Symphony No. 9, From the New World
Antonín Dvořák was born in Nelahozeves (Mühlhausen), Bohemia, near Prague, on September 8, 1841, and died in Prague on May 1, 1904. He began sketching themes for his Symphony No. 9, From the New World, during the last two weeks of 1892; the finished score is dated May 24, 1893. Anton Seidl led the New York Philharmonic in the first performance on December 16, 1893, at Carnegie Hall, having given a “public rehearsal” on the 15th. The Boston Symphony Orchestra played the local premiere just two weeks later, on December 30, 1893, with Emil Paur conducting.
The score of the symphony calls for 2 flutes and piccolo, 2 oboes and English horn, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, triangle, cymbals, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).
One of the great mysteries—and great joys—of listening to instrumental music lies in the fact that what we’re supposed to hear and what we actually hear aren’t always aligned. It doesn’t help if composers never made their intentions especially clear. Such is the case with Antonín Dvořák’s famous Ninth Symphony, “From the New World,” first heard in Boston only a few days after its December 1893 premiere in New York. With an enormous performance history rivaling any piece in the repertoire, perhaps no other work has been interpreted, reinterpreted, and misinterpreted more than the New World Symphony.
It all began in May of that year, when Dvořák shocked the world by proclaiming in a New York newspaper that American composers should draw inspiration from African American folk music if they wanted to develop a truly distinctive national style. The story went viral—at least in 19th-century terms. Week after week, and month after month, musicians from all over the United States and Europe weighed in on the question of whether Americans needed a national style at all and, if so, how it should sound. Bostonians participated vigorously.
John Knowles Paine, a Harvard professor, thought the newspaper must have misquoted Dvořák. The obvious choice for American composers, as he saw it, was to emulate the German symphonic tradition. Composer Amy Beach was more sympathetic to a folk-based classical style but felt that African American music was more representative of southern states, not the entire country. She thought composers should draw from the folk music of their own heritage. Conductor E.N. Catlin heartily endorsed the idea, as if it made perfect sense. J.B. Claus, a well-known arranger, took the opposite view, calling Dvořák’s pronouncement “absurd.” The diversity of Boston opinions reflected those from around the country, with most white musicians expressing skepticism.
People of African ancestry, whether always free or formerly enslaved, were in the middle of a vast political struggle to have their basic human rights recognized in a society that had long denied them. Centuries of dehumanization had led many Americans to believe that music with African origins was inherently uncivilized, or even unmusical, therefore making it wholly unsuitable for classical music, much less a distinguishing national style. Of course, Black intellectuals agreed wholeheartedly with Dvořák: they had been arguing for the musicality of their own expressive culture for decades.
It was against this backdrop of large-scale political conflict and sharpening musical debate that Dvořák penned his Ninth Symphony, as well as two other pieces that would become closely associated with his residency in the United States: the Opus 96 String Quartet (premiered in Boston in January 1894) and the Op. 97 String Quintet, both of which now carry the nickname American. As the controversy wore on in the national press, news of Dvořák’s ongoing work spread, and the country wondered if his new music would somehow display the stylistic innovations he had encouraged Americans themselves to make. On December 29, Bostonians would find out for themselves.
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Dvořák had come to the United States in mid-1892 to direct the National Conservatory in New York—a relatively young musical academy founded by an entrepreneur and progressive philanthropist named Jeannette Myers Thurber. Originally conceived in the 1880s as a training ground for opera singers feeding an attached professional troupe, it soon developed a more comprehensive curriculum closer to that of older institutions like Boston’s New England Conservatory. Dvořák offered instruction in composition, directed the orchestra, and, notably, went along with Thurber’s plan to admit students of color (also mirroring NEC).
While music historians have emphasized the impact of a summer journey to the Midwest on Dvořák’s major American compositions (including a lengthy stay in the Bohemian community of Spillville, Iowa), the significance of his surroundings in New York can hardly be overstated. At the time, the conservatory building was located just off Union Square and mere steps from Steinway Hall, the city’s most vital classical music venue before Carnegie Hall opened in 1891. With the neighborhood’s musical culture dominated by German immigrants or German-speaking Americans, Dvořák quickly found agreeable company in two of the leading music critics: Henry Krehbiel and James Huneker, who loved to drink beers with the composer at saloons and gab in German long into the night.
