ANTONIN DVORAK
NEW WORLDS OF DVORAK
Searching in America for the Composer's Inner Life
By Michael
B. Beckerman
Illustrated. 272 pages. W.W. Norton & Company. $29.95.
November 17, 2002
Dvorak as Prime Mover, Sitting Duck and More
By MICHAEL BECKERMAN
ANTONIN DVORAK'S contribution to American music has been framed in two basic ways, as "Dvorak's American Soul," a program to be presented by the New York Festival of Song on Wednesday, reminds us.
In the first tableau, Dvorak, who lived and worked in the United States from 1892 to 1895, is the hero. He brings a heady combination of humility, egalitarianism and vision to the American compositional landscape. He comes from Europe, it is true, but he does not preach the gospel of European superiority. Rather, he suggests that composers look for local inspiration.
A son of the Czech soil, he admires grit and diligence and appears oddly colorblind for a man of his time, numbering people of color as well as women among his composition students and friends. Working with progressive figures like Henry Krehbiel, a music critic and educator, and Jeannette Thurber, the founder of the National Conservatory of Music, Dvorak sets an example (in works like the Symphony "From the New World," the "American" String Quartet, the Humoresques for piano and the "Biblical Songs") of what an "American inflected" music might be. He creates mainstream music with an American accent. Many composers who followed — notably, George Gershwin, Aaron Copland and Duke Ellington — owe him both a stylistic and an intellectual debt.
But in contrast, seen from the vantage points of contemporary journalists like James Gibbons Huneker and Philip Hale, the composers Amy Beach and John Knowles Paine, and some recent critics, Dvorak's vision was a result of muddled naïveté at best, and mind-numbing arrogance and ignorance at worst. Whether suggesting (while tapping his head) that women did not have what it took "up here" to compose, or implying that for all practical purposes "Negro" and "Indian" music were the same, he blundered into what was already a fascinating and well-developed debate about the future course of American music like a Czech bull in an American china shop. His vision of the New World was but another, already somewhat outdated, European fantasy about Indian tom-toms, plantation blacks and wide prairies.
Ho-hum. As a result of the sterility of this vision, Dvorak founded no important school and produced no significant students, nor did his legacy survive in any meaningful way.
Historical stories like these two divergent ones have a way of telling themselves, facts be damned. But the story of how Dvorak came to have an American style and what he did with it is more interesting than either of those scenarios and offers a more elusive view that incorporates elements of both.
First off, Dvorak was instigator, victim, prime mover and sitting duck all at the same time. Though his own man, he also served the ambitions of a host of strong-minded and manipulative contemporary American figures. Chief among them were Thurber and three journalists who did her bidding, one for money, another almost surely for love and the third because he wanted to.
James Creelman, a card-carrying yellow journalist, received handsome sums to publicize Thurber's conservatory, the composer she had brought to direct it and the idea of American music. Creelman later stage-managed the great controversy of Dvorak's American years. Krehbiel was a true believer who needed no convincing. He served as the primary publicist for the "New World" Symphony, writing a 2,500-word article with 14 musical examples on Dec. 15, 1893, the day before the work's premiere.
But in the end, it was that all-purpose pianist, intellectual, critic and raconteur Huneker who played the greatest role in the creation of Dvorak's American style. While we do not know everything about his motivation, Huneker wrote of Thurber in his memoirs: "After 30 years I confess that her fine, dark, eloquent eyes troubled my peace more than once."
Almost 110 years ago, in December 1892, Huneker appeared at Dvorak's apartment on 17th Street in Manhattan. (The building was torn down several years ago by Beth Israel Hospital.) Huneker had with him, as he later stated, a copy of an article that he thought might interest the composer. Titled "Negro Music" and written by one Johann Tonsor of Louisville, Ky., it had just been published in an exciting new journal called Music and was nothing less than a manifesto. "When our American musical Messiah sees fit to be born," it read, "he will then find ready to his hand a mass of lyrical and dramatic themes with which to construct a distinctively American music."
Dvorak sat down and read the article, with its six musical examples. We know this because the copy made its way to the Dvorak Museum in Prague with the words "I love you Daddy" written upside down in the margin, letting us imagine that as Dvorak was engrossed in the piece, his young son tried to get his attention. Within days Dvorak was making the sketches that formed the basis of both the "New World" Symphony and his American style in general.
At some point in the process, whether before or after Huneker's visit, Dvorak hooked up with Henry Thacker Burleigh, a gifted black composer and arranger, then a young student. It appears certain that Burleigh sang for Dvorak the songs he had heard from his grandfather, a former slave. The "New World" — incorporating bits of various African-American songs, including "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," which appeared in both Tonsor's article and Burleigh's collection of spirituals, compiled later — was basically completed by May 1893.
