Carnegie Hall

Born in 1841 about 20 miles outside of Prague, Antonín Dvořák may be his country’s most emblematic figure. A composer whose tuneful music still serves as inspiration for TV jingles and film scores, Dvořák bridged Slavic folk songs and grand, all-American orchestrations, causing a sensation with both Eastern and Western audiences—quite a feat for the son of a modest Bohemian butcher and innkeeper.

Though prolific, Dvořak was a relatively late bloomer, already in his early 30s when he first made his mark as a composer. His career took off when the imperial Austrian government, impressed with early drafts of his symphonies, awarded him a stipend in 1875, a prize that brought Dvořák to the attention of Johannes Brahms, who was a member of the jury. Brahms savvily introduced Dvořák to his own publisher, and the rest is history. With his works now issued under the Berlin-based Simrock imprint, Dvořák became a celebrity virtually overnight, and commissions for new works began streaming in from across Europe. By the mid-1880s, his international reputation was at an apex, with major publishers bidding to feature his latest works in their catalogs.

Though undeniably patriotic in his early works, Dvořak ultimately branched out. In 1892, the Bohemian composer began a three-year residency in the United States as director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York, an especially happy and productive time for him that gave rise to two virtuosic “American” chamber works—the String Quartet, Op. 96, and the String Quintet, Op. 97—as well as one of his signatures, his monumental Ninth Symphony, “From the New World.” Returning to Prague in 1895, he was so inspired by his experience overseas, he dashed off two more string quartets in quick succession.

Still, the composer never let success spoil him and always remained close to his rustic roots. He built a small farm on his brother-in-law’s estate at Vysoka, a country village not far from the capital. It was here that Dvořak spent his summers and autumns playing gentleman farmer and composing. Far from the aloof cosmopolitan imagined by New Yorkers, what he loved most was country living, the unpretentious company of villagers, and raising pigeons. Listen to and read more about the composer’s essential works.

Slavonic Dances Op. 46 and 72 (1878, 1887)

A series of 16 orchestral pieces composed over the span of a single decade, Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances were originally written with a piano and four hands in mind. The composer had encountered Brahms’s recent Hungarian Dances in the late 1870s, and at the request of his publisher, turned his elegantly lilting piano pieces into full-scale symphonic poems that teemed with national character. “Slavonic,” however, is a misnomer: the pieces evoke Bohemia, and while Dvořák never quite quotes traditional folk dances verbatim, he evokes their style, structure, and patterns. To this day, the works are so enduringly popular, they are themselves often quoted. Milanese film composer Nino Rota, for instance, may have been inspired by Slavonic Dance No. 10 when writing his unforgettable theme for The Godfather.

String Quartet No. 10 (1879)

Not long after publishing his Slavonic Dances, Dvořák was approached by prominent German violinist-composer Jean Becker, who wanted a new work for his Florentine Quartet. The resulting String Quartet in E-flat Major, though dedicated to Becker, was ultimately premiered by a different quartet at a private recital in 1879. The style of the four-movement masterpiece is undeniably Slavonic, with a scherzo movement reminiscent of a dumka ballad, and includes a final movement that evokes the whirlwind skočná folk dances of Dvořák’s youth. Czech music devotees may recognize this traditional genre from the work of another Bohemian composer: Bedřich Smetana, who penned a memorable skočná to be danced by a circus troupe in his comic opera The Bartered Bride.

Violin Concerto (1879)

A defining work in the violin repertoire, this concerto was written for Hungarian prodigy Joseph Joachim, one of Dvořák’s favorite violinists. When it was finished in 1879, however, Joachim was put off by many of the composer’s revolutionary ideas for the form: A punctilious classicist, Joachim didn’t appreciate how the adagio of the second movement cut the recapitulation in the first movement short; he also took umbrage at the playful cascading repetitions of the finale. He took Dvořák’s work home to work on editing the violin part, and never performed it in public. More than a decade would pass before the work’s premiere in Chicago. Performing it is now a rite of passage for any violin virtuoso.