One of the most pressing issues of the day when Dvořák arrived concerned the role of African American music in the country’s larger musical fabric. Krehbiel had been researching the topic through contacts in New Orleans for well over a decade by 1893, while Huneker had considered it off and on in his criticism from the 1880s. Dvořák finally made his philosophical position public in May 1893, but no one would know how he would approach an actual composition until both Krehbiel and Huneker wrote separate commentaries about the Ninth Symphony just before its premiere on December 16. The headline to both pieces was seductive: “Dr. Dvořák’s American Symphony.”
Using their personal connections to Dvořák, both writers explained that he had introduced more surprises than anyone was anticipating. Krehbiel argued that Dvořák’s use of certain rhythmic and melodic gestures not only drew from African American styles, but that these gestures would speak to the entire country. They were close enough in musical character to Scottish, Native American, and even Chinese folk song to inspire national feeling among diverse listeners. Unexpectedly, these reports also revealed that dramatic elements of the second and third movements had been inspired by episodes from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic romance, The Song of Hiawatha. And Krehbiel claimed that the finale contains a funny little riff on “Yankee Doodle.” What could be more American than that?
The audience roared and greeted the composer with a standing ovation, leading critics to pick up the thread. The Times observed that the symphony “throbs with American feeling,” while a writer who wasn’t at the concert but spoke to several listeners found that Dvořák had depicted a “larger Americanism” of El Capitan, Mammoth Cave, and Niagara Falls—vast natural wonders. Still, though, reflecting a wider skepticism about the entire project, certain critics were unable to accept that a great symphony could find inspiration in the music of formerly enslaved people. A brief note in the Musical Courier, a leading New York magazine, put it this way: “Dvořák’s is an American symphony: is it? Themes from negro melodies; conducted by a Hungarian and played by Germans in a hall built by a Scotchman. About one-third of the audience were Americans and so were the critics.”
When the symphony came to Boston, the situation would be treated even less generously.
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In a pure coincidence, the Boston Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Emil Paur performed across the East River in Brooklyn on the same night the New World Symphony premiered in Manhattan. As one observer put it, Paur displayed “uncouthness” on the podium but was unaware of his “farmerisms”—excessive head shaking and foot stomping. He nevertheless drew the most he could from the orchestra with an earnestness suited to the music of Beethoven, Brahms, Anton Rubinstein, and Bedřich Smetana. It was no coincidence, however, that Paur would lead the BSO in the symphony’s Boston premiere a few days later—and that his concertmaster, Franz Kneisel, would premiere the Opus 96 string quartet soon thereafter. The two men, like Dvořák, were German-speaking Central Europeans who very likely caroused in the same saloons near Union Square when they visited New York.
Most critics had taken great pains to note that Dvořák had not based the symphony on music by Stephen Foster or minstrel troupes (as many people had assumed before its premiere). The BSO program book made the same point, noting that he had moved toward “realizing a characteristic school of American music.” But Boston critics were having none of it. A writer for the Daily Globe opined, “With full knowledge of these intentions on the part of Mr. Dvořák, yesterday’s audience gave rapt attention to the performance of the symphony and waited expectantly for the appearance of melodies characteristic of America. It is fair to presume that these expectations were not generally fulfilled.” Tough criticism indeed.
And it continued. The Daily Advertiser noted, “It is not more clearly American than Bohemian or Russian.” The Daily Traveller was even more direct, with a headline trumpeting that the “American Symphony” had been misnamed. “That any of these themes are nationally American cannot be claimed,” the reviewer went on, claiming the opening melody had “a strong resemblance” to “the n***** tunes sung to the twanging accompaniment of the banjo and the tap of the heel”—with the racist epithet fully uncensored.
How could the responses be so different from those in New York? Boston’s musical establishment tended to align with John Knowles Paine, the Harvard professor who believed that the German symphonic tradition was universal. From their point of view, a composer achieved greatness only by making a personal stamp within it. The question of national identity was always secondary—and relying on it too heavily naturally diminished an individual voice. The additional racist invective bolstered the point: for that critic, music with African ties could never rise to the level of universality.
