work, but the symphonic poems live on, and especially in Bohemia they remain very popular as ingenious and instructive musical translations of what are very well-known poems by Erben.

Dvorak went further and deeper in this direction in his fairytale operas Kate and the Devil and Rusalka. Here we see the climactic outpouring of his Czech folk-inspired musical poetics and feeling for rural settings, but also his highly developed imagination when it came to striking musical characterisation of all kinds of dramatic situations and human types. Recent attempts to revive Dvorak's early operas have really only confirmed that in his youth he lacked dramatic nerve, but his perseverance bore fruit and Dimitrij, which he several times reworked, represented significant progress, and the upward curve continued with The Jacobine and beyond it. The two fairytale operas from the turn of the century, in which he was also working with excellent and dramatically effective librettos, are perfect as theatre as well as music. Unfortunately this cannot be said of his last opera Armida, where he failed to overcome the drawbacks of Jaroslav Vrchlicky's romantically schematic libretto. It was an opera for which he created superb choral scenes and individual arias, and it shows an interesting conception of the oriental colour of the setting, but overall it is not persuasive musical drama.

In his last years Dvorak suffered from an affliction previously unknown to him--a shortage of ideas and perhaps even a distaste for composing. This was why some major creative plans, for example for two full-length biblical oratorios, were never realised. Another reason for his lack of drive may have been insecurity and dissatisfaction with some of the new trends in world composition. He was particularly unnerved by some of Richard Strauss's pieces and spoke of them pessimistically, saying that it was the end of music and that music was going to perish in misery. No doubt a certain depression at his own approaching end coloured his opinions, but it was a very peculiar attitude, at odds with Dvorak's own lifelong search for new musical worlds and creative capacity to make them his own.

In conclusion we should mention some sources of Dvorak's music that are not a matter of chronological stages but informed his whole output. In first place we should emphasise his innovative spirit as a composer, and his determination to enrich his work stylistically with impulses from elsewhere that he often sought out on his own initiative. The major example here is the modality already mentioned. It was something that he used with explicit reference to the musical idiom of the distant past, especially in quotations from as it were "musical historical monuments", such as the chorales Kdoz jste bozi bojovnici [For that we are God's Warriors] in the Hussite Overture or Hospodine pomiluj ny [Lord Have Mercy upon Us] in St Ludmila, but in his Moravian and Slav period it had the beneficial effect of allowing him to break out of the closed circle of Baroque-Classical-Romantic tonality. As early as the 1980s some of his pieces use other techniques that also clearly go beyond the traditional circle of melodic and harmonic imagination. Thus the expanded tonality in the orchestral introduction to St Ludmila appears not as a folklore element, but as a way of achieving unusual musical situations with the effect of notably weakening of tonality. And at the climax of the scene of pagan idolatry in the first part, in the double choral fugue Vse lame se a borti [Everything is breaking and Collapsing], the harmonic progression is already unclassifiable in terms of tonality. The fugue develops in the harmony of concurrently expounded themes out of a harmonic progression that corresponds to Smetana's leitmotif for Rarach in the Devil's Wall, i.e. from a perfectly non-tonal sequence of three different augmented triads. Probably we will never know whether this borrowing was deliberate or unconscious, but it shows that Dvorak was well acquainted with the innovative direction of Smetana's last works. Another example of this kind of peculiar, tonality-undermining approach is the introductory theme to the Requiem, based on surrounding the first tone by minor seconds from above and below. In the 1890s such harmonic or melodic devices, which correspond to the efforts of contemporary composers seeking to expand tonality and weaken tone centrality, became more frequent in Dvorak's music. They include the tonally ambiguous modulation in the introduction to the Largo in the Symphony no. 9 "From the New World", variations on which continue to permeate the movement with one variation returning in the finale. Other instances may be found in the evocative depiction of the creeping deathly spectre in The Noon Witch and the passage using an incomplete whole-tone scale (i.e. whole-tone pentatonic) in the hell scene from The Devil and Kate, the sequences of major triads in a tritone relation (we find an isolated use of these much earlier in the cantata Psalm 149 from the end of the 1870s) and the techniques close to what is known as Tristan chord in Rusalka.

All these techniques enlivened Dvorak's musical idiom and gave a peculiar character to some key passages in the compositions mentioned. They are not frequent enough, however, to have fundamentally changed the basis of Dvorak's style. It was only modality of folklore or historical origin, and nothing more recent, that can be said to have done so. And of course in Dvorak's music up to his last pieces all this worked alongside or in direct symbiosis with romantic tonal structures including techniques as overworked by his immediate predecessors and contemporaries as diminished sevenths or their sequences. Emancipation from such ties to the musical language of the past, the systematic use of a significantly expanded tonality or even a challenge to tonality as the main element in the structure of composition was to be achieved only in the mature work of the most important innovators of the generation of Dvorak's pupils.

Dvorak's sacred music forms a separate chapter in his output. Surprisingly it was not based on the older tradition of church music and neither was it indebted to the newer trends marked out in Roman Catholic liturgical music by the "Witt Reform" or Cecilianism. Dvorak addressed and glorified his God freely, in the musical idiom peculiar to him. To the techniques characteristic of the different stages of his development as a secular composer he added a few italianisms in melodics, most frequently akin to Verdi - particularly in the Stabat mater, but also in the Requiem and the Te Deum, but no longer when it came to the Mass in D major and not at all in the Biblical Songs, which in musical idiom belong in full to the American period and the broader framework of Dvorak' highly individual lyrical musical language. We find a certain Italianism outside his sacred music in Rusalka: some prominent vocal parts and most strikingly the heroine aria Mesicku na nebi hlubokem [Moon in the Deep Sky], including stylisation and the instrumentation of the orchestral accompaniment, have affinities with the contemporary idiom of Italian verism. This is something that sets Dvorak--like the isolated examples of expanded and weakened tonality--in the wider context of the Secession.

We have, it seems, covered all the most important sources of Dvorak's music. They were many, and show Antonin Dvorak to have been an extremely sensitive and receptive composer, closely following various trends in music, and open to all kinds of stimuli and new discoveries. This is not, however, the most important point, since what is so admirable is how he managed not just to absorb it all, but perfectly and unerringly to recast it into his own consistently individual and marvellously poetic and imaginatively rich musical language.

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