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Article Excerpt
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...
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