Program Notes

Antonin Dvorak - Symphony #8

Dvořák's musical energy showed a way for the late 19th century symphony to be both profound and immediate in its joyful communicative power

Tom Service

Tue 7 Jan 2014 02.00 EST

So much of the symphonic thinking of the late 19th century is bound up with doing so many things at the same time, through densities of structure and motive, of harmony and counterpoint, that some of the most obvious yet hardest things to achieve in music can get forgotten in a complex symphonic maelstrom of ideas and technicalities. I'm talking about the art of writing tunes: not just any old tunes, either, but composing a whole symphony that teems with tunes that appeal straight to the musical pleasure zones of any listener, but which can also carry and create a whole symphonic edifice.

Which is all an upbeat to this week's symphony, Antonin Dvořák's Eighth. I'm not going to cast Dvořák as some earthy Bohemian in touch with his roots in a way that those bunged-up Germans and Austro-Germanophiles could never be: the Eighth, composed in 1889, would be impossible for Dvořák to have imagined without Beethoven and Brahms as models and catalysts. Yet Dvořák does have a gift that neither of his symphonic predecessors had in the same way, which is that he could compose a seemingly unending torrent of indelible melodies, and he could cast them in crystal-clear orchestration. What's more, in the Eighth Symphony he found a way simultaneously to serve his melodic over-endowment while also creating a kind of symphonic discourse that was definitively his own.

But as well as all of its felicities, this symphony is also, frankly, a popular and even populist pageant of a piece that disguises the brilliance of its construction because its expressive effects are so completely, thrillingly direct, from the miraculous, melancholic waltz of the third movement to the self-assured tune that propels the finale. But you can't have one without the other, immediacy without architecture: Dvořák's is an art that conceals art, and which appeals on many different levels precisely and paradoxically because this symphony's initial impact is so powerful, because Dvořák has distilled his melodic gifts to their symphonic essence.

I'm making this more tortuous than the experience of listening to this perhaps most joyful of all late 19th century symphonies (but you can't have true joy without a sense of darkness, which this piece also contains). So let's begin, with a symphony in G major, as it says on the tin, that actually starts in an achingly expressive G minor with a tune in the cellos, and music that's supposed to be an Allegro con brio ("with movement"), but which sounds in all the world like an andante. A bird-like, arpeggiated tune in the flute signals the movement's true tempo and tonality, but there's still the feeling of an introduction about this section of the symphony, as if Dvořák's just warming us all up for what's to come. You could describe this as an unprecedented elision of time, tonality, and structure in Dvořák's music – which it is! - but the effect it has on you is of unforced naturalness. All of that music comes before a palpitating, perfectly judged crescendo gives way to the main theme of the movement in the strings. Well, I say "main theme": there are a lot of them in this first movement! Instead of Dvořák pulling his melodic material together in some pseudo-'organic' coherence, it's rather that he gives all his tunes space to breathe while also ensuring that they have some resemblances to each other so as to keep them in your ears and brain. That's true on a much bigger scale as well: for example, the main tune of the variations in the finale is based on the same rising arpeggio as the flute's bird-song, which also relates to the first tune you hear in the third movement, and it's expressively comparable to some of the chirruping woodwind music in the slow movement.

The first movement has its most thrilling and adventurous moment at the stormy climax of its central section, which also functions as a kind of bridgeto what was the second subject area of the exposition. Ah, those labels – second subject, exposition – how useless they are (as ever) in describing the experience of listening to this piece! The first movement is really in two parts, because you hear what you think is a return to the opening music just over a third of the way through the movement, and then the rest of the Allegro is really an improvisation on those themes, and it ends in a marvellously brusque coda.

