One of the monuments of Western music—Mozart’s last symphony, the “Jupiter”—was written in Vienna during a horrible summer in 1788 when the composer was plunged into financial adversity and “black thoughts.” In two years’ time, he and his wife had lost four of their children in infancy, and the family was on the precipice of financial ruin. So terrible was his distress, and so heroic his struggle in the face of it (he composed the great E-flat–Major and G-Minor symphonies the same summer), that for more than a century he was to serve as a model for Romantic writers and composers attracted to the cult of the Suffering Artist.
Mozart made the model irresistible by writing excruciating “begging letters” to a brother mason, in which he mentioned bills he couldn’t pay and a despair he could banish “only by a tremendous effort.” In the most poignant of these, he summarized his condition by writing, “My fate is sad, but only in Vienna is it so adverse that I can earn nothing.” He may have literally earned nothing from his last three symphonies, for we have no record of actual performances. Yet none of this hardship stopped him from composing these landmark works.
If the melancholy G-Minor Symphony seems a commentary on this tragic “fate,” the imperious “Jupiter” is more a defiance of it, a forecast of what Beethoven was to do in his Fifth Symphony. It is difficult not to be moved by the contrast between Mozart’s bleak circumstances and this supremely life-affirming symphony. The 41st is the most “learned” and technically adroit of Mozart’s symphonies, but it is also one of the most emotionally vibrant and varied, a sublime mix of anguish and jubilation. The first three movements play these two moods against each other; the finale, in contrast to the gloomy whirrings in the finale of the G-Minor Symphony, is a triumph of the spirit.
The first movement offers a thematic richness and grand sweep extraordinary even for Mozart, yet it develops its three diverse themes in a tight sonata structure with not a wasted note. At once imperious and quizzical, the opening exemplifies what Charles Rosen called “themes with contradictory sentiments, like the beginning of Mozart’s ‘Jupiter’ Symphony, which has a big contradiction in what kind of sentiment is represented.” Another example of this doubleness is a stern minor-key outburst that suddenly turns into a soaring major-key affirmation, projecting two emotions at once.
The Andante cantabile—with its unabashed sensuality, muted strings, and elegant woodwinds—is also laid out in a sonata form, one far more elaborate than most Classical slow movements. Its minor-key second subject has a yearning and darkness that recall the Symphony No. 40 and the Piano Concerto No. 20 in D Minor. The elegant Menuetto offers a welcome simplicity, but it contains a Trio that undergoes surprising inversions and transformations, with a teasing prefiguration of the main idea in the next movement.
Usually in a Classical Viennese symphony, the first movement offers far more heft and drama than the lighter finale, but here the fourth movement has equal—if not greater—brilliance and power. Structured in a sonata format with five themes, this is a fugal finale worthy of Bach, with five-part counterpart in its stunning coda, yet it is based on a simple four-note motif of Gregorian origin that transforms in each of its many appearances. (Mozart actually used this idea in his First Symphony, written when he was eight.) This finale is widely regarded as the most intricate piece of musical architecture in all of Mozart, a grand fusion of Baroque and Classical forms.
Mozart lived three more years, but he never wrote another symphony. After hearing the “Jupiter,” we realize he didn’t need to.
Shortly after arriving in America in 1892 to serve as the head of a national conservatory of American music, Antonín Dvořák declared that the most distinctive folk music in the United States came from Black America; only through a recognition of this fundamental fact, he said, could America realize itself musically. Spirituals, he said, were “the folk songs of America.” With their unlimited emotional range and bracing syncopation, they had “all that is needed for a great and noble school of music.” Now a commonplace idea, this assertion by a European—made long before W. E. B. Du Bois or George Gershwin—was hugely provocative for its time, yet perfectly in tune with Europe’s embrace of radicals like Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville, before Americans could deal with them.
Dvořák composed the “New World” Symphony in New York City, with a copy of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha on his music stand and the soulful sounds of spirituals—sung by his most talented student, Harry Burleigh—ringing in his ears. A summer sojourn in Spillville, Iowa, convinced him that Native American chants also were an important part of American music; however, though he built motifs inspired by these chants into the symphony, he regarded spirituals as the “foundation.” As musicologist and critic Henry Krehbiel noted, this assertion caused “much consternation” among the musical intelligentsia, with some claiming that Dvořák simply lifted Black melodies verbatim and others vehemently denying any African American influence whatsoever. Arguments about authenticity—which continue to this day—barely concealed a larger anxiety and outrage over Dvořák’s embrace of African American music. Tastemakers such as journalist James Creelman and critic James Huneker (who claimed the symphony enabled the “evil” development of ragtime) denounced Dvořák’s advocacy of spirituals in explicitly racist terms.
To this day, some critics deny that the Black influence is authentic or assert that the “New World” Symphony is just another Czech-Bohemian symphony. From the beginning, Dvořák stated that he was out to write a symphony that was “distinctly American” in its combination of influences. He declared that his method was to study indigenous melodies until he became so “thoroughly imbued with their characteristics” that he could create his own themes based on their “essence and vitality.”
All these complicated controversies have tended to bury the work’s simple spontaneity and exuberance. Whatever the symphony’s ultimate sources, it has a powerful immediacy, an instantly apprehensible unity of emotion and sensibility. The sense of open spaces and New World freshness is palpable; that the symphony indeed opened up a new world was not doubted by the cheering audience at the 1893 Carnegie Hall premiere or by the president of the New York Philharmonic, who called the occasion “epoch-making” and spoke of the “justness of the title.”
Dvořák’s “Americanness” is apparent in his saturation in spirituals; his creation of a spontaneous, open sound; and his immersion in American poetry. H. L. Mencken—one of the symphony’s strongest defenders—spoke of its “atmosphere of frank savagery,” its syncopated “rush of sounds,” and its “unbroken clarity.” This sprawling exuberance, with themes spilling over from one movement to another and parading by one more time at the end, is set against a powerful homesickness, an excitement about the New World tempered by a longing for the Old. Dvořák fell in love with America during his two-year stay, but he deeply missed his native Bohemia: The big tune in the second movement for English horn became a spiritual called “Goin’ Home,” a metaphor for Dvořák’s nostalgia for his homeland. The middle section of this innovative movement is a somber march evoking Longfellow’s vision of Minnehaha’s funeral, followed by a “Dawn on the Prairie” full of birdsong and brilliant light—a spectacular climax that helped establish the idea of “open sound” in American music.
Couple all this with Dvořák’s link to jazz and the American idioms of Gershwin and Copland—he taught Rubin Goldmark, who mentored the latter two and Ellington as well—and it turns out that Dvořák’s detractors had a great deal to be anxious about. American music was never quite the same after the “New World” Symphony. Dvořák may have been a European, but his American legacy was profound.
—Jack Sullivan