WSJ: Joe Horowitz: New Song for the New World; This little-known opus paints a fuller picture of Dvorak's time in America.

[Frank Forman]

Joe Horowitz: New Song for the New World; This little-known opus paints a
fuller picture of Dvorak's time in America.
Wall Street Journal, 29 Oct 2014

Joe's the co-composer, with Michael Beckerman, of the "Hiawatha Melodrama,"
which combines text by Longfellow with music by Dvorak. Its world-premiere
recording is on Naxos.

In 19th-century classical music, the composer as tourist is a familiar and
ingratiating phenomenon. Italy was a favorite destination. Mendelssohn,
Berlioz, Liszt and Tchaikovsky, among others, composed famous keyboard and
symphonic works taking their cues from gondolas and the Italian Alps, Giotto
and Michelangelo. But Tchaikovsky's "Capriccio Italien," with its Roman
carnival, still sounds like Tchaikovsky. The "Italian" Symphony, with its
tarantella finale, is vintage Mendelssohn.

Two of the strangest and most intriguing chapters in Western musical history
feature composers whose adaptations to the New World were more than
touristic--who "became American." I am certainly not thinking of Arnold
Schoenberg or Igor Stravinsky, both of whom became American citizens without
relinquishing their prior artistic identities. Rather, I have in mind
Antonin Dvorak, who lived in America from 1892 to 1895, and Kurt Weill, who
moved to the U.S. in 1935 and died there in 1950.

The case of Weill is more completely known. His scathing "Threepenny Opera,"
with Bertolt Brecht, is iconic for Weimar Germany. Weill's "Lady in the
Dark," "One Touch of Venus," "September Song" and "Speak Low" are signature
Broadway products of the '30s and '40s.

About Dvorak, it is popularly understood that he composed his "New World"
Symphony (1893) in New York, and that the Largo's English horn tune was
inspired by African-American spirituals. Less well known is that a central
source of inspiration was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Song of
Hiawatha"--or that the Scherzo of Dvorak's symphony sets "Hiawatha's Wedding
Feast" as a virtual tone poem. If "From the New World" is Dvorak's most
popular symphony, his most popular chamber work is the "American" String
Quartet, redolent of the Iowa prairie he made his home in the summer of
1893.

But to fully grasp the American Dvorak, the piece to know is one not
known--at least to the average concert-goer. It is the "American" Suite, Op.
98, composed in New York in 1894 for solo piano and orchestrated by the
composer the same year. As it postdates both "From the New World" and the
"American" Quartet, it constitutes a more comprehensive snapshot of Dvorak's
vivid New World impressions.

The main reason we are not aware of this music is that for decades Czech and
British Dvorak scholars denigrated it as inscrutable and insipid--and so it
is, unless its Americanisms are recognized. That they were not was
illustrated to me when I met a Czech pianist who had long played the
"American" Suite in complete innocence that Dvorak very obviously has the
piano imitate the characteristic sounds of a banjo. I can also remember
reading an album note for a Nonesuch recording in which an American music
critic, influenced by extant scholarship, off-handedly acknowledged that
Dvorak's Op. 98 was not identifiably "American."

Certainly the "American" Suite has lacked inspired advocacy. But no longer.
A new Harmonia Mundi recording by the young American James Gaffigan with
Switzerland's Lucerne Symphony (of which he is chief conductor) is
revelatory. Mr. Gaffigan has not unearthed the "American" Suite as a novelty
for curious inspection; rather, he brandishes it as a true believer. The
suite is here vindicated as top-drawer Dvorak--albeit Dvorak in a foreign
tongue (the Symphony No. 6, on the same CD, seems like music by another
composer).

What does the "American" Suite sound like? Well, the finale begins with an
Indian dance punctuated--like the "New World" Symphony Scherzo--by ankle
bracelets (a triangle) and tom-toms (timpani). When this A-minor dance
modulates to A major, it becomes a minstrel song. (Dvorak in Iowa saw
American Indian and African-American entertainers singing and dancing
together.) The slow movement (rendered by Mr. Gaffigan with a loving
plasticity of phrase) portrays the desolate Iowa prairie, which Dvorak
called "sad to despair." There is also a movement that features in sequence
a jaunty cakewalk, an aching plantation song, and an elegiac "Indian"
refrain redolent of the vanishing Noble Savage. The suite's five movements
are framed by big skies and wide horizons.

You can hear something like Stephen Foster, Scott Joplin, and Jerome Kern's
"Show Boat" in the "American" Suite. It also connects with the lyric sweep
of Mark Twain's Mississippi River, animated with piquant waterfront detail.
And it aligns with American genre painters like Asher Durand and George
Caleb Bingham (not the heroic landscapes of Frederic Church and Albert
Bierstadt so readily evoked by "From the New World").

Even if Dvorak had not been hired to direct New York's National Conservatory
with a mandate to help American composers find an American voice, he was at
all times predisposed (as he told New York reporters) to "prick his ear" to
the daily sounds of his environs. No sooner did he return to Prague than he
reverted to a "Bohemian" style.

In truth, Dvorak deserves to be ranked with de Tocqueville as a unique
outside observer of the American experience. Tasked with creating an
American concert idiom, he fixed on the sorrow songs of African-Americans
(which he esteemed and validated) and on the plight of Native Americans
(which he absorbed with exceptional empathy). He also absorbed the
distinctive vacancy and majesty of the American West. His findings tell us a
lot about what most distinguished the U.S. from Europe at the 19th century's
end.

Equally revealing is the manner in which Americans reacted to Dvorak's
findings, and to his accurate prophecy that "Negro melodies" would found a
"great school" of American music. In New York, a city of immigrants,
Dvorak's compassion for the Indian and the former slave was taken to heart;
the discourse on race and culture was remarkably egalitarian. In Boston, the
same discourse insisted upon racial hierarchies, with Dvorak classified as a
"barbaric" Slav and his influence on American composers denounced as that of
a "negrophile." For New Yorkers, "America" was polyglot. For Bostonians, it
meant the Mayflower.