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Cutting against the grain of the critical establishment, Paur himself championed American composers, even those who stepped outside the German mold. Early in the 1894-95 season, for example, he premiered George Whitefield Chadwick’s Brahmsian Third Symphony but, more notably, later programmed Amy Beach’s Gaelic Symphony and Edward MacDowell’s evocative Indian Suite. Both pieces engage with folk music in far more obvious ways than Dvořák’s symphony.
Beach followed through on her written response to Dvořák’s ideas by searching for Irish folk tunes in old magazines, believing they were more relevant to Boston audiences than antebellum spirituals. MacDowell borrowed Indigenous melodies from an obscure German dissertation. And while neither composer believed that these works manifested a fully “American” spirit, a critic for the Boston Globe remarked that the suite entitled MacDowell “to rank with the foremost writers of music of the higher forms” and was “harmonized and orchestrated more elaborately than any other strictly American composition yet given here.” We may wonder if Dvořák’s symphony was “strictly” American or not.
The symphony has remained extraordinarily popular in Boston. Paur and the orchestra performed it twenty-one times, at home and on tour, between 1895 and 1898, including once as a short-notice replacement for Beach’s Gaelic. And rarely has a season gone by over the last 130 years when it didn’t appear at least once. Every performance has raised the same questions about what makes the music American, while the symphony itself always refuses to give a clear answer. In the end, the piece sounds American because it will always echo what we sound like when we answer the question of what being American means.
Douglas Shadle
Douglas Shadle is Associate Professor of Musicology at the Vanderbilt University Blair School of Music. An award-winning historian of American orchestral music, he is currently co-authoring a biography of Florence Price with Samantha Ege (Oxford University). His previous books include Orchestrating the Nation: The Nineteenth-Century American Symphonic Enterprise and Antonin Dvořak’s New World Symphony, both published by Oxford University Press.
The American premiere of Dvořák’s Symphony From the New World was given by the New York Philharmonic on December 16, 1893, with Anton Seidl conducting.
The first Boston Symphony performance followed two weeks later, on December 30, 1893, with Emil Paur conducting.
About the Music
Dvořák’s Ninth is a traditional four-movement symphony with fast outer movements, a slow movement, and a scherzo. There are similarities among many of the main thematic ideas throughout, and themes recur across movements, a technique frequently used by Beethoven, Schumann, and Brahms.
The first movement, Adagio–Allegro molto, opens with a slow, chorale-like passage played first by strings, then woodwinds, with a sharp horn outburst hinting at drama to come. A timpani-punctuated three-note motif leads to a fragment of the first theme to come, which is finally sounded by horns in the fast Allegro tempo. A contrasting folk-music-flavored idea, introduced by flute and oboe, is extended and developed before yet a third theme is played by solo flute, apparently a transformation of the spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” which Dvořák had heard sung by his Black student Harry T. Burleigh. Solo turns for individual instruments play a big part in the working-out of the movement.
For the Largo second movement, Dvořák invented one of the most famous melodies in classical music, played on English horn. This was later adapted by Dvořák’s pupil William Arms Fisher into a popular song known as “Goin’ Home.” We return to this melody following a contrasting middle section. The entire movement has a nostalgic quality thought to express Dvořák’s homesickness at being separated from his beloved Bohemia.
The third movement scherzo (a lively movement type originated by Haydn, named for the Italian word for “joke”) that begins with a reference to the scherzo of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. This aggressive opening is alleviated by sections of much lighter music, including a tune played by flute and oboes that is derived from the “Goin’ Home” melody. The opening movement is hinted at just before a contrasting, dancing passage.
The high-energy finale begins with a buildup (an inspiration for John Williams’s Jaws motif) to a simple but powerful six-note theme rising and falling by step. A clarinet brings a lovely second melody, taken up by strings. Dvořák returns to themes from early in the symphony, including the “Goin’ Home” melody, the main scherzo idea, and the first theme of the first movement, often blended together.
Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.