The Song of the New World
By Timothy Sandefur
On an April evening in 1895, a twenty-year-old University of Nebraska student attended a performance by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which was touring what were then the Western states.1 The orchestra was in Lincoln that night to share the latest cultural wonders of America, and this student—an aspiring writer named Willa Cather—was especially excited, because she had never before heard an orchestra perform a piece of music.
Raised in a tiny prairie town called Red Cloud 150 miles southwest of Lincoln, Cather was a daughter of the American frontier, and all her life she held mixed emotions about the land of her childhood. It was beautiful but barren; populated by poor, struggling, ignorant farmers and mechanics, many of them immigrants seeking a better life—sometimes finding it beyond their grasp but never seeming to lose their idealism. Sometimes, the Great Plains felt miserably lonely and dull, particularly due to the stifling atmosphere of censoriousness and gossip that pervaded the village in which she grew up; in her 1918 novel My Àntonia, she described it as a place where people “tried to live like the mice in their own kitchens; to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things in the dark.”2 But at the same time, the prairie could be a place of hope and opportunity, qualities that seemed vividly symbolized in the landscape. In another novel, she described her own feelings when looking at the land: “She had felt as if her heart were hiding down there, somewhere, with the qual and the plover and all the little wild things that crooned or buzzed in the sun. Under the long shaggy ridges, she felt the future stirring.”3
The symphony Cather heard that night resonated in her soul like nothing she’d ever imagined. It conveyed something vast and sublime—something inextricably connected to the landscape of her youth and the big cities to which she would later be drawn by her successful career—something simultaneously homely and marvelous, comforting and fearsome. It was not mere entertainment; it was a revelation. She later likened it to losing her virginity.4
Two parts of the symphony struck her with particular force: the second movement, called the “largo,” sounded to her like a “song of homesickness, the exile song of many nations.” And the unusual conclusion of the symphony felt like “an aspiration . . . like the flight of the dove over the waste of waters.”5
What she was listening to was the brand-new symphony by Czech composer Antonin Dvořák. Formally known as his Symphony no. 9 in e-minor, Dvořák had given it a special title, writing on the cover of the manuscript, “From the New World.”
This symphony, which had premiered in New York City on December 16, 1892, was destined to become one of the most celebrated compositions of all time—the most popular symphony ever written according to a 2009 poll—and among the finest expressions of what now we call the “American Dream.”6 And just as the American Dream is a universal dream—one all humanity can share—so Dvořák’s New World Symphony has, for more than a century, gone beyond borders to express some of mankind’s greatest ideals.
Dvořák in America
To appreciate it in all its splendor, one must start with the question of why a fifty-two-year-old Bohemian musician would travel to the United States to write music about America to begin with. And to answer that, one must begin with the immense transformation of human life in the late 19th century.
The forty years after the American Civil War revolutionized human existence.
During this period, social, political, and technological changes ushered in a world barely recognizable to people only half a century before. This marked the maturing of capitalism, which, now that slavery was vanquished, began shining the light of liberty across America—and the world. Consider the inventions of this era: the lightbulb, the phonograph, the telephone, the internal combustion engine, the typewriter, the bicycle, barbed wire, corrugated cardboard, the ballpoint pen, the toothpaste tube. Steam and gas started to replace wood-burning stoves. Indoor plumbing became commonplace. Skyscrapers began reaching for the clouds. Wooden ships were succeeded by vessels made of steel. And, of course, there was the railroad, the most important technology of the age. The Transcontinental Railroad was finished in 1869; and within a decade, new refrigerated railcars were transporting food thousands of miles, including to the nine new states admitted to the union during this period. Dvořák’s generation had been born into a world built of stone and wood, lit and warmed by fire, reliant on horse and wind power—now, they lived a hundred feet in the air in buildings made of steel and lit by electricity, rode trains to far-off cities, and conversed by wire with people in different states. Within a few short years, they would learn to fly.
The transformation was especially noticeable in two rival cities, New York and Chicago. In the 1830s, Manhattan’s population was around 300,000, and Chicago was a frontier fortress with 250 people living in it. Fifty years later, there were 1.7 million New Yorkers and half a million Chicagoans.
Almost everything we think of as quintessentially Manhattan was, more or less, created between 1865 and 1900: the American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Central Park, the Metropolitan Opera, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty, the first skyscraper, the New York Public Library. Chicago’s transformation was even more spectacular. The Union Stockyards—an engineering marvel—were established in 1864; and by 1890, they housed nine million cattle prepared for slaughter and transportation to far-flung villages across North America. A tremendous fire in 1871 destroyed three square miles of the city—more than seventeen thousand structures—yet Chicagoans rebuilt with amazing rapidity and then began working to reverse the course of the Chicago River to eliminate a terrible sewage problem. In 1900, they accomplished it—one of the greatest engineering feats of all time. The Monadnock Building, still the tallest brick structure in the world, was finished in 1891. But a year before that, the first steel-framed building was completed—the Rand McNally Building—which revolutionized architecture and made possible Chicago’s legendary skyscrapers.
