Dvorák’s “Symphonische Erzählhaltung”
(= symphonic story style)

Without the support and vote of confidence of Johannes Brahms, life would have turned out very differently for Antonín Dvorák. Originally, the young boy was in fact destined to succeed his father in the butcher’s shop, but finally music won out. However, after his training at the Prague organ school, a magnificent career did not immediately await the young composer. First, he had to earn a living by means of various minor jobs, such as organist, music teacher and viola player in bands in restaurants, as well as in dance and theatre orchestras. His first symphonies were never even performed – or at least, not until much later. However, when he met Johannes Brahms, who was a member of the jury of the Wiener Kunstlerstipendium, things began to change. Brahms introduced the young composer to the world of music, got him a contract with his own publisher, Simrock, and brought him into contact with influential conductors, such as Hans von Bülow and Hans Richter. The latter, especially, turned out to be an ardent advocate of Dvorák’s music. It was Richter who commissioned the Symphony No. 6, which went into print following the début in Prague in 1881 as Dvorák’s Symphony No.1. And although this numeration now causes a great deal of confusion, it is symbolic, as the composer’s first five symphonies prove that he was still searching for his own sound: they were still strongly influenced by Smetana, Wagner and Brahms. In his Symphony No. 6, Dvorák first came up with an unmistakable sound of his own; a synthesis of the symphonic style of Brahms and the folk music from Bohemia.
The Symphony No. 7 followed in 1884 and was commissioned by the London Philharmonic Society. The first performance was the beginning of a large number of successes which lay in wait for Dvorák in the English capital. Somewhat surprised about this, he wrote as follows: “They are talking about me everywhere, and they are saying that I am the ‘lion’ of the current music season.”
Thanks to this success, Dvorák became increasingly financially independent. In Vysoka, he renovated an old barn to create a summer residence, where he thereafter spent every holiday with his family. This was also where he wrote his Symphony No. 8, in just two months’ time – between August 26 and November 8, 1889. Dvorák first conducted the work in Prague in April 1890, to celebrate his induction in the “Böhmische Franz-Joseph-Akademie für Wissenschaft, Literatur und Kunst.” A year later, when he was awarded an honorary doctorate in Cambridge, he conducted the symphony there, instead of giving the usual speech. The work was published in London by Novello, and for some inexplicable reason, was classified as the Symphony No. 4.
Not just the numbering was confusing: in fact, not everyone liked this symphony, in which the composer had made more use of his beloved folk music than in previous works, and had subjugated the traditional formal structures to the ‘poetic idea’. Dvorák wanted to consciously step off the beaten track, and write a work which “[...] differed from the previous symphonies; a work in which individual ideas were elaborated in a new manner.” Dvorák’s “Symphonischer Erzählhaltung” (= symphonic story style, Mahler) did not fit in with the musical mind-set of his contemporaries: instead it presaged new developments, as was recognized by Dvorák’s younger colleague, Léos Janácek: “…as soon as you have met one character, the next one is standing in line to greet you in a friendly manner; you end up in a state of constant and pleasurable excitement.”
Some commentators did their best to hear an extra-musical programme in the music. The Times wrote that it was impossible not to sense that the music was trying to talk of circumstances other than itself, in a highly comprehensible manner. And the vitriolic British critic, George Bernard Shaw, wrote as follows: “His symphony in G is very nearly up to the level of a Rossini overture, and would make excellent promenade music at the summer fêtes out in the grounds.” Naturally, Dvorák’s friend, Johannes Brahms, also reacted negatively. After all, ‘formal structure’ was central to his style of composition, and anything that reeked in the slightest of programme music was taboo. Therefore, his judgement was harsh: “Too much of the fragmentary and trivial hangs around in the music. It is all subtle, musically gripping and beautiful – yet it contains no matter of substance.”
Nevertheless, the Symphony No. 8 was soon a major success in concert halls world-wide, and Dvorák’s fame even stretched to the United States. When the National Conservatory of Music in New York was founded in 1885, it was the wish of Jeanette Thurber (the initiator, and wife of an immensely wealthy wholesale grocer) that Antonín Dvorák would become the first principal. Money would tempt the composer to the Big Apple: she offered Dvorák no less than 25 times the salary that he was earning in Prague. And her plan succeeded. In September 1892, Dvorák, his wife and two children boarded the steamer Saale to cross the ocean.
Three years later, on April 16, 1895, Antonín Dvorák departed New York on the same steamer. After a safe journey, the composer arrived almost unnoticed in Prague. There, he resumed his work at the conservatoire. Within no time, so many new pupils turned up that his composition class had to be split in two.
