12/17/2024
December 16, 2024
RE-DISCOVERING THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Today, on Beethoven’s 254th birthday, we celebrate him with a 10-part series titled “Dvorak in America”. It seems appropriate since Antonin Dvořák premiered his 9th symphony ”From the New World”, on Beethoven’s birthday in 1893 in New York City, at Carnegie Hall. We hope you that you will find it as enjoyable as it was for us to write it.
Dvořák Part 1
A true and positive revolutionary movement does not exist as an isolated moment in time, it is a process. It unleashes change for The Good, as it creates a better future, a "more perfect union". We only continue to be good, if we strive to become better. History is replete with both failed and false revolutions. The American Revolution, despite setbacks, has accomplished much for the betterment of mankind. Whether it will continue to do so is in our hands, and depends on "We the People", rediscovering our principles, and deciding to end our woeful ignorance of our own history.
THE REAL SIGNIFICANCE of Antonin Dvořák’s Visit to the USA
The great Czech composer Antonin Dvořák paid a visit to the USA from Sept 1892 until February 1895, at the invitation of Jeanette Thurber, founder of the National Conservatory. It was not a casual visit. They were on a mission. The Declaration of Independence had declared that "All men are created equal". If that were to mean anything, then slavery would have to be defeated. But although the slaves were freed after the Civil War, their freedoms were being eroded at the time by Jim Crow laws, sharecropping, and degraded minstrel songs.
Jeanette Thurber and her friends did not see music as mere entertainment (as do many today), but as a way to change the world, for the better. The two peoples most denied their humanity in the USA were African-Americans and Native-Americans. Finding beauty in their music, and developing it into great classical art of the highest standards, would be an effective way to break stereotypes and axiomatic assumptions about entire peoples.
She founded the National Conservatory of Music in New York with not only this idea in mind, but of matching, and surpassing European conservatories. She appealed to congress for support:
“America has, so far, done nothing in a national way either to promote the musical education of its people or to develop any musical genius they possess, and that in this, she stands alone among civilized nations of the world.”
Congress declined to help. So she sought the help of wealthy philanthropists. She offered free tuition to women, the disadvantaged, and especially to African-Americans. She brought in the very best musicians to head each department, such as Raphael Joseffy for piano, Victor Herbert for cello, and opera conductor Signor Romualdo Sapio, as head of the vocal department. The National Conservatory became the first conservatory in the US to demand universal piano proficiency, and solfeggio training for voice. Mrs. Thurber insisted on bel-canto vocal training, even for Vaudeville performers. It soon equalled or surpassed the best European Conservatories (Ft 1).
For composition though, she wanted Antonin Dvořák. He was not only one of the most famous composers in the world; he was sympathetic to the demands of oppressed peoples for freedom. He wrote that the opening of his 7th symphony came to him as he walked by the Prague RR station:
“The first subject of my new symphony flashed in to my mind on the arrival of the festive train bringing our countrymen to the National Theater.”
These people were coming to the National Theatre in Prague (Ft 2), where there was to be a musical evening to support the political struggles of the Czech people. Dvorak resolved that his new symphony would reflect this struggle. He later said that the 4th movement includes a suggestion of the capacity of the Czech people to display stubborn resistance to political oppressors. He declared that the new work "must be capable of stirring the world, and may God grant that it will!"
In what might seem like a contradiction to this integral approach, the principle of “Motivfuhrung” - of the differential, of everything flowing from the unfolding of a single idea - also contributed also to Dvořák’s success. His Seventh Symphony was inspired by Brahms’ Third. Dvořák wrote that his symphony, like that of Brahms, had “not one superfluous note in it.”
Mrs.Thurber made sure that Dvořák would be inspired when he arrived in New York:
1. He arrived just in time for the quadracentenary of Columbus’ 1492 arrival in the Americas, which featured a three-day parade. This parade celebrated, among other things, the spread of universal education to immigrants, including Italians. Dvořák spent his second day in the US observing the parade, and wrote to a friend:
“The Columbus expositions finished yesterday, and they were simply gigantic. We have never seen anything like this: and never has America had such an occasion to show what it is capable of. Imagine an incessant succession of grand parades- from the branches of industry, trade, gymnastics (including our Sokols), the arts, and everything, which lasted for three days, from the morning until 2 o’clock at night. There were thousands and thousands of people.., and an ever changing sight! And you should hear all the kinds of music!... Well, America seems to have demonstrated all it is and all it is capable of! I haven't got enough words to describe it all.” (Ft 3)
2. She made sure that Dvorak was exposed to authentic “Native American” music.
3. She made sure that he was exposed to “Negro Spirituals” and had Harry Burleigh sing the spirituals to him, on an almost nightly basis. Dvořák loved the spirituals, and told Burleigh that “Go Down Moses” was worthy of a setting by Beethoven. Burleigh, whose family had participated in the Underground Railroad, recalled Dvorak’s countless pleas to tell him not only of the music of his people, but of their struggles. Dvořák loved “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”, and it is doubtful that he was unaware of its importance as a “code song” (Ft 3)
4. She made sure he heard American patriotic songs. On December 16th, 1892 (the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party), she arranged for him to attend a concert of American patriotic music at Carnegie Hall. Dvořák’s personal secretary, Joseph Kovaric wrote:
“The next day, Maestro read the words of the anthems attentively, and remarked it was a shame to use an English tune as one of the anthems. He seated himself at the piano, improvised a tune, wrote it down in his sketchbook, and said: “So, this will be the future American anthem”-arranged for baritone solo, choir and orchestra. Alas, this was not to be...”