In 1889, the greatest building of the era was finished: the Chicago Auditorium, by Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler. The largest structure in America, among the first in the Windy City to be electrified, and equipped with an early form of air conditioning, its austere exterior concealed a glorious interior. Unlike most theaters of the time, audiences entered an almost spartan lobby, only to rise up the stairs into a breathtaking hall bathed in the ethereal gold of electric light and ornamentation almost mesmerizing in its beauty. The building was so gorgeous that it won Chicago the greatest prize of all: It, not New York, would host the 1893 World’s Fair, officially known as the World Columbian Exposition.
The Exposition—one of history’s most important cultural events—was the opening fanfare for what everybody sensed would be a new age for mankind. It was timed to celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the New World, although, due to technical problems, it opened a year late. Nevertheless, its organizers were emphatic that it should mark the New World’s answer to Europe—and particularly, its answer to the Paris Fair of 1889, where the French had unveiled one of the great wonders of the time: Gustave Eiffel’s 1,083-foot-tall steel tower, the tallest man-made structure that had ever been built. The organizers of the Chicago Fair wanted to prove that America could top that—that America had grown up.
But, of course, New York City was not going to let Chicago have all the glory. Its cultural leaders decided to offer their own celebrations of America’s maturity. Throughout the autumn of 1892, the metropolis resonated with fireworks displays and massive parades—one included more than twelve thousand schoolchildren—all climaxing with the dedication of the statue of the explorer at Columbus Circle on October 13, 1892.
One New Yorker who saw an opportunity to assert America’s coming of age was a remarkable patroness of the arts named Jeannette Thurber. Wife of a wealthy grocery wholesaler, Thurber nurtured the dream of establishing a musical school that would rival Europe’s great academies. But she did not want merely to imitate German and Italian schools. She dreamed of helping create a distinctive, indigenous form of musical expression—one that would convey a uniquely American spirit. She admired Richard Wagner, who was credited with establishing a distinctively German musical style, and she couldn’t help but wonder what an American Wagner would be like.7
At the time, musicians and critics were engaged in heated debates about what it meant for music to be “national.” Was such a thing even possible? Could orchestras and singers articulate a nation’s cultural identity? Whatever the answer might be, Thurber wanted Americans to rebut the dominance of German and Italian composers. And she wanted her new school to be open to all students, including women and members of racial minorities, who were often excluded from such opportunities in the United States. So, when she established her National Conservatory in 1885, she announced that it would admit anyone of talent, regardless of race, sex, or ability to pay.
Yet she knew that her school would need a prominent musician to lead it, and the world’s greatest musical minds were, of course, in Europe. Thus, she began searching for a composer willing to come to America for a few years’ residency to teach and write new music with a specifically American character. That was a lot to ask; Europeans still considered America a rustic land of philistine shopkeepers and nouveau riche. And they weren’t entirely wrong—New York City was hardly Paris. Still, Thurber had one very persuasive tool in her kit: money, and lots of it. So, when she asked German composer Johannes Brahms to recommend someone, and Brahms suggested his protégé, Antonin Dvořák, she knew just how to convince him.
From Bohemia to the Big Apple
Dvořák was born in Bohemia in 1841, the eldest son of a butcher who had thirteen other children.8 He proved to be a skilled violinist, even composing a polka at the age of fourteen. His family had little money, and he struggled to persuade his father to let him pursue a musical career. But Antonin’s teachers were sure enough of his potential that they overcame his father’s reluctance, and in the 1850s, after graduating from music school, Antonin began playing in a traveling dance band, teaching piano lessons, and composing serious orchestral works in his spare time. His was no overnight success—in fact, twenty years passed before he began to gain recognition as a composer, and even then, the financial rewards were modest.
His rise was largely due to Brahms’s influence. The German first learned of Dvořák through some competitions the younger man entered in which Brahms served as a judge, and he especially admired Dvořák’s “Hungarian Dances” and “Slavonic Dances,” two pieces in which Dvořák adapted traditional folk songs into artistically respectable music for orchestras. Such adaptations seemed just the thing for musicians seeking to create “national” styles, and especially for Brahms, who had spent years opposing Wagner’s more radical take on the question of musical “nationalism.” The iconoclastic Wagner had sought to throw off artistic traditions and to create revolutionary new styles that included not only new musical techniques, but also psychological and philosophical themes that served his racist political beliefs. (“[Wagner’s] ‘Artwork of the Future,’” writes historian Jan Swafford, “was music built over a gigantic apparatus of words, of poetry, myth, philosophy, feuilleton, screed, and rant.”9) Brahms, by contrast, believed in adhering to traditional styles and preferred to approach the question of nationalism through the type of adaptation Dvořák was offering. Simply put, the Czech had a flair for understanding, expressing, and elaborating upon the essential qualities of folk songs without copying them or burying them under political propaganda as Wagner seemed to do.
