The annals of modern music are full of splendid examples
of "from log cabin to White House" : indeed, there is no calling in which a career is more open to talent; and after Verdi, there is no more striking example of a rise from obscurity to fame than Dvorak. It is said that all Bohemians are born fiddlers ; but Dvorak was a born composer as well, and, like another great orchestral writer—Dr. Elgar—be was practically self-taught. It was a case of per aspera ad antra, however, and Dvorak had a severe struggle before he could gain more than a bare living by his composition. It is pleasant, therefore, to remember that it was Brahms—who • " Materia cnjusque generis nt in Gallia eat praeter fagum atque abietem." —Caesar, " De Bello Galileo," V. 12 t Virgil, Aeneld, X. 861. happens to be at the present moment specially singled out for depreciation by "enlightened" critics—who gave Dvorak the great lift of his life, by recommending him as a fitting recipient of Government bounty. The episode is in itself a sufficient answer to all the ignorant and afflicting balderdash that is talked about Brahms's pedantry, cold- ness, austerity, &c. The sympathy and appreciation of Brahms, backed up later on by the powerful encourage- ment of Richter, opened the door to Dvorak in Vienna, where, after Prague, his genius has been more cordially recognised than anywhere else on the Continent. In Germany his unintellectuality has no doubt stood in his way. There is too much scene-painting, too little psychology and philosophy, in his music to satisfy,the serious Teuton. In France he is practically unknown ; but in France the unex- pected always happens,—Tschaikowsky, for example, being far less known and infinitely less appreciated in Paris than in London. But in England, though Dvorak has been latterly somewhat eclipsed by newer idols, the instructed public, thanks to the lead given them by Sir August Manna, Sir Charles Halle, and Dr. Joachim, had the good taste to appreciate his music almost from the first, and one of his choral *compositions, the Stabat Mater, has passed into the British repertory of standard works, happily • dislodging Rossini s setting in the process. The appreciation of the music of Dvorak by the British public is one of those things that one accepts gratefully without attempting to explain. Exotic and extra-European as it is in many ways, with its barbaric colouring and its strange alternations of childlike exuberance and poignancy, one might well have imagined that it would disconcert the staid British oratorio-going public as something "pagan, I regret to think." Certainly these con- trasts are less vivid in the Stabat Mater, the most dignified and classical of all Dvorak's choral works, than in the Requiem, where the composer's "profuse strains of unpremeditated art" are occasionally impossible to reconcile with the spirit of the word, and almost tempt one to believe that Dvorak could not have understood the meaning of the Latin text.
The recognition of Dvorak's genius in England, where more than one of his most ambitious works were produced for the first time, and the desire of Festival Committees in the middle and late " eighties " to secure novelties from his pen, exposed him to a temptation which somewhat injuriously influenced the development of his genius. In The Spectre's Bride, a cantata based on a Bohemian variant of the legend which Burger familiarised in his ballad of Lenore, he was most happily inspired, and the result was a work of true romantic feeling, great melodic charm, rich orchestral colouring, and a vivid appreciation of the macabre element in the story. One felt that he was indulging his genius without any regard for his public. But in Ludmila he set himself to write an oratorio for an oratorio-loving people, and the result was a strange and kaleidoscopic amalgam, in which echoes of classic exemplars alternated with character- istic national rhythms and melodies. The work had some -fine moments and delightful snatches of melody, but it was killed by its length, its reminiscences, and its jumble of styles. It was much as though a poet had written a tragedy inter- spersed with lyrics in dialect. The limitations of Dvorak's equipment, and his lack of self-criticism, were never more conspicuously illustrated. But if Dvorak's relations with England were somewhat mixed, what are we to say of the curious episode of his sojourn in the United States ? The facts of the case were very simple. Dvorak was offered the post of Director of a Conservatoire established and endowed in New York by a munificent American lady. He was a poor man, dependent on his compositions for a very modest income, and the salary attached to the post was handsome. He could therefore hardly be blamed for consenting to this well- remunerated expatriation. The most perfunctory inquiries must have made it clear that he was singularly unfitted for the administrative duties of such a post. He was not a man of affairs, he had no capacity for organisation, no social gifts, no general education. But the authorities at New York were pre- sumably aware of all this ; it was enough that be was a famous European composer, and they imported him as a picturesque figure-head. Yet in the short space of time-1892-95—during which Dvorak remained in New York he showed a faculty of atlaptipg Iiims-eIfto his new surroundings, and an artistic loyalty