..until now that is. Kovaric told us that Dvorak's proposed setting of "My Country 'tis of Thee" could be found starting at measure 17 of the Larghetto movement of the String Quintet, Op 97. Jarmil Burghauser, cataloguer of Dvorak’s works, and choral conductor at the National Theater, did the necessary detective work, and demonstrated how it could function in a single verse. This author expanded it to the entire movement. (Ft 5)
5. Mrs. Thurber also organized Dvorak to make an astounding announcement within less than a year of his arrival. In May of 1893, he was quoted in the New York Herald:
“I am now satisfied that the future music of this country must be founded upon what are called negro melodies. These are the folk songs of America, and your composers must turn to them.... In the negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music. They are pathetic, tender, passionate, melancholy, solemn, religious, bold, merry, gay, or what you will. It is music that suits itself to any mood or any purpose.”
THE OPPOSITION
That was an extremely bold statement. Had anything similar ever been said before, in the entire history of music? Do you imagine that such a statement was passively accepted in a country still embroiled with racial prejudice? Boston’s leading music critic, and arch racist, Phillip Hale, led the opposition.
Eight leading American composers, including John Knowles Payne, Amy Beach, George Chadwick, and the Dean of Harvard Music, were approached to denounce Dvořák for the very idea that negro spirituals could be the basis of an American school of musical composition. European composers were also challenged on the matter (Ft 6). If a Negro sang a beautiful song, said Hale, he learned it from a white woman. He insisted that Negroes brought no musical culture with them from Africa.
More insidious forms of racism, will praise certain innate qualities of the maligned people, even dub them superior, while denying them cognitive abilities. For instance: the idea that black people have great motor skills, as demonstrated in sports and dance, but lack reasoning power. Hale argued the same for Czechs: they are natural-born musicians; ideas just leap out of their heads, without the study of literature, history, or foreign composers (Ft 7).
Ft 1: Thirty Years of the National Conservatory: Henry Fink
Ft 2: The National Theater in Prague was, and is the center of Czech national pride. It re-opened (after a fire) in 1883 with Smetana’s opera, Libuše. She was a princess, who, from Vyšehrad, prophesied the founding of Prague, or “Praha” (threshold).
Ft 3: Letter from Dvorak to his friend Karel Bastar Oct 14th 1892.
Nowadays it is popular to reject Columbus' founding of the "New World", as a bad thing. Like the American Revolution, its goodness or badness is an ongoing, still-to-be developed question.
Ft 4: Richard Sanders has discovered this by making his own astronomical observations. Certain spirituals, including "Follow the Drinking Gourd" were "code songs", that contained astronomical indications for the "Underground Railroad". Whereas "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" ostensibly refers to the prophet Isaiah's ascent to Heaven, it can also refer to the "Big Dipper", and the time of day at which it appears low in the sky. Where does "carry me home" refer to, Heaven, or freedom?
Ft 5. The author's arrangement of the Larghetto from Dvorak's String Quintet Op 97.
https://youtu.be/X3Qmv7_-JeU
Ft 6. That included Rubenstein. Bruckner, and Joachim. Brahms was not asked. He supported Dvorak strongly.
Ft 6. In 1907, four years after Dvorak's death, Phillip Hale vented his racist fury, and concluded, in the Boston Herald:
“The "New World" symphony expresses the state of soul of an uncultured Czech in America, the state of a homesick soul, remembering his native land and stupefied by the din and hustle of a new life. 2.The uncultivated Czech is a born musician, a master of his trade. He is interested only in traces of music that he finds in America. Negro airs, not copied, adapted, imitated, tint slightly two or three passages of the symphony without injury to its Czech character. 3. The symphony leaped, Minerva-like, from the head of this uncultured genius. As with nearly all his other compositions, except the operas, it was not stimulated by any foreign assistance, by any consultation of authors, or by quotations, reading, etc., as was especially the case with Brahms. 4. The national Czech feeling in this work, quickened by homesickness, is so marked that it is recognized throughout Bohemia, by the learned and by the humblest. These are the conclusions of Mr. Ritter after a painstaking investigation. That Dvořák was most unhappy and pathetically homesick during his sojourn in New York is known to many, though Mr. Ritter does not enter into any long discussion of the composer's mental condition in this country. Yet some will undoubtedly continue to insist that the symphony "From the New World" is based, for the most part, on negro themes, and that the future of American music rests on the use of Congo, North American Indian, Creole Greaser and cowboy ditties, yawps and whoopings.”
World Premiere of "My Country 'tis of Thee" (America) from the Larghetto of A. Dvorak's Op.97 String Quintet, arranged by J. Frederick Haight. Performed by t...