Symphony No. 7 (1885)

While subtle and modest in size, Dvořák’s Seventh is often counted among the greatest of the composer’s nine symphonies. It was commissioned by the London Philharmonic Society, which in 1884 invited Dvořák to become an honorary member in return for a new symphony. This was Dvořák’s only such commission, and it clearly inspired him: He set to task with great seriousness, determined to create a symphony capable of changing the world, and conducted the premiere himself in 1885.

Piano Quintet No. 2, Op. 81 (1888)

Between August and October 1887, Dvořák composed his Piano Quintet in A Major at Vysok. At the time, he was reviewing the many unpublished works created during his years of obscurity and revising some of them for his publisher. Decades later, his beloved second piano quintet would receive its Carnegie Hall premiere in Carnegie Lyceum (now Zankel Hall) on December 3, 1912, with pianist Caroline Beebe and the Max Jacobs Quartet.

Symphony No. 8 (1889)

Dvořák’s Eighth is the most straightforwardly “Bohemian” of this nationalistic composer’s later symphonies. Whereas in the Seventh Symphony Dvořák had reined in his overtly nationalist tendencies to write a more internationally “relatable” work—and explored African American and Indigenous American material in the Ninth—in the Eighth Symphony, Dvořák was content to mine his own native sources on a grand scale. Indeed, some of Dvořák’s early Czech partisans denied the G-Major Symphony was a real symphony at all, declaring it to be a patriotic symphonic poem.

Carnival Overture, Op. 92 (1891)

Composed in 1891 as part of a romantic “Nature, Life, and Love” trilogy of overtures, this orchestral Carnival was intended for the second part: life. Fast and festive, it’s written in the jubilant key of A major, and features a full ensemble of strings, winds, and even tambourine. As per its title, the work nods to the spirited bedlam of a carnival setting—crowds, barkers, and what Dvořák described as “a pair of straying lovers.” The composer led the premiere of the trio of pieces in Prague in 1892 before introducing them at Carnegie Hall later that same year. At the time, New Yorkers were celebrating the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery” of America, but it may well have been Dvořák who was discovering the New World during that visit.

Piano Trio No. 4, “Dumky” (1891)

One of Dvořák’s most popular chamber works, the “Dumky” Trio takes its name from the Slavic folk ballads, typically melancholy in nature, that provided inspiration for numerous 19th- and 20th-century composers. Eager to reassert his Czech heritage, Dvořák based the work’s six movements on dumky of varying temperaments. He wrote the trio shortly before departing for New York to become director of the National Conservatory of Music.

String Quartet No. 12, “American” (1893)

The shortest of Dvořák’s 14 string quartets, the “American” is among his most accessible works, despite its formal and thematic brevity. “I wanted for once to write something very melodious and simple, and I always kept Papa Haydn before my eyes,” the composer told a friend back home in Bohemia. The germ of the quartet seems to have been the song of a scarlet tanager bird that Dvořák once heard while strolling along the banks of the Turkey River in Spillville, Iowa.

Symphony No. 9, “From the New World” (1893)

Since its epochal world premiere at Carnegie Hall in 1893, Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony has become one of America’s most popular orchestral works and is considered a breakthrough in its use of African American musical idioms—though it also spawned some controversy. The work was composed in New York City, and it drew from a wide array of source material, including Longfellow’s epic “The Song of Hiawatha” and African American spirituals sung by his student, Harry Burleigh. A summer sojourn in Iowa convinced him that folk songs also were an important part of American music.

Cello Concerto (1895)

One of his most exuberant creations, Dvořák’s sole fully orchestrated Cello Concerto was the last work he produced after his stint in the New World. With its soulful lyricism, exquisite balancing of cello and orchestra, and open-air grandeur, it is widely ranked among the greatest cello concertos in the repertoire. The delicate slow movement is a memorial to Dvořák’s secret love for his sister-in-law, who was dying when he wrote it; the first and last movements have an epic quality that recalls the “New World” Symphony.

Photography: Dvořák courtesy of the Carnegie Hall Rose Archives.