Alterity Syllabus Unit 1
Introduction
Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904) was a composer from Bohemia, a region in the northern Habsburg and later Austro-Hungarian Empire in what is now the Czech Republic. Born to a large, rural, working-class Czech family, he received his early musical education in village schools and churches where he studied violin and viola. He later received formal musical education at the Prague Organ School, from which he graduated in 1859. For just over a decade Dvořák worked in the theater orchestra of the Provisional Theatre in Prague, where he played in productions of German, French, and Italian opera. After an early period of composition that closely imitated the German tradition of Beethoven and Wagner, Dvořák quickly developed a reputation as a Czech nationalist composer in the 1870s. He used Czech and other Eastern European folktales and folk tunes as inspiration for his operas, including The Cunning Peasant, and character pieces including the popular Moravian Duets and Slavonic Dances. He cemented his position in nineteenth century classical music and Czech national repertoire with later works including the sacred cantata Stabat mater (1877) and his operas The Devil and Kate (1899) and Rusalka (1901). With these, Dvořák gained an international celebrity, especially in England where he was invited to conduct his Stabat mater at the Royal Albert Hall, and was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 1891. But in the United States, he is largely known for his Symphony No. 9 in E Minor “From the New World,” curiously considered a catalyst for the development of uniquely American orchestral music.
Dvořák’s biography is distinct from contemporary German canonical figures such as Johannes Brahms, who are privileged in Western classical music history, and this distinction forms a double-edged sword where the composer’s reception is concerned. Dvořák is often situated as an implicitly inferior rustic/ethnic foil to the sophisticated Brahms and other Viennese elites. Though Brahms himself did not grow up very privileged, Dvořák seems provincial by comparison purely as a result of his position as a Czech Other outside of mainstream German bourgeoisie culture that dominated the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But Dvořák also enjoys a status as a sort of folk-hero in classical music history: an often-told story is that he apprenticed to a butcher before dedicating himself to music, though this has been proven to be a myth. This kind of mythology, which is reliant on romanticized or wholly imagined rustic origins, is important to understanding the lasting impression of Dvořák the man, and his music.
In the early 1890s he attracted the interest of wealthy American patron and impresario Jeanette Thurber who, at that point, was deeply involved in the creation of the fledgling National Conservatory in New York City. Thurber recruited Dvořák to serve a three-year term as its director between 1892 and 1895, with the express mission of producing a large-scale symphonic work representative of American musical style. The most prominent result of this tenure became his Ninth Symphony. Dvořák openly declared the work to be inspired by African American spirituals and Native American indigenous music, which he promoted as the true foundation for distinctly American musical idiom. These comments were then, as now, controversial, but the piece was well received by the American public and sparked a contest among American composers to produce nationalist music that was stylistically removed from the dominant German tradition of continental Europe. The popularity of Dvořák’s Ninth “New World” Symphony endures in the United States today, where the symphony’s supposedly American essence can be heard in concert halls, film soundtracks, and phone commercials.