Second Monday Music: Interpretative layers

Young Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904)

Of the music of Antonín Dvořák

By Geoffrey Dean

The Czech romantic composer Antonín Dvořák gained international popularity in the late 1870s, when his first set of Slavonic Dances was published at the recommendation of Johannes Brahms. Like so many other works by Dvořák, the Slavonic Dances use characteristic folk rhythms coupled with catchy folk-like tunes that were invented by Dvořák rather than being quoted from existing music. Dvořák used a similar combination of borrowing and invention when he came to the United States in 1892 and set out to show American composers how they might create an American-sounding classical music – a national school of composition similar to the ones that had emerged in Russia and Dvořák’s own Bohemia.
    Dvořák Slavonic Dance, Op. 72, No. 1 [about 4 min.]:

    Part of the idea of Russian or Czech musical nationalism in the 19th century was simply for newly-created symphonies and operas to sound different from their Germanic antecedents. Any musical ingredients that provided a dose of otherness were generously stirred into the mix. Exotic sounds became the order of the day, especially if they helped transport the listener to an imagined Russian or Czech soundscape. It was of lesser importance whether or not these exoticisms actually existed “naturally” in Russian or Bohemian folk music, and in many cases, they didn’t.

With his wife in London, 1886

Dvořák himself was a wonderfully exotic figure. One can just picture him in his bowler hat, with a thick beard and tanned complexion, strolling the streets of New York City as he took in the sights and sounds of what for him must have been an otherworldly metropolis. He came to America determined to engage with our otherness. He gave it back to us in instantly-popular compositions such as the Symphony “from the New World,” with its references to Longfellow’s Hiawatha and quotations from African-American spirituals and North American birdsongs, and the “American” string quartet, with repetitive pentatonic tunes and laments perhaps inspired by American Indian music.
    Largo from Symphony No. 9 in E minor, From the New World (death of Hiawatha and birdsongs) [about 14 mins]:


    Scherzo from String Quartet in F Major, Op. 96, “American” (repetitive pentatonic motifs) [about 4 mins]:


But Dvořák’s American period works of 1892-5 still sound like Dvořák. This to me is the ultimate sign of Dvořák’s greatness as a composer. He could be a crowd-pleasing composer of Slavonic Dances and quasi-American music and yet preserve his own artistic and personal identity in these works. I think this is why there are so many divergent interpretations of a work like Dvořák’s Cello Concerto in B minor, Op. 104, also composed in the US. To me, interpreting Dvořák means trying to square music with very clear emotions like jubilation or lament – the “outer” Dvořák – with elements that seems to tell a different story – the “inner” Dvořák.
    In my opinion, Dvořák’s cello concerto has at least three distinct interpretative layers. First there is “concerto otherness” – he knew that this concerto was not a concerto in the traditional sense of a virtuoso display piece for a solo instrument with an unobtrusive orchestral accompaniment. Dvořák rethinks the traditional relationship of the cello to the orchestra by making the orchestra just as important to the unfolding instrumental drama as the soloist.
    Then there is “folk otherness” or “folk universality.” Like the New World Symphony, the concerto features pentatonic themes that have culture-crossing folk roots – they could be referencing either Czech or American folk music. Dvořák had hinted at this universality in the symphony by suggesting that the subtitle New World actually referred to a quarter in Prague, not to the Americas. To take this even further, the real roots of the pentatonic scale are planted firmly in China, and if Dvořák had gotten a cushy job in Beijing, he could just as easily used this same 5-note scale to demonstrate how one might compose a Chinese symphony.
    Finally there is “personal space,” that inner Dvořák that peeks through when the Dvořák we think we know lets him, and when we get in tune with this otherwise hidden layer, especially in the cello concerto.
    To find this personal layer, we have to go back to Prague, to Dvořák’s early days as a violist in the theater orchestra there, when he gave music lessons to round out his income. One of his students was Josefina Cermakova, and Dvořák had hoped to marry her until she chose a count over him. Dvořák later married her younger sister Anna. Dvořák’s Sonatina for violin and piano, yet another popular work from the American years, seems to give the G-rated version of Dvořák’s blissful family life with Anna and their five children. Touchingly, Dvořák dedicated this charming music, his 100th opus, to his family and completed it at Christmas time.
    Sonatina in G Major, Op. 100, fourth movement [about 6 mins]:

    But the work that he could never quite get over was the song cycle he had composed in the summer of 1865 for Josefina. The songs are based on patriotic Czech-language poetry by Pfleger-Moravský from a collection entitled Cypresses. Dvořák gave his song cycle another name: Love Songs. He returned to these songs in the 1880s, revising them for publication and arranging 12 of them into one of the most beautiful string quartets I know of.
    No. 5 (“Here I Gaze at That Dear Letter”) from Cypresses for string quartet [about 3 mins]:

In 1895, after Dvořák had largely completed the cello concerto, he received news of Josefina’s death. Apparently in response to this, he wrote the ending of the concerto anew, opening up an extended personal space and distancing himself even further from the accepted ideas of what a concerto “should” be.
    Did Dvořák think of his cello concerto as a musical memorial to Josefina? He never explicitly said as much. Hanus Wihan, the gifted Bohemian cellist who had requested that Dvořák write a cello concerto, likely assumed that this concerto was for him. And later Dvořák actually did say that he would never have written the work if Wihan had not asked him to.
    In his 1983 novel, Dvořák in Love, the Czech-Canadian writer Josef Škvorecký devotes a chapter to “The Mystery of the Cadenza,” which looks at Dvořák’s cello concerto through the prism of the “years of friendship” between Dvořák and Wihan. The chapter dramatizes the question of whether Dvořák composed the work for the cello or for a particular cellist, or “for anyone capable of playing it.” (Škvorecký p. 150) Škvorecký narrates the kind of musical confrontation that might have resulted from Wihan’s insistence on replacing much of Dvořák’s new ending with a cadenza of the cellist’s composition. This scene is inspired in part by a frequently-quoted letter from Dvořák to his publisher, in which Dvořák anticipates an underhanded attempt by Wihan to have the cadenza included in the published work. Without any reference to Josefina or any other extra-musical narrative, Dvořák explains to his publisher how the concerto finale “closes gradually…like a sigh…” and forbids Wihan to “stick a bit like this [cadenza] on.” (The publisher followed Dvořák’s directive.)
    Cello Concerto in B minor, Op. 104, mvt 3: the long sigh [about 6 mins]:

    The conflict is represented in Škvorecký’s treatment as one between the cellist wanting to “celebrate the solo voice” and the composer wanting to preserve the deeper meaning of the music, a “secret” which he cannot express in words. Reinforcing the idea of the concerto as a memorial to Josefina, Škvorecký concludes the chapter with its own coda in which music from Dvořák’s Requiem is heard during the composer’s own funeral procession.
    Perhaps influenced by Škvorecký, a highly engaging and readable scholarly book on Dvořák’s American period by Michael Beckerman also has a “soundtrack” running through it, supported this time by actual audio excerpts provided on an accompanying CD. I’ve tried to take a similar approach here, and hope that you discover something of the “inner Dvořák” as you listen to the musical examples. But remember, there is so much more to Dvořák’s music than at first meets the ear!

Copyright © 2014 by Geoffrey Dean