American multi-millionaire businessman,
had lured Dvořák to New York City to
become director of her new National
Conservatory of Music. She chose well, for
not only was Dvořák one of Europe’s most
celebrated composers, but more importantly he brought fine teaching skills and
an openness to the potential of American
music. In his words, “I came to discover
what young Americans had in them and
to help them express it.”
Dvořák absorbed the
vitality and brashness of
America in the 1890s.
A man who drew on his Czech peasant
roots both for personal values and artistic
inspiration, Dvořák found much to treasure in American folk traditions. While
white Americans were inclined to undervalue the spirituals of black Americans,
Dvořák was enraptured by them. One of
his students was Harry T. Burleigh, an African American with a fine baritone voice
who was to become an important arranger
of spirituals and writer of American art
songs. As Burleigh remembered, Dvořák
“literally saturated himself with Negro
song … I sang our Negro songs for him
very often, and before he wrote his own
themes, he filled himself with the spirit
of the old Spirituals.” It was those songs
and the very sound of Burleigh’s voice that
inspired the great English horn melody in
the “New World’s” second movement.
With his sensitive antennae, Dvořák
absorbed the vitality and brashness of
America in the 1890s (“The enthusiasm
of most Americans for all things new is
apparently without limit. It is the essence
of what is called ‘push’—American push,”
he observed), and this spirit influenced his
new symphony of “impressions and greetings from the New World.” The drive of
the first and last movements as well as the
syncopated rhythms and melodic shapes
of many of the themes gave this symphony
a unique voice. But, as Burleigh wrote,
“the workmanship and treatment of the
themes … is Bohemian” — Dvořák is
here, as always, the proud Czech patriot.
Lyric
Roland School
January– February 2014 |
O v ertur e
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