During the 1870s and 1880s, critics began to recognize Dvořák’s name and promote his work, and he found himself increasingly busy. He traveled back and forth across Europe, coordinating with orchestras, composing dozens of pieces—symphonies, concerti, choral works—and teaching classes at the Prague Conservatory. It was hectic work, and all of it earned him a modest salary to support his wife and nine children. Thus, when Mrs. Thurber appeared with her offer of $15,000 per year—twenty-five times his current salary—how could he refuse?
It wasn’t just about the money, though. Dvořák was fascinated by the social and technological changes then taking place in the United States, and he wanted to see them for himself. He particularly loved boats and trains. In fact, his favorite hobbies were touring ships and sitting at train stations to watch locomotives fly past. Mere months before he arrived in America in September 1892, the New York Central Railroad set the world speed record with a train that traveled more than a mile a minute; and within a year, the company announced that one of its trains had broken the one-hundred-mile-per-hour barrier, becoming the fastest man-made object ever to travel on land.10
In America, Dvořák eagerly indulged his passion for boats and railroads, dragging his assistant to the docks almost every day. “There was soon not a boat that we had not inspected from stem to stern,” his assistant later said. “When a ship was due to sail, we went there and watched it from the shore till it was out of sight. . . . If it happened that the Master . . . was engrossed at his work at home, and so forgot about the departure of a boat and there was no longer time to go to the harbor, we went . . . to Battery Park . . . and from there followed the ship.”11
Examining trains was more difficult, because station managers would not let people on the platform without a ticket. “It was in vain that we begged the porter to let us look at the ‘American locomotive,’” the exasperated assistant recalled. “So we traveled [all the way] . . . to 155th Street, a good hour from the Master’s house, and there, on a bank, waited for the Chicago or Boston express to go by. . . . It took up a lot of time, nearly the whole afternoon.”12
Hiawatha and Henry Burleigh
Dvořák had toyed with the idea of writing music on American themes for many years. In his youth, he had read a book by an American writer that he admired so much he dreamed of someday making it into an opera. That book was The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Longfellow was born in 1807 and became America’s first professional poet—that is, the first lyricist able to make a living from his writing. Although literary critics sneered at him in later years, he was actually a brilliant innovator and the creator of immortal verses that Americans still cherish today. As scholar Christoph Irmscher puts it, “Longfellow’s works appealed to bespectacled university professors and servant girls alike.” He “pretty much invented poetry as a public idiom in the United States.”13
Many of Longfellow’s poems focused on the quiet joys of home and family, celebrating what are often called the “bourgeois values” of domestic life. But he was also a serious literary scholar who wanted to bring world culture to American readers. Thus, he translated Dante’s Divine Comedy into English—and composed his own epic poems about the people and history of the New World. One of these was The__Song of Hiawatha, written in 1855, a work he hoped would be to Americans what The Odyssey is to the Greeks.
Hiawatha was based on an actual Ojibwe legend about a warrior, son of the West Wind, who falls in love with the beautiful Minnehaha, only to lose her to a terrible famine. To capture a feeling of Native American life, Longfellow used an unusual poetic meter, which gives the poem a hypnotic drumbeat quality, as though the lines are being chanted around a campfire. In some passages, it depicted intoxicatingly lovely images of bucolic America:
Round about the Indian village
Spread the meadows and the corn-fields,
And beyond them stood the forest,
Stood the groves of singing pine-trees,
Green in Summer, white in Winter,
Ever sighing, ever singing.14
Song of Hiawatha was immensely popular and was translated into many other languages. As Irmscher puts it, many Europeans, in a sense, “discovered America through Longfellow’s lines.”15 But many Americans themselves discovered Native American culture through Longfellow’s poem—or, more accurately, a stylized, romanticized version of it. Song of Hiawatha exerted such a powerful influence over how non-Indians thought about Indian life that, to this day, many cultural stereotypes about indigenous Americans are traceable to the beauty and dignity of Longfellow’s work. It’s fashionable today to scorn art like this as “appropriation,” but that’s unfair to Longfellow, who was trying to honor the noble qualities of his Native hero and to underscore the fact that those qualities are universally admirable, regardless of one’s race. In any event, although Dvořák never wrote his opera, the spirit of Longfellow’s poem would infuse his New World Symphony, especially its celebrated second movement.