Dvořák's musical energy didn't just transfuse new life into his own music, it showed a way for the late 19th century symphony to be profound in its musical implications as well as brilliant and immediate in its communicative power, without all that Teutonic introversion and angst. It's 35 minutes (or so) of life-enhancing joy.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/jan/07/symphony-guide-dvorak-eighth-tom-service

Antonín Dvořák

Bohemian composer

Antonín Dvořák (born September 8, 1841, Nelahozeves, Bohemia, Austrian Empire [now in Czech Republic]—died May 1, 1904, Prague) was the first Bohemian composer to achieve worldwide recognition, noted for turning folk material into 19th-century Romantic music.

Dvořák was born, the first of nine children, in Nelahozeves, a Bohemian (now Czech) village on the Vltava River north of Prague. He came to know music early, in and about his father’s inn, and became an accomplished violinist as a youngster, contributing to the amateur music-making that accompanied the dances of the local couples. Though it was assumed that he would become a butcher and innkeeper like his father (who also played the zither), the boy had an unmistakable talent for music that was recognized and encouraged. When he was about 12 years old, he moved to Zlonice to live with an aunt and uncle and began studying harmony, piano, and organ. He wrote his earliest works, polkas, during the three years he spent in Zlonice. In 1857 a perceptive music teacher, understanding that young Antonín had gone beyond his own modest abilities to teach him, persuaded his father to enroll him at the Institute for Church Music in Prague. There Dvořák completed a two-year course and played the viola in various inns and with theatre bands, augmenting his small salary with a few private pupils.

The 1860s were trying years for Dvořák, who was hard-pressed for both time and the means, even paper and a piano, to compose. In later years he said he had little recollection of what he wrote in those days, but about 1864 two symphonies, an opera, chamber music, and numerous songs lay unheard in his desk. The varied works of this period show that his earlier leanings toward the music of Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert were becoming increasingly tinged with the influence of Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt.

Among the students Dvořák tutored throughout the 1860s were the sisters Josefina and Anna Čermáková. The musician fell in love with the elder sister, Josefina, but she did not reciprocate his feelings. The anguish of his unrequited love is said to be expressed in Cypresses(1865), a number of songs set to texts by Gustav Pfleger-Moravský. In November 1873 he married the younger sister, Anna, a pianist and singer. The first few years of the Dvořáks’ marriage were challenged by financial insecurity and marked by tragedy. Anna had given birth to three children by 1876 but by 1877 had buried all of them. In 1878, however, she gave birth to the first of the six healthy children the couple would raise together. The Dvořáks maintained a close relationship with Josefina and the man she eventually married, Count Václav Kounic. After several years of regular visits, they bought a summer house in the small village of Vysoká, where Josefina and the count had settled, and spent every summer there from that point onward. Dvořák composed some of his best-known works there.

In 1875 Dvořák was awarded a state grant by the Austrian government, and this award brought him into contact with Johannes Brahms, with whom he formed a close and fruitful friendship. Brahms not only gave him valuable technical advice but also found him an influential publisher in Fritz Simrock, and it was with his firm’s publication of the Moravian Duets (composed 1876) for soprano and contralto and the Slavonic Dances (1878) for piano duet that Dvořák first attracted worldwide attention to himself and to his country’s music. The admiration of the leading critics, instrumentalists, and conductors of the day continued to spread his fame abroad, which led naturally to even greater triumphs in his own country. In 1884 he made the first of 10 visits to England, where the success of his works, especially his choral works, was a source of constant pride to him, although only the Stabat Mater (1877) and Te Deum (1892) continue to hold a position among the finer works of their kind. In 1890 he enjoyed a personal triumph in Moscow, where two concerts were arranged for him by his friend Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The following year he was made an honorary doctor of music of the University of Cambridge.

Dvořák accepted the post of director of the newly established National Conservatory of Music in New York in 1892, and, during his years in the United States, he traveled as far west as Iowa. Though he found much to interest and stimulate him in the New World environment, he soon came to miss his own country, and he returned to Bohemia in 1895. The final years of his life saw the composition of several string quartets and symphonic poems and his last three operas.