In that month, Dvorak sat for an extended interview with James Creelman, which resulted in an article in The New York Herald, "The Real Value of Negro Melodies." Dvorak here insisted, parroting the article from Music, that any school of American music had to begin with African-American song. This argument engendered a huge international controversy, almost certainly whipped up by Creelman to sell newspapers and provide publicity for Thurber's National Conservatory.
From December 1892 on, Dvorak's compositions almost all conformed to his American vocabulary. According to his secretary, the "experiment" ended one day, probably in early 1895, with these words: "So I'm an American composer, am I? I'm through with that. From this day forward I will write the way I wrote before."
Though he later made mention of Indian music, and he included things like bird song and even street cries in his works, black spirituals were at the core of his invented American dialect. As a religious man who adored folk music and legend, he fastened on those songs as quintessentially American. Unlike the oral tradition in the Czech lands — which, aside from Christmas songs, is unabashedly secular — these plantation melodies fulfilled Dvorak's idealized yearning for a substance simultaneously "of the earth" and blessed by religious fervor.
Several recent critics have suggested that Dvorak misunderstood American culture. Of course he did. So did everyone else. There can be no complete grasp of a culture, since the very idea of culture is always a combination of reality and illusion, a few hard facts and the myths that hold them together. Dvorak saw and heard what he did through a combination of his specific experiences in the United States and his predisposed preferences for certain kinds of themes and ideas, which he brought with him after decades of composing. But he certainly worked fervently to imagine what an American music might be.
As an example of the paradoxes of Dvorak's American years, we might note that Huneker became a bitter opponent of the "New World" when critics like Krehbiel held it up as a model for the future of American music. Johann Tonsor, meanwhile, was most likely a pseudonym for a white ethnographer from Louisville, Mildred Hill, who wrote, among other things, "Happy Birthday."
The concert on Wednesday, in addition to offering early and late music by Dvorak, will feature works by arguably the two most enduring conduits of Dvorak's vision. Art songs and song arrangements by Burleigh will be interspersed with Dvorak's "Biblical Songs." There will also be several numbers from "In Dahomey," by Will Marion Cook, a pioneer in the creation of the black musical. Cook played a role in the musical development of Duke Ellington, and some have sought to hear Czech blue notes in works like "Black, Brown and Beige."
The concert gives us another chance to evaluate Dvorak's role in the history of American music. The past offers few examples of events or situations that are entirely positive or entirely negative. Dvorak's American visit was a remarkable undertaking. Like most historical processes, it offers no clear and absolute lessons; we are free to draw many different kinds of conclusions from it. In addition, Dvorak was a man of sufficient complexity that his motives and aims were not always what they appeared to be.
While it is true that New York scared Dvorak witless at times, and he called the prairies "sad unto despair," there is no doubt that he loved many things about the United States deeply. In fact, near the end of his life he actually thought of buying a house in Iowa and settling there among the Czech-American farmers. Would he then have been an "American composer"?
America, such as it is, is more than a simple place or a state of mind. It is the sum total of all the visions about America that exist. Dvorak's America was a land of bustle and fire, sadness and loss, sharp insights, crass misunderstandings and endless, passionate variety. It included bird song and Burleigh's song, Niagara Falls and even a tune that Dvorak saw in a store window on the music desk of a toy piano. Like all imagined things, it will not sit still while we poke and probe it, but as we try to grasp it from its many angles, we may come to agree that it is one of the most exciting visions of this country that have ever been transformed into music.
January 10, 2003
Crossing Old World Angst With New World Music
By JEREMY EICHLER
When a composer leaves behind scant records of his inner life and personality, we are often tempted to fill in the gaps by listening to the music for clues and projecting our own interpretations onto the chronology of his life. Take, for example, the intensely private Dvorak. Toward the end of his life, the composer spent a fabled three years in America, where he seemed to transpose his joy and homesickness into a music of wide open spaces and deep yearning. That period from 1892 to 1895 has proved an irresistible canvas for speculative portraits, including Josef Skvorecky's delightful novel "Dvorak in Love."
From that popular account, from Dvorak's music and from the existing biographic literature, many admirers of the composer may feel they already understand the bearded old Bohemian bard: a wandering genius of humble birth, a guileless and unassuming artist, a simple soul embracing the sights and sounds of rural America.
Well, think again, says Michael B. Beckerman. In his recent study, "New Worlds of Dvorak: Searching in America for the Composer's Inner Life," the author seeks to dispel these misconceptions of Dvorak. He offers a more complex and therefore human portrait of the composer: naïve but also self-aware, duped by America but also capable of duping, straightforward in his music but also secretly tormented by anxiety and fear.