Another major influence on the symphony was the music of black America—what were then called Negro songs or spirituals. On this point, Dvořák was probably influenced by his students at Mrs. Thurber’s Conservatory, especially a twenty-six-year-old black singer from Pennsylvania named Henry T. Burleigh.
Born in 1866 to a Civil War veteran, Burleigh had worked a variety of odd jobs before being admitted to the conservatory as a singer and bass player. When Dvořák asked him to sing, he performed several spirituals, including “Go Down Moses” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Dvořák was transfixed, and in an interview published two months after his arrival in New York, he said that Negro spirituals “must be the real foundation of any serious and original school of composition . . . in the United States.”16 That Negro spirituals would necessarily help shape America’s national style seemed obvious to the composer. After all, he had already written many successful pieces based on Czech and Hungarian folk songs, so it seemed clear that any future “national” school of American orchestral music should likewise adapt the country’s folk music, of which the spirituals were the most prominent example. But the idea proved controversial. When newspapers published his comments, several critics denounced him. One Boston writer called him a “Negrophile.”17 Others insisted that American culture had more in common with European culture and that music born on slave plantations could hold nothing of value for white Americans. True, black musicians at the Chicago World’s Fair had just invented a new musical style they were calling “ragtime,” but ragtime struck sophisticated critics as vulgar—a mere fad.18
Dvořák, however, was resolute that America’s cultural diversity must be the source of its music. “The germs for the best music lie hidden among all the races that are commingled in this great country,” he declared. “When it is accomplished . . . another wreath of fame and glory will be added to this country which earned its name ‘Land of Freedom’ by unshackling her slaves at the price of her own blood.”19 As a self-made man who had risen from poverty to world fame, he likely felt a kinship to the spirituals’ tone of earnest expectation. Decades after Dvořák’s death, Burleigh remarked that black musicians would always honor him for recognizing “in the songs of the plantation, proof of the Negro’s spiritual ascendancy over oppression and humiliation, [and understanding their] message . . . that eventual deliverance from all that hinders and oppresses the soul will come, and man—every man—will be free.”20
The Premiere
All these changes and controversies were swirling in the background when twenty-year-old Willa Cather sat in the audience in Nebraska on April 18, 1895, watching conductor Theodore Thomas take the stage.21 Although Cather had never heard a symphony before, she doubtless knew that symphonies consist of four sections, called movements: typically a fast first movement; a slow second movement; then an upbeat, dance-like third movement; and a final, fast movement. Maybe she’d heard the rumor that Dvořák made some last-minute changes to the score—that a friend persuaded him to slow down the second movement, making it more melancholy.
As the violins began to play, Cather probably recognized that the music was in a solemn minor key, which musicians use to convey a sense of longing or wistfulness. That was followed by a two-note fanfare on the horns, and then woodwinds that made the opening moments seem like the sunrise over a broad river. Suddenly, a sort of announcement—a burst of sound, and a theme began to rise from the horns. It grew more prominent—a triangular rising and falling figure—and it started to seem like one had emerged from an ocean fog into a vast new landscape, full of grand forests and sunlit valleys.
Ever since its premiere, listeners have claimed to detect various Negro spirituals in the music that follows. Yet Dvořák never actually quoted any of them in any noticeable way, and it’s rather amusing that writers who are convinced that he copied from black music have never agreed about which exact song he’s supposed to be imitating. Is it “Roll, Jordan Roll”?—or “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”? Journalist H. L. Mencken claimed Dvořák engaged in a “palpable borrowing” of the song “Oh, Redeemed”—but if so, it’s awfully subtle.22
The reality is that Dvořák didn’t copy directly from any source. Instead, he had a unique capacity for grasping the sense of life expressed in these songs and creating new music that articulated that same spirit: the spirit of defiant resilience in the face of injustice, of confidence in ultimate triumph, of the will to persevere, of the sweetness of joy and victory—the spirit of vindication that makes these spirituals such a cherished part of the American repertoire. The actual music here is entirely Dvořák’s own. Yet it evokes the same sense of reaching for freedom that animates the best spirituals, and that, in American tradition, is frequently associated with the country’s great rivers. This is the music of independence.
After the bold announcement of the first movement, the second begins with a hush. Known as the “largo,” it has become one of the most cherished of American tunes. In 1922, one of Dvořák’s students, William Arms Fisher, even wrote lyrics for it, converting it into an imitation Negro spiritual called “Goin’ Home.”23 But it seems more likely that Dvořák was trying to convey the spirit of the Midwestern prairies, drawing from Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha.
