The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Antonín Dvořák · a symphony in E minor, Op. 95, in four movements, scored as one work in its standard performing version · composed in New York in 1893 and first performed at Carnegie Hall on 16 December 1893 · about forty minutes in performance
Mode
The Austro-German symphony of Beethoven and Brahms, carrying pentatonic and modal melody, drone fifths and a chorale
Mythos
The journey to a new world and the exile’s look back toward home; a funeral and a homecoming in the slow movement
Phase
Four movements in E minor, D flat major, E minor, and E minor ending in E major; one horn theme returning in each
Presentation
Concert music; a symphony for double woodwind with piccolo and cor anglais, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, cymbals and strings
Register
Longing and open-air vigour; the dark brass of a chorale, the plainest beauty in the Largo, grandeur of force in the finale
Scale
One traveller and the country around him: forest, feast, burial and a nation’s question; about forty minutes
Governing Proposition
A horn theme rises out of a slow introduction in E minor and returns, altered, in every movement after it: at the height of a Largo for cor anglais framed by a chorale, in the coda of a scherzo, and in a finale that sets it against its own march. The wager of the work is that melody shaped from the songs a newcomer heard in America can carry a full Romantic symphony, and that one self can be carried whole into new country.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The symphony begins slowly and quietly, in E minor, with the cellos alone and the woodwind answering them. Then, without warning, the full orchestra breaks in. It is a threat before anything has been stated, and when the Allegro molto arrives the horns give out the theme the whole work will carry: a figure rising by arpeggio, open-air, plain, made to be remembered. It is the traveller’s theme. Every later movement will hear it again, altered, and the last will make it fight.
The Allegro is in sonata form, with its exposition marked for repeat. Its second theme belongs to the flute, in G minor, and it is the borrowed idiom at its plainest: a tune that sounds as if it had been sung before it was written down. Whether that is American, Bohemian or simply Dvořák has been argued since the first performance, and the argument is part of the work’s life. The score itself does not settle it. It offers the tune as colour, and the colour is consistent from the first page to the last.
The development is short. It works by sequence and repetition, by turning the themes over rather than taking them apart, and the recapitulation follows the expected order. The frame is a container, well made and quickly filled, and the movement’s force is energy more than elevation. What it leaves behind is the horn theme, and a key, E, from which the next movement must find its way somewhere remote.
Movement II
The slow movement opens with a chorale: a few chords in the dark of the wind and brass, moving from the E in which the first movement’s world ended to D flat major, a key as far from it as the symphony goes. The passage sounds like a door. On the other side of it the cor anglais sings over muted strings, and the theme it sings is built, in its opening phrases, on four notes of the pentatonic scale, moving by steps and thirds, with one small leap. A plain, almost artless tune becomes the symphony’s centre of gravity. It is also the longest of the four movements.
The middle section turns to C sharp minor, with lines for the oboe and the flute, and it is here, in the episode and in what follows, that the work is most compelled. At the movement’s height the horn theme of the first movement returns. Dvořák is reported to have linked the movement to Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, to the burial of Minnehaha in the forest, and the score holds a forest and a burial. It does not hold Hiawatha: from the notes alone, no listener could say which scene is meant.
Then the theme comes back, and breaks. It is played in phrases divided by silences, the strings thin, and the chorale returns before the last chords. Loss is made audible by the form itself, by a tune that cannot be finished without stopping. In 1922 William Arms Fisher set words to the theme as “Goin’ Home”, and the song fixed a homecoming on the movement. That is the movement’s later life. In the score it is a funeral and a homecoming at once, and the chorale on either side of it is the threshold both pass through.
Movement III
The scherzo is back in E minor, and back out of doors. Its opening drives over open fifths held like a drone, and its rhythm is a dance’s. Dvořák’s reported statements link it to a feast and a dance in Longfellow’s poem; the music holds a feast and a dance, and needs no name for them. It is the work’s communal life, vigorous and quick, and its register is charm more than transport.
