New World Symphony

New World Symphony, orchestral work by Bohemian composer Antonín Dvořák, a major milestone in the validation of American—or “New World”—music and lore as source material for classical composition. Written while Dvořák was living and working in New York City, the symphony purportedly incorporated the composer’s reflections on his American setting. The piece premiered at Carnegie Hall on December 16, 1893.

In 1891 the noted American patron of the arts Jeannette Meyer Thurber embarked on a mission to find a director for the National Conservatory of Music, the school that she had founded in New York City. Determined to fill the position with a person of global reputation whose own prestige would boost that of the conservatory, she offered the attractive annual salary of $15,000. Although many Americans would have leapt at the opportunity, there were no suitably qualified candidates, largely because classical music was still in its adolescence in the United States. Thurber ultimately offered the job to Dvořák, who at that time was a music professor at the Prague Conservatory in Austria-Hungary (now in the Czech Republic). As a skilled composer of international renown—a conservative late Romantic who specialized in lush symphonic works and chamber music rather like that of his mentor Johannes Brahms—Dvořák had much to share with aspiring musicians. Moreover, according to his colleagues, he had a flair for teaching.

Dvořák accepted Thurber’s offer and moved to the United States in 1892, but he was uncomfortable in the urban American setting, and he disliked being absent from his homeland. His new address of 327 East 17th Street in New York City seemed a poor substitute for the rolling hills of Bohemia. Thus, Dvořák terminated his contract after three years to return to Prague.

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Dvořák’s American sojourn was brief but productive, and it yielded the piece that widely became regarded as his signature work—the four-movement Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, better known as the New World Symphony. The piece premiered with the New York Philharmonic in a program shared with Brahms’s Violin Concerto in D Major and Felix Mendelssohn’s incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A reporter for the New York Herald who had attended the last rehearsal before the premiere observed that the new symphony was “a noble composition…of heroic proportions” and compared the work favourably to the compositions of Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Brahms.

Dvořák’s writings reveal that he admired the beauty of African American spirituals and plantation songs of the American South and that he advised other composers also to study them for inspiration. Many musicologists have speculated that, at least in part, the melodies of the New World Symphony were based on such spirituals. The second theme in the first movement, for instance, is to some ears reminiscent of the spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” and the gently lyrical second movement is popularly perceived as an orchestral setting of the spiritual “Goin’ Home.” However, “Goin’ Home” has no organic tie to the South or to plantation life; it is Dvořák’s own melody, written specifically for the New World Symphony and later given words by one of his students.

In addition to the songs of the African American South, Dvořák was fascinated by Native American tradition—or, at least, by his imagination of it. He acknowledged that certain segments of the symphony were inspired by The Song of Hiawatha, a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow that recounted the tale of Hiawatha, the legendary Onondaga chief. A dancelike passage in the third-movement scherzo supposedly evokes the Native American wedding feast depicted in Longfellow’s poem. Ironically, it was unlikely that Dvořák actually heard Native American music until after the symphony was completed; he had summered in a Czech community in Iowa, but by then there were few Native Americans left in the area. Whether tapping Native American or African American musical styles (he made no distinction between the two), Dvořák avoided strict quotation. As he explained to one quizzical European conductor, “I tried to write only in the spirit of those national American melodies.”

Aside from any actual or attributed links to American music, the New World Symphony notably employed stylistic elements that were suggestive of Bohemian, German, French, Scottish, and other Old World sources. The theme from the third movement, for example, resembles Dvořák’s earlier Slavonic Dances, Op. 46 (1878), which was inspired by the rhythms and spirit of Bohemian folk music. The symphony also exhibits cyclic form (having movements that are linked motivically or thematically), a structure that was popular among European composers—most prominently, Beethoven—throughout the 19th century. In its character, then, Dvořák’s New World Symphony was an expression of both the Old World and the New, and as such it enjoyed transoceanic appeal.

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