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. . . .
Click To Tweet
You might also like
Endnotes
1. Cather misremembered that she had attended the concert at the age of seventeen. In fact, the concert was part of the orchestra’s 1894–95 tour. It was reported in the Lincoln Courier, April 20, 1895, 8.
2. Willa Cather, My Antonia (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), 219.
3. Willa Cather, O Pioneers! (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), 71.
4. Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915), 201.
5. William M. Curtin, ed., The World and the Parish: Willa Cather’s Articles and Reviews (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), 1, 413–14.
6. Australian Broadcasting Company, The Classic 100 Symphony, on the Wayback Machine at https://web.archive.org/web/20120208180439/http://www.abc.net.au/classic/classic100/symphony/list.htm (accessed August 9, 2024).
7. Emanuel Rubin, “Jeannette Meyer Thurber (1850–1946),” in Ralph P. Locke and Cyrilla Barr, eds., Cultivating Music in America: Women Patrons and Activists since 1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
8. The standard biographies of Dvořák are Neil Butterworth, Dvořák: His Life and Times (New York: Midas Books, 1980) and Otakar Šourek, Antonin Dvořák: His Life and Works (New York: Philosophical Library, 1953). The composer’s son also wrote a memoir of him: Otakar Dvořák, Antonin Dvořák, My Father (Spillville, IA: Czech Historical Research Center, 1993). A superb brief introduction to Dvořák’s music is David Hurwitz, Dvořák: Romantic Music’s Most Versatile Genius (Pompton Plains, NJ: Amadeus Press, 2005), which is accompanied by two compact discs of musical selections that illustrate Hurwitz’s points. It should not be confused with Joseph Horowitz’s Dvořák in America, which is intended for a young-adult audience, but it is informative and well written. Maurice Peress’s book Dvořák to Duke Ellington (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004) is actually a memoir by a prominent orchestra conductor, who uses the story of his own career to detail the influence Dvořák had on American music, especially jazz.
9. Jan Swafford, Johannes Brahms: A Biography (New York: Vintage, 1999), 93.
10. In reality, the train probably did not manage to reach that speed; the crude technology of the age made accurate measurements of such speeds almost impossible. Still, it certainly did travel extremely fast. See “Was NYC 999 the First Steam Locomotive to Reach Over 100 mph?,” Railroad Street, December 31, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_39shicHwwM.
11. Otakar Šourek, ed., Antonin Dvořák: Letters and Reminiscences (Prague: Artia, 1954), 154–55.
12. Šourek, Letters and Reminiscences, 155.
13. Christoph Irmscher, Longfellow Redux (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 3.
14. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha, in J. D. McClatchy, ed., Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Poems and Other Writings (New York: Library of America, 2000), 142.
15. Irmscher, Longfellow Redux, 12.
16. “The Real Value of Negro Melodies,” New York Herald, May 21, 1893, in John C. Tibbetts, Dvořák in America (Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1993), 355.
17. Horowitz, Dvořák in America, 120.
18. Antonin Dvořák, “Music in America,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, February 1895, in Tibbetts, Dvořák in America, 380.
19. Dvořák, “Music in America,” 377–80.
20. Joseph Horowitz, Dvořák in America (Chicago: Cricket Books, 2003), 138.
21. Thomas was conductor of the Chicago Orchestra and perhaps the most prominent figure in American musical culture at the time. See Rose Fay Thomas, Memoirs of Theodore Thomas (New York: Moffatt, Yard & Co., 1911).
22. H. L. Mencken, “Dvořák—An American Symphony,” in Michael Beckerman, ed., Dvořák and His World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 185.
23. In fact, two other Dvořák students also published lyrics for the largo movement: Harvey Worthington Loomis, who published “Massa Dear” in 1923; and Maurice Arnold, who published “Mother Mine” in 1927.
24. Šourek, Letters and Reminiscences, 166.