There are two trios, both in the major, and the woodwind give them their colour. They are dance episodes, and they could be shortened with little loss to the symphony’s argument. Their place is to widen the country the traveller passes through: after the burial, a village; after the forest, a floor for dancing. The melodic law is the same as everywhere else, pentatonic turns over drone fifths, and so the farthest-seeming movement still sounds like the same work.
In the coda the horn theme returns once more, now in the scherzo’s company. It is not developed. It appears, and the scherzo closes around it. The return is enough to show what the cycle is for: whatever the country, the same figure crosses it. The fourth movement will ask what happens when that figure meets a theme that is wholly new.
Movement IV
The finale opens with a rising half-step in the strings, repeated and accelerating, until the horns and trumpets break out with the main theme in E minor, a march of force. It is the grandest gesture in the work and the plainest. The strings drive under it, the brass carry it, and the scoring needs no help: no conductor retouches it, and none has needed to.
As the movement goes on it looks back. The Largo theme is heard again, and the scherzo’s figure, and the first movement’s horn theme. Some of these returns are transformations; more are a roll-call, themes named in passing more than worked, placed side by side rather than derived from one another. This is where the work’s seams show most clearly. A symphony this lean in time still has joints a careful listener can find, and the finale’s are joins of juxtaposition.
Then the coda. The first movement’s theme and the finale’s are thrown together, fortissimo, old and new sounding at once: the traveller’s theme forced into combat with the country it has reached. The key turns from E minor to E major, and the work ends on a long-held chord fading in the winds. It is an elevation by withdrawal, and an answer the cycle has earned in outline, if not in every join: the self is carried whole into the new world, and it does not come out unchanged.
Movement V
The title is the composer’s: “Z nového světa”, “From the New World”. Dvořák wrote the symphony in New York in the first months of 1893, while he directed the National Conservatory of Music, and it was first performed on 16 December 1893 at Carnegie Hall by the New York Philharmonic under Anton Seidl. Simrock published it in Berlin in 1894. It is his ninth symphony, Op. 95, and it came after the Seventh and the Eighth, in which he had already mastered the four-movement form of Beethoven and Brahms. The form here is the proven one. What is new is the material, and the claim made for it.
The claim was Dvořák’s, made in public and outside the score: that the music of America’s future lay in the songs of its Black and Native people. The symphony was offered as an answer, written in the new country by a foreigner. What the score shows is a melodic idiom of pentatonic turns, flattened sevenths and drone fifths, used with a consistency that makes one law of the whole. What it does not show is the cost of the claim to those whose music was borrowed. The idea of their songs as raw material for the concert hall, like the “Indian” programme, now reads as a period idea, and the work’s surface carries it.
The work set the terms of the American debate about a national art music for a generation and more, and its reception by Black American composers and critics is part of that debate. It has been played continuously since 1893, in the repertoire of every major orchestra, and the Largo’s theme left the concert hall as a song, a hymn and an idiom of film. Under the fame is a symphony whose form is inherited and whose meaning is more mood than disclosure, and whose beauty and survival are beyond question: one horn theme, carried through a forest, a feast and a funeral, and brought at the end to stand against the new.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test meets resistance in the large plan and finds give in the joints. The cyclic returns make the movements need one another: the finale’s coda, which sets the first movement’s horn theme against its own, has nothing to gather if any earlier movement goes, and the Largo’s chorale stands where it does because it turns the first movement’s E toward D flat. The Largo’s C sharp minor episode, and the return of its theme broken off by silences, are the most compelled stretch. The give is real: the scherzo’s two trios could be shortened with little loss, the finale’s recalls are partly a roll-call, and the first movement’s exposition repeat is a convention.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Disclosure through sound is credited in full. What the work brings into the open can be stated: that a nation’s art music could be built from the melodic speech of its excluded people, and that a newcomer’s view of a new world is shaped by longing for the old. The pentatonic Largo theme makes the first claim audible: a plain tune for cor anglais over muted strings becomes the symphony’s centre of gravity. The second is heard in the way the Largo breaks off and resumes in fragments. Held down by the line between mood and meaning: longing and vigour are moods, and the national claim is made more by Dvořák’s interviews than by the score, which states it as colour and does not show what the claim costs those whose music it borrows.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Height is reached and it returns. The slow introduction breaks into a sudden tutti, a sublime of threat. The Largo is the summit: the chorale’s dark brass chords, then the cor anglais theme, beauty at its plainest, and at the close the theme broken into phrases divided by silence, the strings thinning before the last chords. The finale’s opening, a rising half-step in the strings accelerating into the horn and trumpet theme, is grandeur of force; the coda rises again, and the work ends on a long-held E major chord fading in the winds. Held below the top on frequency: the scherzo is vigour and charm, and the first Allegro is energy more than elevation.
