Would you accept position Director National Conservatory of Music New York October 1892. Also lead six concerts of your work. With the inviting words of Jeanette Thurber's telegram of 6 June 1891, began the American episode in Antonín Dvorák's life. As president of New York's National Conservatory of Music of America, which she herself had founded in 1885, Jeanette Thurber was looking for an artistic personality who would lend international allure to the institution. Her choice fell on Dvorák, who in, the early 1890s, was at the pinnacle of his career: He already held a professorship at Prague Conservatory and, in addition, had received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Cambridge and Prague. At Tchaikovsky's invitation, he had conducted his own compositions and excelled as a composer of nationalistic music. In short, he was exactly the kind of European personality for whom Thurber had been searching. And the salary on offer was a princely one: 30,000 guilders per year was 25 times what he was able to earn at his post in Prague!
On 26 September 1892 Dvorák arrived in New York, accompanied by his family. For the composer Dvorák, these two and a half years in the New World, until April 1895, must have been a kind of paradise on Earth: He was freed from burdensome administrative tasks; each semester, he gave group instruction in composition to a group of eight students not more than three days per week, and led an orchestral rehearsal twice per week. This left him with sufficient time to devote to composing. And he used it to the full. Not least because he was able (in particular through colleagues, as well as pupils) to gain access to the work of American composers, and even more importantly: to American folk music, especially that of American Indians and Negros. He observed: "I have more inspiration here than I can use." Ironically, it was specifically with regard to his "most profound interest [in the] folk music of the Negros and Indians" – this in the context of his efforts towards creating a national American music – that he failed to elicit a unanimously positive resonance from his white American composer colleagues.
On 10 January 1893, Dvorák's commenced work on the composition of his ninth and final symphony, that in E minor, completing it in May of the same year. "I have the impression that being in America will have a beneficial effect on my mind, and I am tempted to say that something of this can already be heard in this new symphony." It was with these words that Dvorák gave future interpreters of the work a clear indication of the path he intended. This notwithstanding, Dvorák did not, in composing the symphony, actually employ any quotations or tunes from the corpus of American folk music. "I simply wrote original themes of my own and developed them whilst making full use of all the possibilities of modern rhythm, harmony, contrapuntal technique and orchestral colour. Equally, all of the motifs are of my own composition, and a few I even brought with me from Europe, which are, and remain, Czech." The following organisational principles are of essential importance in the Symphony "From the New World": with regard to melody, a frank use of the pentatonic scale, as well as scales in the minor without the fourth and seventh steps; in respect of rhythm, strong syncopations and dotted rhythms. Through the use of these parameters, and their skilful dosage, Dvorák succeeded in arriving at something which could qualify as an American-sounding art music. A critic from the New York Herald wrote following the premiere on 16 December 1893: "A symphony, which was inspired by American Negro and Indian melodies, a symphony which proves that there is such a thing as American art music."
Carnival, Op. 92, forms part of the overture trilogy (In Nature's Realm, Op. 91, Carnival, Op. 92, Othello, Op. 93) dating from 1891–1892, and originally planned under the title, 'Nature, Life and Love,' with each overture being intended to give expression to one aspect of human life. The title, Carnival, was certainly meant metaphorically, as it symbolises youth, lust and an exuberant life. The programmatic work starts with a furious tutti, verging on the raucous, before the strings introduce a secondary theme, quite lyrical in character. There ensues an intermezzo with the tempo indication Andante con moto, in which the main theme from In Nature's Realm is intoned by the clarinet. This could be interpreted as man reclaiming his place in nature, before the turbulent, virtuosically orchestrated development re-enters the wild feast, with a driving momentum no listener can resist!

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