25. Longfellow, Song of Hiawatha, 278.
26. Longfellow himself never visited the falls, but today a reproduction of his home can be found nearby in Minnehaha Falls Regional Park, about ten minutes from the Minneapolis airport.
27. “Vine and Fig Tree,” The George Washington Presidential Library at Mt. Vernon, https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/vine-and-fig-tree (accessed August 9, 2024).
28. Hurwitz, Dvořák, 24–25. When he visited the Chicago Fair, Dvořák almost certainly stopped by the fabulous Transportation Building, built by Louis Sullivan, the same architect who had built the Chicago Auditorium. Behind its famous “Golden Door” were the newest locomotives, including the one that allegedly had reached one hundred miles per hour only months before.
29. Šourek, Letters and Reminiscences, 151.
30. Šourek, Letters and Reminiscences, 158.
31. Longfellow, Song of Hiawatha, 212.
32. Curtin, World and the Parish, 413–14.
33. Cather, Song of the Lark, 251–54.
34. Robert Higgs, The Transformation of the American Economy, 1865–1914 (New York: Wiley, 1971).
35. Louis Sullivan, The Autobiography of an Idea (New York: Press of the American Institute of Architects, 1926), 329.
36. James Norman Hall, “Rivnac,” The Forgotten One and Other True Tales of the South Seas (Boston: Little, Brown, 1950), 131–32.
37. Hall, “Rivnac,” 148.
38. Hall, “Rivnac,” 140–41.
39. Helen Colijn, Song of Survival: Women Interned (Ashland, OR: White Cloud Press, 1995), 135.
40. Colijn, Song of Survival, 136.
41. Colijn, Song of Survival, 145.
42. The recording was for the soundtrack to a film, Paradise Road (1997), based on Colijn’s memoir.
43. Cather, Song of the Lark, 254.
44. Ellington called him “His Majesty, the King of Consonance.” See Duke Ellington, Music is My Mistress (New York: Da Capo Press, 1973), 95.
45. Quoted in Peress, Dvořák to Duke Ellington, 43–44.
46. Ean Wood, George Gershwin: His Life and Music (London: Sanctuary Publishing, 1996), 78; George Gershwin, “Fifty Years of American Music,” in Robert Wyatt and John Andrew Johnson, eds., The George Gershwin Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 115–16.
47. Gershwin, “Fifty Years of American Music,” 115–16.
48. Zora Neale Hurston, Letter to Burroughs Mitchell, October 1947, in Carla Kaplan, ed., Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters (New York: Anchor Books, 2002), 563.
49. The role of Clara in Porgy and Bess was created by soprano Abbie Mitchell, wife of Dvořák’s student Will Marion Cook. Peress, Dvořák to Duke Ellington, 75.
50. The phrase “American Dream” originated in 1931, in James Truslow Adams’s book The Epic of America.
51. Cather was hardly the only person enthusiastic about this painting. In 1934, attendees at the Chicago World’s Fair voted “Song of the Lark” the most beloved painting in America. That did not prevent the Chicago Art Institute from removing the painting from display two years later, to make way for more modern works—which led to a popular outcry. See Michael Kammen, Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture (New York: Vintage, 2006), 102. In 2014, actor Bill Murray, speaking at a press conference promoting the film The Monuments Men, told reporters that as a young actor, he once experienced severe depression after a poor performance and resolved to commit suicide. On his way to doing so, however, he stopped at the Chicago Art Institute, and on a whim went inside—where he saw “Song of the Lark.” The painting, he said, saved his life. “I saw it that day and I just thought ‘Well, look, there’s a girl who doesn’t have a whole lot of prospects, but the sun’s coming up anyway, and she’s got another chance at it,’ so I think that gave me some sort of feeling that I, too, am a person and get another chance every day the sun comes up.” Red Carpet News TV, “Bill Murray Admits a Painting Saved His Life,” YouTube, February 11, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eOIcWB7jSA.