Mr. Beckerman, a New York University professor and respected scholar of Czech music, suggests that understanding the "real" Dvorak can help explain the dark, turbulent strains that often lie just beneath the surface of his music. It will also, he claims, help us see this composer as "no second-tier master but rather the equal of Wagner, Beethoven and Brahms."
The author does not address why psychological complexity should necessarily be a prerequisite for admission to the highest rungs of the musical pantheon, but his smoothly written chronicle would be worthwhile regardless of Dvorak's relative rank. His book is at once a probing portrait of the composer's private world and a fascinating snapshot of late 19th-century America — a country reaching both inward and outward in its quest to forge a national cultural identity, yearning to be free of Europe's shadow but seeking its counsel in finding that freedom.
How else to explain the decision by the great arts patron Jeannette Thurber to bring Dvorak to New York to direct her National Conservatory of Music in 1892? Certainly this was no simple gesture of academic exchange. Thurber hoped that her distinguished guest would do nothing short of found a new American classical music. After all, the composer had already demonstrated a remarkable gift for fashioning Czechness out of folk music and the materials of 19th-century Romanticism. If given the proper exposure, could he not do the same for the United States?
Indeed, what Dvorak had to offer America seemed clear at the time, but what America could offer in return was less apparent. We still don't know why the composer, who was well established in his home country, a devoted husband and father of six children, chose to uproot himself and come here in the first place, but Mr. Beckerman suggests several plausible reasons ranging from the money, which was excellent, to the relief from contemporary musical politics, to that mythical European romance with terra incognita, in this case both geographic and musical.
Whatever his motivation, the composer arrived in New York in 1892 and quickly took up a schedule of teaching, conducting and, of course, composing. He remained in New York for most of his stay, though he spent one idyllic summer among Czech farmers in Spillville, Iowa.
As Mr. Beckerman points out, from the very beginning of his time here, Dvorak was plied with a selective diet of Americana ranging from Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show to Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha." Most pointedly, the journalist James Huneker presented the composer with an article explicating "Negro melodies" (spirituals) and concluding with a provocative charge: "When our American musical Messiah sees fit to be born he will then find ready to his hand a mass of lyrical dramatic themes with which to construct a distinctively American music."
Dvorak took the none-to-subtle hint and used some spirituals as building blocks for his grand Symphony No. 9, "From the New World." Mr. Beckerman offers extensive but nontechnical analyses of the work's contents and the circumstances of its birth, pausing along the way to revise the established record. Musical examples are provided on an accompanying CD and the corresponding musical scores are available at www.wwnorton.com/trade /beckerman/.
Interestingly, the Dvorak of the "New World" emerges from this account as both sincere in his love of spirituals (he appreciated their status as simultaneously religious and folk music) but also savvy and calculating in his techniques for coding his symphony as American. He was, after all, a practiced conjurer of nationalist illusion. This time, through his bold choice of title, his programmatic use of the Hiawatha text, his insertions of a few recognizably "American" rhythms and melodic quotations, and some shrewd comments to journalists around the time of the premiere, Dvorak insured that the American accent of this instrumental music would come through loud and clear.
And yet the careful construction of facades was not limited to Dvorak's music. Mr. Beckerman writes that studying the composer is a bit like "observing a planetary body acting under the gravitational pull of an invisible force" with that force being the fears and anxieties that dominated Dvorak's inner life. In New York, his nerves were apparently so fragile that he required constant accompaniment outside the home. He had terrible anxiety before performances of new work, and his modest upbringing made him frequently insecure in the company of American and European elites. Other sources of turmoil, we learn, might have included a furtive love for his sister-in-law, and a deep conflict about whether to follow the more conservative example of Brahms or the more radical approach of Wagner.
The important thing, Mr. Beckerman suggests, is not discovering all the secrets that plagued the composer (most of which remained secret) but simply recognizing that a pained inner dimension existed and that it was an important part of his relationship to his work. Whether or not Dvorak felt anxious about writing music, his condition became "part of the emotional palette out of which he composed."
This sort of analysis can be instructive and engrossing as it affirms the Romantic myth of a poet speaking directly from his own soul, but it can also be a slippery slope leading to facile correspondences between life and work and the musicological version of pop psychology. Mr. Beckerman's careful and persuasive arguments suggest he is well aware of the contours of this slope, but the author's claims may still raise a few eyebrows. Of particular note is his application of a modern diagnostic and clinical vocabulary to the workings of Dvorak's 19th-century mind.
We are told, for example, that Dvorak's anxieties were in fact agoraphobia, and we are given a technical definition of the condition from the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. We are also informed that Dvorak's well-documented passion for drink might have been a form of "self-medication for anxiety" and that his famous homesickness while in America "might be considered a code word for what today we call `depression.' " The author seems to assume that calling Dvorak's demons by their modern names can help us understand them better, but he does not convince us of exactly how or why this is so.