Hiawatha is an elegy. Like so much writing in the “noble savage” tradition, it’s a romanticization that takes Native Americans as a symbol to represent what many Europeans wanted the New World to be. It’s also a profoundly sensuous poem that celebrates the majesty of the American landscape. And here, Dvořák could write from personal experience. In the summer of 1893, he took a thousand-mile train ride from Manhattan to a small village in northeastern Iowa called Spillville, which had been founded thirty years earlier by Czech immigrants. He spent three months there, exploring the great plains. “A great deal of empty space,” he told a friend. “A farmer’s nearest neighbor is often four miles off, especially in the prairies (I call them the Sahara) there are only endless acres of field and meadow and that is all you see.”24
This quaint town could not have been more different from New York City. With its vast, open horizon and its melting sunsets, it likely reminded Dvořák of the pastoral scenes in Hiawatha. Consider the powerful ending passage, in which Hiawatha sets off for a westward voyage in his canoe, riding into the sunset in a scene that would be imitated by countless Western movies a century later:
And the evening sun descending
Set the clouds on fire with redness,
Burned the broad sky, like a prairie,
Left upon the level water
One long track and trail of splendor,
Down whose stream, as down a river,
Westward, westward Hiawatha
Sailed into the fiery sunset.25
The effect must have been heightened by the fact that Dvořák had the opportunity in Spillville to hear and see actual Native Americans performing their tribal songs and dances. He visited several times with members of the Iroquois, who lived in a nearby camp and who demonstrated their songs for the composer. He also had time for a brief excursion to Minnesota to see Minnehaha Falls, a waterfall that helped inspire Longfellow’s poem.26
The largo movement of Dvořák’s symphony combines the bucolic countryside of Longfellow’s imagination with the gentle beauty of the Iowa cornfields—and the dreams of Spillville’s immigrant farmers, proud of the modest prosperity they’ve built for themselves and their families. It starts with quiet, introspective horns, which create a frame for a soloist. That solo is performed on an obscure instrument called an English horn, which scholars think Dvořák chose because it sounded like Henry Burleigh’s singing voice.
What has made this movement so appealing to so many listeners is Dvořák’s skill at capturing the atmosphere of home and family. With its calm tempo and warm, autumnal tone, one can almost see a farmhouse with smoke rising from the chimney. It brings to mind the biblical phrase that George Washington liked to quote as his definition of the American Dream: “every one shall sit under his own vine and fig tree, and none shall make him afraid.”27
The third movement is altogether different. It’s a whirl of energy and excitement, with rapid-fire strings and booming drums. Is it the drumming of Indians in Song of Hiawatha? Or the explosive power of Niagara Falls, which Dvořák stopped to see on his way back from Spillville to New York? Or is it the bustling crowds of the Chicago World’s Fair, which he also stopped to visit? The Fair was then boiling with thousands of visitors—more than 750,000 on a single day—there to see the fantastic “White City,” with sculptures by Daniel Chester French and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, featuring authentic Indian warriors.
All these things may have influenced the composer, but it’s more likely that his inspiration was the railroad.28 Here, in the third movement, one can hear the thrill and rush of blasting across the landscape—racing through tunnels and over mountains on ribbons of steel at a locomotive’s top speed. This section is followed by a slightly more peaceful passage, likely inspired by the steamships Dvořák liked to watch sailing off toward the horizon. Triangles even evoke the ships’ bells.
At last, the final movement: Here, Dvořák summarizes everything that’s gone before, and—in a step that’s quite unusual for a symphony—even introduces new themes, as many as six in this single concluding movement. They interact, folding over each other in a demonstration of musical inventiveness that seems to celebrate America’s racial and cultural diversity. This is the music of a dynamic society, one rooted in equality and freedom. It’s the music of a lively new world of explosive possibilities.
America’s diversity and dynamism astonished Dvořák. He wrote home about seeing the “magnificent Statue of Liberty”—then less than ten years old—and about his fascination with the country’s cultural and racial variety.29 “Here in America there are . . . towns and villages of all nations under the sun!!”30 Immigrants were indeed flooding into the country; about twelve million between 1870 and 1900, 70 percent of them through New York harbor. Only nine months before Dvořák’s arrival, federal officials opened a new facility to receive these immigrants: Ellis Island. The symphony’s fourth movement seems to revel in the harmony and diversity of the American melting pot.
The most ingenious and powerful moment in the music comes toward the end. Most symphonies reach a resounding, straightforward conclusion, resolving the themes into a single point and signaling the end to the audience. But Dvořák’s ending is far more introspective, perhaps even ambiguous. The New World Symphony began with a few hesitant notes, and it ends—not with hesitation, but with a sense of wondrous trepidation about what this New World and its inhabitants have to offer. It seems to say that, as glorious as the future might be, it also could hold great danger, and only the choices we make will determine the outcome.
At first, the music seems to approach a typical crescendo—like something Mozart or Brahms might write. But then it pauses, folds back upon itself, and offers a denouement with the French horns—a sound of hope on the horizon, like the evening star. Then it rises a second time into a final, trembling drama. This is unlike any symphony ever written, and here, too, Dvořák seems to have been inspired by Hiawatha, evoking the closing lines of Longfellow’s poem:
Yes; it is the sun descending,
Sinking down into the water;
All the sky is stained with purple,
All the water flushed with crimson!