Score: 8.7 / 10
An archetype is present and bears some weight: the journey to a new world, and the exile’s look back toward home. The horn theme of the first movement, heard in every movement after it, is the figure of a traveller carrying one self through changing country, and the finale ends by forcing that theme into combat with the new. The Largo, framed by its chorale, is a funeral and a homecoming at once. But the myth is mostly evoked. The link to Longfellow’s Hiawatha rests on the composer’s reported statements, not on the score, and the homecoming the world hears in the Largo was fixed by a later song. The particular is vivid, but it does not by the work’s own means reach the scale of the elder myths.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The inheritance is the four-movement symphony of Beethoven and Brahms. The departures: melody shaped on pentatonic and modal lines, flattened sevenths and drone fifths, offered as American rather than Bohemian; a symphony presented as a public answer to a national question, written in a new country by a foreigner; the slow movement made the centre of gravity, scored for cor anglais and framed by a chorale; and cyclic return across all four movements. The stake was real: Dvořák staked his name on the claim that America’s art music lay in its Black and Native song. But the form is a proven path. Cyclic recall was already Berlioz’s practice, in the Symphonie fantastique (8.8), and Liszt’s and Franck’s; and much of the “American” idiom runs along Dvořák’s own Bohemian practice. The swerve is in the material and the claim, not in the architecture.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Change the form and the work loses part of what it knows. What it knows is that the traveller carries one self into new country, and the cyclic form is the instrument of that knowledge: the first movement’s horn theme recurs, altered, in each movement, and the finale’s coda makes the old theme and the new sound together. The Largo’s chorale is form as threshold, the remote D flat reached through a passage of chords that sounds like a door; the Largo’s broken close is form making loss audible. Held down because the sonata frames of the first movement and the finale are containers more than instruments, and the finale’s recalls are placed more than earned.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Evidence over promise. The work has sustained a century and a third of performance and a real if narrower critical return: the long dispute over its Americanness, whether the idiom is American, Bohemian or Dvořák’s own; the Hiawatha connection and how far the score holds it; the question of race it opened, and its reception by Black American composers and critics. Formal analysis returns to the cyclic plan and to the Largo’s chorale. The performance tradition has not unsettled the work as the Beethoven Ninth’s (9.3) has. Return yields, and the questions are real ones, about America and about borrowing. Held down because a listener who knows the themes and the cyclic plan has much of what the score contains.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Published, so force and reach are scored together. Intrinsic force is moderate: the work did not reorganise what a symphony could be. It showed, with great authority, that vernacular and pentatonic material could carry a full Romantic symphony, and it put the national question into the centre of American concert music. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is large and documented in its field. The work set the terms of the American debate about a national art music for a generation and more, and the Largo’s theme became a song, William Arms Fisher’s “Goin’ Home” of 1922, then a hymn and an idiom of film scoring. But the line of influence runs mainly through American music and the nationalist idea; in the wider symphonic field of its decade it redirected little.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the score survives whole, in its composer’s published text, and is performed as written. Presence: continuous since the premiere of 1893, and in the repertoire of every major orchestra. Fabric: no loss. Over a hundred and thirty-three years, survival is demonstrated. What holds it below the widest figure is the surface, which carries some of its moment: the “Indian” programme and the 1893 idea of the songs of Black Americans as raw material for the concert hall now read as period ideas, and the Largo has been worn by use as background and as sentiment. Popularity is not proof, and wide presence earns little beyond what survival has already shown.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Command of the medium, and the making is load-bearing in colour and melody. The orchestration is masterly and economical: the cor anglais over muted strings, the chorale’s dark wind and brass, the finale’s brass over driving strings. The melodic invention is of the highest order, and the themes are built to combine, as the finale’s coda shows. No conductor retouches the scoring. The costs are in the motivic work. The first movement’s development is short and works by sequence and repetition more than by transformation; transitions in the outer movements are sometimes formulaic, joined by repeated figures and pedal points; the finale’s recalls are juxtaposed more than worked. In contrapuntal and developmental command it stands a clear step below the Beethoven Ninth.