have given him credit. His aims and achievements are briefly but lucidly expressed in Mr. Louis C. Elson's interesting "History of American Music" (Macmillan and Co., £1 Is.), published only a few weeks ago. After referring to Dvorak's efforts to promote the renascence of Bohemian music, Mr. Elson continues :—
"On Dvorak's coming to New York, he began with composition classes at the National Conservatory at once, and many promi- nent young musicians became his pupils. He desired, however, to evolve something distinctly American on his own account, and at once sought to discover what American folk-song was like. He must have been somewhat disappointed at first, for he found only the Indian music (unfamiliar to almost every American) and the plantation music of the South, the product of an alien race. Yet, as the latter portrayed phases of American existence and was recognised and understood by almost all the people (a prime necessity of folk-song), he proceeded to employ this material in classical composition. Music for a string quartet, a sextet, and a symphony were the results of the search for native material. The symphony 'From the New World' has given rise to con- siderable contention. Some maintain that it is no more American than Dvorak's own painful attempts in the native language. One may disagree with such a dictum ; the symphonic language is not itself a local dialect, but it may properly be founded on local themes. It is not a Bohemian masquerading as a plantation darky that we find in this work, but an idealization of the typical music of the South, developed, as this epic form demands, yet entirely recognizable. The chamber-music on American figures is still more frankly plantation-like in its vein. But the American Symphony (in E Minor, Op. 95) will always remain Dvorak's chief achievement in this country. The whole proceeding was a demonstration, on the part of a great composer, that the roots of the music of a nation are to be found in its folk-songs ; should there be no such inspiration to draw from, the result will be more generally eclectic and less typical. For that reason it is still a mooted point as to whether a distinctively American school can ever arise, even amid a host of talented native composers."
Mr. Elson goes on to state that although Dvorak was the first to call the attention of Europe to the possibilities of planta- tion-music, he was not the discoverer of this foundation of classical music, Mr. G. W. Chadwick in the scherzo of his
Second Symphony having already recognised the adaptability of this material before Dvorak came to New York. He omits to mention, however, in his enumeration of Dvortik's American pupils, whether any of them were of negro extraction, a point
of interest in view of the talent shown by coloured musicians in the more ambitious fields of composition of late years. In Dahomey, the piece which, after being a great success in New York, has recently drawn the town in London, was
not only written but composed by men of colour, and in the piquant orchestration of the songs and dances one seemed to recognise a good deal of the spirit of Dvorak's treatment of similar themes.
After his three years' sojourn in New York, Dvorak returned to take up the directorship of the National Conservatoire at Prague, where he died a fortnight ago in his sixty-third year. His creative impulse, if not dormant, had not shown any remarkable activity of late years, but there was at least no serious falling off in the quality of his more recent compo- sitions, and his death removes the most refreshingly uncon-
ventional, and at the same time most genuinely musical, of modern musicians. He essayed every form of composition, and achieved distinction in the symphony, in choral work, in chamber-music, and in his songs. Of his numerous operas— belonging more or less to the category of the Singspiel- which attained a considerable vogue in his native country, we cannot speak, none of them having been brought to a hearing in England. But two of his symphonies— notably the beautiful work in G-, with the lovely Schu- bertian Allegretto—will certainly live, as well as the ex- hilarating Symphonic Variations, the joyous Carnival over- ture, and the delightful Slavonic Dances and Legends. It was his privilege to invest the classical forms with a certain fresh and primitive grace, which expressed itself by turns in artless melody and luxuriant harmonies. With Spohr the use of the chromatic scale led to a cloying sweetness : with Dvorak, on the other hand, it gave a quasi-Oriental or tropical piquancy to his music. He wrote, in short, like an inspired rustic ; and it is perhaps that very fact which renders his music so peculiarly welcome at a period when composers are so assiduously engaged in the attempt to desimplify the processes and the products of the art.
C. L. G.
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