No; it is the Red Swan floating,
Diving down beneath the water;
To the sky its wings are lifted,
With its blood the waves are reddened!
Over it the Star of Evening
Melts and trembles through the purple,
Hangs suspended in the twilight.31
Young Willa Cather was stunned by the symphony’s climax. This was more than a concert. It was what she imagined life could mean and ought to mean. “There was all the hope of the new world in it,” she wrote.32 Dvořák had captured her own sense of life in the evanescent, abstract way that only music can.
Something Despairing, Something Glorious
In fact, the experience struck Cather so profoundly that she made it into a pivotal moment in a novel she published thirty years later. The main character is an opera singer named Thea, loosely based on Cather herself. Thea grows up in a poor farming village on the Great Plains. But when a local music teacher arranges for her to take singing lessons in Chicago, she moves to the big city. One day, Thea goes to hear the orchestra perform. On the program, of course, is the New World Symphony.
Strikingly, however, Cather sets the scene not in the small Nebraska theater where she heard it, but in Louis Sullivan’s phenomenal Chicago Auditorium. There, the golden splendor of Sullivan’s architecture and the heavenly sound of Dvořák’s music light a fire in Thea that she feels she must preserve forever, even if it requires defying all the world. Cather’s writing in this passage is so impassioned and beautiful that it is worth quoting at length:
When the first movement ended, Thea’s hands and feet were cold as ice. She was too much excited to know anything except that she wanted something desperately, and when the English horns gave out the theme of the [largo movement], she knew that what she wanted was exactly that. Here were the sand hills, the grasshoppers and locusts . . . the reaching and reaching of high plains, the immeasurable yearning of all flat lands. There was home in it, too; first memories, first mornings long ago; the amazement of a new soul in a new world; a soul new and yet old, that had dreamed something despairing, something glorious, in the dark before it was born. . . .
When the symphony was over . . . she sat still, scarcely knowing where she was. . . . When she emerged from the concert hall . . . a furious gale was beating over the city. . . . The streets were full of cold, hurrying, angry people, running for street-cars and barking at each other. . . .
There was some power abroad in the world bent upon taking away from her that feeling with which she had come out of the concert hall. Everything seemed to sweep down on her to tear it out from under her cape. If one had that, the world became one’s enemy; people, buildings, wagons, cars, rushed at one to crush it under, to make one let go of it. . . .
Very well; they should never have it. They might trample her to death, but they should never have it. As long as she lived, that ecstasy was going to be hers. She would live for it, work for it, die for it; but she was going to have it, time after time, height after height. . . . She would have it, what the trumpets were singing! She would have it.33
Cather’s wording here brilliantly captures the power that art can possess—that capacity to transport us to a realm where things seem fundamentally right; to burst like a ray of the sun into a realm one had not even realized was dark; to sound like an answer to a question one has always somehow been asking.
Willa Cather’s generation had emerged from the poverty and drudgery of farm life. They had been brought to the threshold of liberty by immigrant parents or enslaved grandparents, and now, in the 1890s, they witnessed not just economic growth, but the birth of an essentially brand-new civilization—things humanity had never experienced before: electric light, motion pictures, skyscrapers. Steel production increased by a factor of five hundred in their lifetimes; the amount of railroad track quadrupled; farm output doubled.34 This was the moment when what Columbus had called the “New World” produced upon the Earth something genuinely new: a society where the infinite potential within each person could be unleashed to irrigate the deserts, fertilize the plains, cure the diseases, and construct the machinery to liberate mankind from the toil under which every one of our ancestors labored. Louis Sullivan, architect of the Auditorium Building, said that this was the instant “when the golden hour tolled, all mists departed, and there shone forth a vision, the reality of MAN, as Free Spirit, as Creator, as Container of illimitable powers, for the joy and peace of mankind.”35 The Ninth Symphony was the sound of that golden hour.
Mr. Rivnac
Yet Dvořák’s symphony reached people far beyond America as well. In the years to come, the spirit of hope that Cather—and her fictional counterpart—cherished so passionately would be shared by people worldwide. One of these was the novelist and adventurer James Norman Hall.
Born in Colfax, Iowa, in 1886, Hall attended Grinnell College, and one day in 1907, as he was walking to the library to study for a philosophy exam, he happened to hear music coming from the chapel. He stopped, intrigued. It was a professor playing the New World Symphony on the organ.
