Dvorak

“Songs My Mother Taught Me”: From Dvořák to Ives

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Songs My Mother Taught Me is the fourth and most famous of Antonín Dvořák’s seven-song cycle, Gypsy Songs, Op. 55. Composed in 1880 at the request of the Viennese tenor, Gustav Walter, the texts are from a collection of poems by Adolf Heyduk. Songs My Mother Taught Me highlights the timelessness of music, and enduring truths, passed lovingly through generations: Songs my mother taught me in the days long vanished, Seldom from her eyelids were …

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Dvořák’s String Quartet No. 12 in F Major: The “American”

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During the summer of 1893, Antonín Dvořák took his habitual morning walks, not through the meadows of his native Bohemia, but into the vast, rolling prairie of northeastern Iowa. It was here, in the small Czech immigrant enclave of Spillville, that Dvořák completed the “New World” Symphony, and then, in just over two weeks, wrote his String Quartet No. 12 in F Major, Op. 96. Having relocated from Prague the previous September …

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Dvořák’s Carnival Overture: A Vibrant Celebration of Life

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In 1892, Antonín Dvořák composed three concert overtures (In Nature’s Realm, Carnival, and Othello) inspired by poetic visions of “Nature, Life, and Love.” After examining the composer’s notes, the biographer, Otakar Šourek, wrote, Dvořák wished in this cycle to draw in overture-form musical pictures of three of the most powerful impressions to which the human soul is subjected: the impression of the solitary, wrapped about by the exalted stillness of the summer night; …

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Dvořák’s “Rusalka”: Four Key Excerpts

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First performed on March 31, 1901 in Prague, Antonín Dvořák’s enduring fairytale opera in three acts, Rusalka, Op. 114, blends Slavic mythology with the story of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid . Rusalka is a water nymph who falls in love with a human—a Prince who happens one day to swim in her lake. She tells her father, the water goblin, that she wishes to become human to be with the …

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Dvořák’s Violin Concerto in A Minor: Spirited Bohemian Strains

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Once, while reflecting on his music, Antonín Dvořák commented, “I myself have gone to the simple, half-forgotten tunes of the Bohemian peasants for hints in my most serious works. Only in this way can a musician express the true sentiment of his people.” Dvořák’s Violin Concerto in A minor, Op. 53 overflows with the spirited strains of the composer’s Czech homeland. Bending sonata form and liberating the traditional structure of the concerto, …

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Dvorák’s Piano Quartet No. 2 in E-flat Major: Melodies Coming in Droves

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As with Franz Schubert, Antonín Dvořák was a composer awash in melody. In a letter to a friend, dated August 10, 1889, Dvořák expressed gratitude for this seemingly effortless melodic stream: Do you want to know what I’m doing? My head is full of it. If only one could write it immediately! But it’s no use, I have to go slowly, only what the hand can manage and the Lord God will …

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Dvořák’s Humoresque in G-flat Major: Ignaz Friedman and Art Tatum

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Antonín Dvořák was one of the greatest composers of melody. Perhaps the most catchy and popularly enduring example is the Humoresque No. 7 in G-flat Major (Poco lento e grazioso), originally written for solo piano. Propelled forward by an infectious, lilting rhythm, the melody develops in two-note steps which ascend gradually and explore a variety of motivic combinations before sinking into repose at the end of the phrase. As with much of …

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