HISTORY OLD WORLD AND NEW WORLD!

HISTORY, OLD WORLD AND NEW WORLD!
The first part of this blog is about Antonin Dvořák, amazing Czechoslovakian musician, composer, father, and teacher, who not only made incredible and lasting contributions to music and art in his own country, but also in the United States. The second part describes my own experience and travel to discover what influenced much of his composition, and a link to a wonderful performance of the American Quartet, performed by my teachers and coaches from the Cleveland Quartet at the end, if you’d like to listen while you read!
Originally apprenticed to a butcher, at quite a young age Dvořák showed such an aptitude for the violin and viola, as well as the organ, that his uncle sponsored his musical education. In his late twenties and early thirties, he won several composition competitions in Europe, and his notoriety grew when Johannes Brahms, as well as his publisher, were highly impressed with Dvořák’s work. He held a well-deserved reputation for including themes from traditional folk songs as well as sounds inspired by nature in his music, with Smetana, composer of Má vlast (My Homeland), as a large influence on his early works.
When Dvořák came to the United States in 1892, he became the first director of a newly established conservatory, and had this to say… “I did not come to America to interpret Beethoven or Wagner for the public. That is not my work and I would not waste any time on it. I came to discover what young Americans had in them and to help them express it.”
Antonín Dvořák was very clear about his mission in the New World. He never wanted to be an ambassador representing the music of the Old World but rather a discoverer of what the New World had to offer.
It was a woman, Jeannette M. Thurber, New York society leader and arts patron, who established the National Conservatory of Music of America, and committed herself to finding a recognized master to direct it. In 1891 that meant looking to Europe. Thurber went to the composer of by then the famous Slavonic Dances and other symphonic works. His wife and two of his children came with him, and the others eventually followed.
Through his teaching and composing, Dvořák developed ideas about the possibilities of music in the New World. “I am now satisfied that the future of music in this country must be founded upon what are called the Negro melodies.” This was his response to the commonly held view at that time, that America, being a nation of nations, didn’t possess the requisite folk culture upon which an indigenous music might be based. He strongly encouraged his composition students not to imitate European composers, but rather to draw on their own heritage and experiences. “In the Negro melodies of America, I discover all that is needed for this great and noble school of music,” said Dvořák, who had racked his pupils’ resources for all the spirituals and plantation songs that they knew! He also apparently had one of the janitors singing to him whenever possible, generally interrupting his maintenance duties. While most of his students at the conservatory regarded such sources as beneath notice, he pointed out to them, that even his own most serious works were rooted in the “simple, half-forgotten tunes of the Bohemian peasants”.
Ms. Thurber agreed with Dvorak’s ideas, and she backed them up with concrete actions and funding. The New York Times announced her decision to open the National Conservatory to black students with tuition waived for the most gifted.
In 1893, Dvořák was apparently exhausted and slightly burned out on the bustling life of New York City! He thought of returning temporarily home, where he had a country house outside of Prague, but instead decided to accept an invitation from one of his students to visit his hometown in Spillville Iowa, in the far Northern part of the state. I can only image what that trip would have been like at that time!
I drove to Spillville myself “on the way” from Rochester, New York to Vail Colorado for the Vail Valley Music Festival (with an SUV, Cell Phone, and all of the modern convenience we take for granted in travel), and even so, it was quite a trek! The “Dvořák Memorial Highway”, was still largely a single lane gravel road, and I spent most of the last part of my drive behind a horse drawn hay wagon. I think Spillville froze in time, and I had the pleasure of visiting the Dvořák Museum, the upstairs of a split level home in which he had lived, and I had to make an appointment in advance with the curator, since they do not get a lot of traffic in that part of the world! The first floor had been a business and residence for the Bily Brothers, famous clock makers, and that is another wonderful museum in and of itself!