“In less than two minutes I was rapt away from any further thought of [philosophy],” he wrote five decades later. “As I listened, doors swung apart, revealing what was, indeed, a new world to me. . . . [The music sounded like] the landscape, but idealized, spiritualized: of the earth and not of it at the same time.”36
When World War I broke out, Hall became a fighter pilot and was shot down by the Germans, spending the war’s final months in a POW camp. When peace came, he moved to Tahiti and cowrote the novel Mutiny on the Bounty, which was made into an Oscar-winning movie in 1935. A few years later, he was walking past a hotel in Papeete, Tahiti’s capital city, when he heard Dvořák’s New World Symphony coming from the building. Inside was the hotel’s owner, a Czechoslovakian émigré named Mr. Rivnac, playing the music on his record player. Hall asked if he could sit and listen, too, and soon the men became fast friends, sharing evenings together listening to Rivnac’s records.
But as the decade ended, Rivnac grew increasingly despondent about the rise of Adolf Hitler, who was trying to annex much of his homeland. In 1939, when the British government caved in to Hitler’s demands, handing Czechoslovakia to the Nazis, Rivnac was devastated. Hall wrote:
He was sitting in his stout chair near the phonograph, and I could see no outward change except that instead of his usual greeting, he gave me a barely perceptible nod. . . . Presently I took my courage in my hands. . . . I went to the shelf . . . and took from it the record we loved so much . . . and set it [to play the] fourth movement. . . . It was then night in Europe; night in a double sense in Czechoslovakia . . . but we were not aware of it. . . . It was as though I were hearing a new fourth movement . . . a never-failing spring of living water, to give refreshment, solace, new powers of endurance under the cruelest blows of Fate. . . . It seemed to me that Dvořák was speaking now, for and to his homeland.37
To Hall, and his despairing Czech friend, the New World Symphony seemed like “the most inspiring of unfulfilled prophecies, and, at the same time, by implication, the most heartbreaking commentary in advance, on the history thus far of the twentieth century.”38
The Sound of Hope
During the war that followed, others found in Dvořák’s New World Symphony the fuel they needed to keep the light of hope alive. In 1942, a group of British civilians was captured and imprisoned by the Japanese Army on the island of Tabuan in the East Indies. Imperial Japan’s cruelty to its prisoners is infamous, and the case of the Tabuan prisoners was no different. Abused, starved, beaten, and humiliated, they struggled to retain their sanity and dignity. The guards allowed them to hold religious services and sing hymns, so a group of prisoners asked if they could hold a concert. The guards agreed.
Yet the prisoners had no musical instruments. So, they came up with an unusual idea: They would hum and vocalize to mimic the sounds of an orchestra. After practicing for several days, they invited the other prisoners to their show. “This evening,” declared the group’s leader, “we are asking you to listen to something quite new . . . a choir of women’s voices trying to reproduce some of the well-known music usually given by an orchestra.”39 Together, the group began to perform the “largo” movement of Dvořák’s New World Symphony.
“I felt a shiver go down my back,” recalled one prisoner, a woman named Helen Colijn. “The music didn’t sound precisely like an orchestra. . . . It sounded ethereal, totally unreal in our sordid surroundings.”40 Although puzzled at first, the guards themselves soon began enjoying the music, and eventually the prisoners were holding regular concerts. “The music renewed our sense of human dignity,” Helen said. “We had to live under bestial conditions but, by Jove, we could rise above them.”41
She and her sisters were freed when the war ended. Almost four decades later, one of her sisters found among her papers the booklet in which she had written the notations for the singing parts. In 1995, a Dutch choir used her crudely written sheet music to record the Tabuan prisoners’ vocal orchestration of Dvořák’s largo movement.42 In her novel, Willa Cather had written that Dvořák’s symphony expressed something so precious that “she would live for it, work for it, die for it,” but never give it up.43 The Tabuan prisoners felt that fierce devotion to a better world in a way Cather could never have imagined.
Dvořák’s American Legacy
There are many more tales of the way Dvořák’s vision has touched people, but there is one that must not be omitted. Less than a decade after World War II ended, a twenty-two-year-old Korean War veteran from Ohio decided to join the marching band at Purdue University, where he was now studying engineering. He played the trumpet and the piano and performed in a jazz band in high school. But one of the pieces he learned for the Purdue band was Dvořák’s classic symphony.
His name was Neil Armstrong, and seventeen years later, when the crew of Apollo 11 was allowed to select music to bring along on their mission to the Moon, Armstrong chose two recordings: a groovy science-fiction jazz record called Music Out of the Moon—and Dvořák’s New World Symphony. Thus, it became the first symphony ever played on an actual new world.
Did Dvořák succeed in crafting a distinctive American national music? In one sense, no. After he left America in 1895, only a handful of composers built on his example. None of them became America’s Wagner. On the other hand, his influence may be more profound than it seems. His endorsement of black music lent vital credibility to singers such as his student, Henry Burleigh, who went on to become a composer himself—and the nation’s leading black vocalist. In 1941, when he was eighty-three, he sang at a ceremony honoring Dvořák’s legacy.
