Brave new worldlings
John Jolliffe DVOIIAK IN LOVE
by Josef Skvorceky Chaco & Windus, f10.95
Antonin Dvotak (1841-1904) appears in several different accounts as one of the most personally attractive and sympathetic of the creative geniuses of the 19th cen- tury. According to Max Brod, 'he thought exclusively in tone and paid no heed to anything else', not necessarily a recom- mendation in ordinary life, but enabling him to draw interesting equations between the compositions of Raphael and Mozart, and between Beethoven and Brueghel. His son-in-law, Josef Suk, a notable violinist and composer in his own right, paid a far broader tribute to him as 'not humbling himself before the mighty, not stressing his own greatness as compared with lower beings; the self-confidence of "one of the chosen" without vanity, feeling without sentimentality, an inexpressible delight in work, a pure and uncomplicated relation to God and his fellow-creatures — these were the qualities of his spirit.'
Son of a rural butcher/innkeeper, he made an understandably slow start as an orchestral player and music-teacher and made little impact until he was 32; but from then on he never looked back, and when he came to London in 1885, aged 44, he was pleased to find that the choir which performed his Stabat Mater in the Albert Hall was 840 strong, and that there were 92 string players in the orchestra. The chair- man of Novello, the music publishers, gave a dinner for 150 guests in his honour, and his music was played afterwards till 2.30 a.m. Several newspapers had the letters f and a cut specially to get his name right.
By an accident of history, his rise to fame in Europe came just at the time when a handful of rich and indomitable enthu- siasts were struggling (against heavy odds, needless to say) to introduce classical music to America. Among them was Mrs Jeanette Thurber, who was determined to spend as much as possible of her husband's grocery fortune on her role as a female American mixture of Thomas Beecham and John Christie, though unlike them she was often reduced to the financial subter- fuge of not actually paying the performers. At her invitation, Dvotak and his merciful- ly practical wife, later accompanied by their six surviving children, spent several years in New York and in the Czech community in Iowa in the 1890s, and he gained endless inspiration from what he heard there, which was not then to be heard elsewhere. 'In the Negro melodies of America I find all that is needed for a great and noble school of music. . . There is nothing in the whole range of composition which cannot be supplied from this source. . . I am satisfied that the future of music in this country must be founded on what are called Negro melodies.' After he died, anyone could of course make whatev- er claims they liked about the music he wrote in America, and would back up their claims by real or invented statements made, whether seriously or as a joke, by the Master himself.
This excellent novel consists of a series of loosely connected scenes, imaginary but entirely convincing, taken from the life of Dvotak and his family and entourage, largely set in America; they are artistically constructed, orchestrated like a great musical composition, not least in the hand- ling of echoes of what has gone before. More interesting than the conventional love story which the publishers have wrongly and stupidly tried to make it sound like, it is an episodic jumble of stories about those who knew him, as well as about Dvorak himself. There are also flashbacks, handled with a sure touch, to his early days as a teacher, his pupils having included his future wife Annie and her bewitching younger sister Josephine, a gifted comedy actress. The simple peasant aspect of his character is well brought out by his secretary Kovarik's story (not men- tioned here) of Dvoiak gazing for five minutes at Niagara Falls before exclaiming `My goodness, what a symphony in B minor that will be.' Altogether, there are numerous and very effective variations in tone &nd pace, and while some passages evoke the pastoral, lyrical Bohemia of Dvofak's youth, chapter ten is full of the wry, sardonic twists of Runyon on Broadway.
At a more serious point, the hero re- flects that 'Music is a great gift. I had that gift to the full. But the giver may decide one is no longer worthy of such a gift. He can take it back.' This certainly happens to novelists too, but there is happily no sign of it in the case of the truly admirable Josef Skvoreck9. His inspiration has always sprung from his own native sources: in his earliest stories he was reduced by cen- sorship in Prague to the existence of an `internal exile'; and since 1968 he has lived and taught (and published books in Czech) at the University of Toronto. In the pre- face to one of his earlier novels, the intriguing Miss Silver's Past, Graham Greene wrote that 'the sadness in comedy, the comedy in sadness — of this Skvoreck9 is a master and this too is the mark of exile. . . of a writer who has to study, if he is to survive, a long indifference.' Skvoreck9 has always had his faithful admirers in this country, but this review is a plea that popular indifference to his books has been all too long, and should now cease. He is just the novelist to appeal to Spectator readers (though certainly not only to them).
Previous page