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Take the Largo’s D flat stillness and the finale’s E minor march. One law governs them: the pentatonic and modal melodic idiom, the horn theme that recurs in both, and the chorale that leads from the first movement’s E to the Largo’s D flat. The scherzo’s drones and the first movement’s flute theme in G minor obey the same melodic physics. The range is moderate: a forty-minute symphony with one dominant colour, open-air and nostalgic. The tension is in the finale’s coda, where themes of every movement are brought together; the joins there are by juxtaposition, and the law holds by idiom and recall more than by derivation. Narrowness is not coherence, and part of this work’s coherence is the coherence of a consistent idiom.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The orders the work holds: the inner life of the exile, in longing and homesickness; the natural order, open country and forest, in drone fifths and wind colour; communal life as dance and feast in the scherzo; death and burial in the Largo; and the nation, the question of what a people’s music is, carried by the idiom itself. The cyclic theme integrates them. What holds the axis at its figure, the lowest of the twelve, is that several of these orders are named by the composer’s statements rather than held by the score, and that the family, labour, history and the sacred beyond the chorale’s colour are absent. The question of race is in the work’s context more than in its structure.
Score: 6.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.1, then The Made at 8.8 and The Sublime at 8.7. A score that survives whole in its composer’s text and has been played continuously since 1893; orchestration and melodic invention that need no correction, with themes built to combine; and height that returns, in the slow introduction, in the Largo and its broken close, and in the finale’s coda.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.8: exile, open country, feast, burial and the nation’s question are carried by one theme, but several are named by the composer’s statements rather than held by the score, and the family, labour, history and the sacred are absent. Next above it, The Archetypal Deep and The Swerve at 7.8 and The Unconcealment at 7.9: the myth of the journey is evoked more than built, the form is a proven path, and what the work discloses is more mood than meaning.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Made at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.4 and The Living Form at 8.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.1 clears the bar of 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.2, The Unconcealment at 7.9, The Archetypal Deep at 7.8 and The Swerve at 7.8 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.8, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.8. Four of the five summit conditions are met, and with the Epochal Gate unmet and an aggregate of 8.2 the work stands in Tier IV.
Basis · the score of Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Op. 95 (B. 178), in its standard performing version, the four movements as published by Simrock in 1894 and played today, and its performance tradition, read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music; no score, edition or recording was in hand, and bar numbers are not given. The four movements are scored as one work; no movement is scored apart, and no performance or recording is the object. Later arrangements, among them William Arms Fisher’s song “Goin’ Home” (1922) on the Largo’s theme, are reception, not the work. There are no sung words; the title, in Czech and English, is the only text quoted. The link to Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha rests on statements reported from the composer and is treated as context, never as score. The time shares of the movements and the notes of the Largo theme were counted by script. Details that could not be verified are not given, among them the date the score was finished, a public rehearsal before the premiere, the part Brahms may have played in the edition, the edition used today, the exact chords of the Largo’s chorale, where the tuba and cymbals play, the circumstances and wording of Dvořák’s press statements and the singers he heard, a resemblance between the first movement’s flute theme and a spiritual, the scholarship on the Hiawatha connection, particular answers to the work by later American composers, and the extent of its recording. The running time is a range across the recorded tradition, not a measurement, and the sound of the work as heard is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.