Still, with or without his contemporary terminology, Mr. Beckerman has updated our image of Dvorak in important ways. The composer did not ultimately succeed in forging a new American musical tradition, but he did write some deeply loved music while here. Both his successes and his failures were arguably driven by his skewed visions of America — visions that were thrust on him by others, visions that he carried with him from Europe and visions that were less products of the landscapes of New York or Iowa or even Bohemia, but of a much darker, implacable wilderness within.
Jeremy Eichler has written about music for Newsday, The Washington Post and The New Republic.
Dvorak in the 'New World'
Czech composer made classic music in Manhattan -- and in Iowa
Reviewed by Brian Richard Boylan
Sunday, January 19, 2003
New Worlds of Dvorak
Searching in America for the Composer's Inner Life
By Michael B. Beckerman
From 1892 to 1895, the Bohemian composer Antonin Dvorak was an honored guest in the United States, during which time he created one of the great popular repertory classics, his Ninth Symphony, "From the New World," plus numerous other chamber and piano music. He has a reputation as a simple, homesick man who yet created a masterpiece (his cello concerto also is one of the high spots of the modern repertoire).
Much twaddle had been written about where Dvorak found his inspiration for the "New World" symphony: He supposedly borrowed heavily and stole directly from then-popular "Negro and Indian" music and themes; the gorgeous largo movement is a paraphrase of the spiritual "Going Home," which a black musician sang for him in New York; he mimicked songbirds and American Indian tribal dances for his scherzo.
And yet, during a hectic three years in Manhattan, Dvorak was able to sneak away to Spillville, Iowa, an idyllic hamlet in the middle of nowhere, for a few months of drinking beer, playing cards, telling Czech jokes and composing some of the greatest music this country has ever heard.
Michael Beckerman's "New Worlds of Dvorak" is all about these influences on the composer's work. In its classy tradition, Norton has provided an annotated CD with the book, illustrating melodies, harmony and even possible variations based on Dvorak's sketches. Not only does this biography portray Dvorak as the musical great he was, but it also carefully traces the origins of his work. Beckerman shows that Dvorak was on the verge of composing an opera based on Longfellow's "The Song of Hiawatha," only to have the libretto trashed by a committee of minor composers, music critics and professors as not worthy of Dr.
Dvorak's efforts.
Noting that Dvorak has been romanticized in legend, Beckerman nonetheless points out that the fact "that Dvorak was modest, straightforward, and uncomplicated is true beyond a doubt, but he was fully aware of his own worth, deceptive and complex. That is why he is worth writing about, and more important, why he is no second-tier Master but rather the equal of Wagner, Beethoven, and Brahms."
Determined to import a world-class composer, society matron Jeanette Thurber offered Dvorak the directorship of the National Conservatory of Music in Manhattan. At the same time, "yellow journalism," which often made the reporter and the newspaper part of the news story, had started. It was the era of the Pulitzers, the Hearsts and other publishing dynasties. Dvorak was perfect fodder. Journalists such as James G. Huneker (who led Dvorak on a roistering pub crawl through lower Manhattan), James Creelman (who had paddled up the Missouri River to interview Sitting Bull) and Henry Krehbiel, music critic for the New York Daily Tribune, reported Dvorak's every comment seriously, resulting in the agoraphobic Bohemian breaking the panic of daily city life by traveling and visiting Spillville. During one trip, he visited St. Paul, Minn., then home of Minnehaha Falls, which figure in the epic poem written by Longfellow. Moved by the grandeur of the cascading falls, he scribbled some notes on his cuff. (He also thought Niagara Falls was worthy of a symphony.)
Beckerman, a professor of music at New York University, compares the world Dvorak moved in with today's, and the results are unfavorable. If Dvorak were alive today, "they would see artists and their agents using critics as if their jobs were to create puff pieces to stock resumes; they would see contests playing a huge role in musical life; they would see a society that does not support its young artists, and their dreams of making education available to the poor would seem farther away than ever."
Beckerman devotes a hunk of space to the role played by Henry Hacker Burleigh, the singer-composer descended from slaves who spent many happy hours with Dvorak, singing spirituals and folk songs for him. Dvorak was so taken with Burleigh that for the famous solo in the largo, Dvorak employs an English horn, which Burleigh's recorded voice seems to resemble.
The book concludes on a triumphal note. "We live, we love, we create by breathing. For a time, Dvorak sailed across the ocean, set himself down in New York City, Iowa, Boston, Chicago and St. Paul. He inhabited all the America he could find, including those birdsongs, mixed it with his own craft and soul, his love and his fear, and exhaled some extraordinary music."
This is a book that will exhilarate Dvorak lovers, make converts out of the indifferent and possibly infuriate the musicologists. It is a wonderful book to read, and to hear.
Brian Richard Boylan is an author and critic.