Dvořák’s other students at Mrs. Thurber’s conservatory, including Will Marion Cook and Rubin Goldmark, may not have become equally famous, but they went on to become teachers themselves—and through them, Dvořák exerted an extraordinary influence on American music. Cook became a successful composer, who collaborated with the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar on a musical called Clorindy: The Origin of the Cakewalk in 1898. _Clorindy—_which put Dunbar’s lyrics to ragtime-influenced music—became the first all-black musical performed on Broadway. Later, Cook collaborated with musicians such as Sidney Bechet, Eubie Blake, and Duke Ellington, who revered him.44 Rubin Goldmark, who became the head of the composition department at the Juilliard School of Music, taught George Gershwin and Aaron Copland. “American musicians,” wrote Copland in a tribute to Goldmark after his death,
tend to forget that only half a century ago so-called classical music was thought of as an exotic growth in the American landscape. . . . In a very real sense [he and his generation] were pioneers, we owe them a debt, if for no other reason than that they helped make possible our present day flowering.45
Gershwin’s debt to Goldmark is less clear—according to one source, he took only three lessons with Goldmark—but he later called Goldmark “my teacher and friend,” and in 1929 saluted the older man’s composition Negro Rhapsody, which had appeared seven years earlier: “In the negro spiritual did Goldmark feel—just as Dvořák had felt—that he had found, at last, the American idiom” wrote Gershwin.46 “Since jazz—certainly the most efficacious means, to date, for the creation of American music—has its roots deeply embedded in the negro spiritual, the importance of such a pioneer work as the Negro Rhapsody should not be disregarded.”47
In the hands of Ellington, Gershwin, and other musicians, the ragtime style invented at the 1893 Chicago Fair evolved into jazz and gradually became a full-fledged—and fully American—musical art form. In 1947, novelist Zora Neale Hurston would write that Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess marked “a revolution in national expression. . . . There is no more negro music in the U.S. It has been fused and merged and become the national expression, and displaced the worship of European [styles]. . . . What has evolved here is something American.”48 It was just as Dvořák had predicted.49
Singing the Song
Dvořák’s influence would also be felt in what has become another of America’s greatest musical forms of expression: cinematic music. Many Hollywood composers, most notably John Williams, would borrow from the New World Symphony for their themes in the late 20th century, particularly for science-fiction films. Williams drew on Dvořák’s fourth movement for several pieces written for the Star Wars films (The “Imperial March” and the “Duel of the Fates,” for example). He also borrowed the opening notes of the fourth movement as the basis for his Jaws score. Other composers would employ the “largo” theme when they wanted to create a sense of home and nostalgia; Mike Post’s music for the 1990s television show Quantum Leap did so quite noticeably. Canadian composer Howard Shore drew inspiration from the largo movement when he wrote the “Shire Theme” for The__Lord of the Rings.
But as far as Jeannette Thurber’s original goal of an American “national music” is concerned, such a project was ultimately doomed, because music cannot really give voice to a national spirit or stop at national boundaries. It’s too abstract for that. “From the New World” embodied Dvořák’s impressions of America; it evokes not any particular ethnic or political identity, but broader, human longings. It expresses the sense of life born of opportunity: the chance to accomplish grand, bold, and unprecedented things—to set oneself against the odds and triumph—as well as the calmer pursuits of the household; the freedom to raise a family, to own one’s home, to enjoy the fruits of one’s labor in peace. This freedom to pursue happiness would later be called the “American Dream,”50 but, of course, these desires were not and are not confined to Americans. They are aspirations open to all mankind. What makes America special is that, at its best, it liberates these aspirations and opens the door for those willing to pass through. Although Dvořák’s symphony may be from the New World, it is to anyone in the world who cares to claim it as his or her own.
When Willa Cather published the novel in which Dvořák’s symphony changes her character’s life, she chose for the cover a painting by a French artist named Jules Adolphe Breton. Painted only eight years before Dvořák’s symphony premiered, it depicts a poor, young girl standing barefoot in a cornfield. She could be an ancestor of any one of us—your grandmother, your great-grandmother. She holds a sickle, ready for another day of hard, manual labor. Yet she’s also ready for something else. Behind her, the morning sun begins to spread the new rays of a hopeful dawn. The girl looks up, not down—toward the rising light. Recognizing a kinship between the painting and the New World Symphony, Cather borrowed Breton’s title for her novel, calling it “The Song of the Lark.”51 The lark, of course, sings at daybreak.
This is the sense of life Dvořák managed to capture: the moment of dawning opportunity, the first glimpse of the potential for triumph, of the chance to prevail that has always been the New World’s greatest gift. This was the song of the New World.