In February 1896, Dvorák travelled to Vienna to attend a performance of his Symphony No. 9 under conductor Hans Richter. There he met his old friend Johannes Brahms, who tried to convince him to stay in Vienna and give composition classes there. However, Dvorák refused, claiming that Vienna was too expensive a city in which to live. Brahms replied as follows: “Look, Dvorák, you have a lot of children, whereas I have hardly anyone left. If you should need anything, then my capital is at your disposal.” But even this generous gesture could not convince Dvorák. After Vienna, a trip to London was on the agenda, where he conducted his Cello Concerto on March 19. Upon his return, he decided to get down to composing immediately, but his former urge to create was somewhat exhausted. Dvorák’s greatest desire was to write a patriotic opera. In 1900, he was to succeed in this with Rusalka. Before then, he wrote many shorter works, among which five symphonic poems in 1896, which must be considered among his most original symphonic works. The first four – The Water Goblin, Op.107, The Afternoon Witch, Op.108, The Golden Spinning-Wheel, Op.109, and The Wood Dove, Op.110 – are based on ballads, originating from Czech folk tales and legends from the collection Kytice (= The Bouquet) written by the Prague town registrar Karel Jaromir Erben (1811-1870). The last symphonic poem, The Hero’s Song, Op.111 (also Dvorák’s last orchestral work) does not have a specific programme.
Conductor Hans Richter originally thought that this was a cycle, similar to Smetana’s Má Vlast (= My Fatherland), but Dvorák explained to him that these were independent compositions: “Although the pieces are written in the sense of folk music, at times the dramatic element is still quite dominant. These are ballads, and each piece contains three or four personages, which I have tried to represent in the music.”
The Afternoon Witch is a ghostly entity employed in folk tales to scare naughty children. In the ballad of Erben, the mother threatens her child with the witch, saying that she will take it away if it is disobedient. The child does not listen, and when the clock strikes twelve, the witch actually appears. She demands that the child come with her. When the father returns home for his dinner, he finds his wife lying in a faint, with her lifeless child in her arms.
It was not Dvorák’s intention to illustrate the events by means of his music. After all, he disliked programme music intensely. A letter he wrote to Richter reveals that he, in fact, preferred the public to be ignorant of the programmatic background of his symphonic poems, trusting that everyone had been brought up on the folk tales employed. Only in the case of the Wood Dove, did he have the ballad printed on the first page of the score. But this is also the only symphonic poem in which the events are more or less depicted in the music. In the other poems, the literary source is simply the basis for the independent orchestral work.
The Afternoon Witch is based on a single theme, which is reproduced in all kinds of guises. Only a few vague references are made to certain passages from Erben’s poem. For instance, in certain places Dvorák follows the metre and intonation of the Czech text, in which the witch (depicted by the ‘drab’ colours of the strings con sordino and the bass clarinet) claims the child. It was precisely this first attempt at speech melody, as well as the ideas re the instrumentation, the at times daring harmonic sequences, and the manner in which Dvorák elaborated the themes, which gained him much admiration from composers such as Leoš Janácek, who wrote an extensive analysis of the four works, and was later to conduct the first performance of The Afternoon Witch in 1898. Thus it is fair enough to suggest that these late orchestral works by Dvorák paved the way for Czech realism, which was later embodied in the operas and symphonic poems of Janácek.
The Wood Dove tells of a beautiful young woman, who poisons her husband and, shortly afterwards, marries a handsome young man. A tree growing above the grave of her murdered first husband houses a wood dove. The woman believes that the cooing dove is the sound of her first husband bitterly complaining and, in a fit of insanity, she kills herself. A second funeral procession proceeds to the woods, where the dove continues to utter its complaints.
Dvorák depicts the story by means of a majestic funeral march, alternating with contrasting episodes representing the wedding, among others. However, he develops all themes from the material of the funeral march. An excellent example of Dvorák’s innovative orchestration can be found in the Andante, when the wood dove appears after the wedding: a tremolo on a diminished seventh chord, trills in the flute, second intervals in the oboe and soft sounds from the harp, against which background the bass clarinet and horns play the ‘guilt motif’. The end of the piece is exceptionally dramatic. In his analysis, Janácek writes as follows: “The weight of the chords, which almost crush one another, almost makes us feel the weight of the burden which bears down on the body of the damned woman like a stone.”
The funeral march and the manner in which Dvorák develops the musical material must have appealed greatly to the imagination of Gustav Mahler. In 1899, he conducted the first performance in Vienna of the Wood Dove, after having given the world première of the Hero’s Song the previous year.

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