Much of the town and surrounding farms were and are populated by Czech immigrants, so I could immediately see why Dvořák and his family felt so at home. The museum, such as it is, contains much of Dvořák’s hand-written correspondence, original manuscripts, notes, and much more! I asked if I could photo-copy the documents, but the museum didn’t have a copy machine, so I spent the better part of a day hand writing the most important parts of what I had viewed, and the curator was sweet enough to spend her day there, and even went out to get sandwiches and soda from the local market when she realized how long I was going to be there. I wish I had been able to spare more than one day.
I went to the local cathedral, beautiful with the original stained glass and tile, but largely in a state of disrepair. Dvořák played the organ in church every Sunday during his time in Spillville, and often practiced there. In an article from the local “newspaper”, complaints from the devout ladies of the church about the “noise”, since they liked to pray daily in silence, were prevalent, and I could not help but respectfully laugh. An experience I would have given a limb for was a nuisance to their routine. Dvořák walked by the creek that runs through the woods next to the town with, “pen, paper, and a pale of beer” at about 5am each day, and he would listen to the birds as he composed. While taking that walk myself, the sound of the water and the birds truly made an impression, not just in terms of beauty, but also because I could hear in my mind a lot of passages in Dvořák’s music with new perspective and understanding.
He would come home for a family lunch, head off to the church to practice and to annoy the faithful ladies of the town in the afternoon, and return home in the evening, where he taught his children music, and put them to work trying out his compositions. Presumably, he also befriended some Native American tribes while he was there, and as his family traveled, and though there is little documentation and more legend, he did mention it in his handwritten journals, and without being an expert, I can say that certainly some of his music seems influenced by that type song, dance, and chant.
For me this represents one of the most fascinating and little known periods of Dvořák’s life. He wrote the American Quartet, the Bass Quintet, and the American Symphony there, among other wonderful works. He premiered the chamber music in the tiny living room of his home with his children and visiting friends. When the works were premiered later in Prague, he is famous for saying to a reviewer that he preferred the performance of his children at home in Spillville to that of the rather distinguished musicians who performed the European premiere.
I love Dvořák’s music, and have performed, taught, and conducted much of it myself. I especially love that regardless of fame and success, he remained entirely grounded and humble, valuing students, family, nature, all variety of cultural and ethnic influences, and the importance of education and the arts in any community. I have several folders full of notes from that visit, and I hope to elaborate and publish them one day, but for now, a blog!
On my drive down from a very peaceful day in Spillville, I was heading South and the West to arrive in Vail with time to check into a hotel and warm up for rehearsal. To my surprise, at six in the evening, on what was a completely sunny day, the sky turned black and the rain started pouring! My XTerra was quickly a foot deep in water, so I called a friend in Rochester and asked him to look at a weather map QUICKLY so that I could make a decision to either pull off somewhere or get the heck out. Well, as he searched, the water kept rising and, about a minute later, I decided to drive as quickly as possible South to avoid what was about to be a terrible flood. I called a few motels as I drove, all either booked or evacuated, and decided to just hustle. I finally made it back to the interstate, stopping for gas on the way, hip deep in water with lightening coming down in the area a little too close to the pumps for comfort. Thankfully, I finally hit dry land in Nebraska, drove about 90 miles an hour, and made it to rehearsal the next day. It did bring home my original thought, I can’t imagine the difficulty of making that trip in Dvořák’s day. Still, it was worth it for him, incredibly meaningful to me, and certainly some true treasures of classical music, which represent both Dvorak’s own musical heritage and American musical heritage, were created during his time there. His influence on his conservatory students, and subsequent American composers goes without saying!
Enjoy this performance from the Cleveland String Quartet, special to me because the first violinist is Bill Preucil, former concertmaster of the Atlanta Symphony (my hometown, and the first orchestra I ever heard as a child), and because his mother was my teacher at many summer music institutes! Lot’s of great performances out there on You Tube, worth checking out if you’d like a little beauty in your day!

Karine Stone