To approach the technical side first, there can be no doubt that the rich quality of Dvořák's tone, a quality so striking that Mr. Hadow places him with Beethoven, Berlioz, and Wagner in the class of supreme masters of orchestration, would never have been attainable to one who had not had his peculiar experience. He has the practical player's exhaustive knowledge of instruments, which enables him, by disposing the parts always in effective registers, to get a rich and mellow sonority in his ensemble writing. Examine any chord in his scores, and you see that each player gives a tone that he can sound fully and advantageously, and that each choir of instruments—the strings, the wood, the brass—gives in isolation an effective chord. The resultant harmony is a well-balanced, thoroughly fused mass of tone. But far more important than the power to write effectively disposed single chords is the power to weave a fabric of close texture and firm consistency, to make the orchestra sustain, ramify, and reinforce itself, so to speak. By far the best way to secure this solidity of texture is to write coherent and well-individualized melodies in the different parts, which serve as strands to bind the whole. Such is the method of Beethoven among classic and of Tschaïkowsky among romantic composers, and so efficient is good polyphonic or «many-voiced» writing as a means of sonority that it has been truly said, «Pure voice-leading is half an orchestra.» Yet great skill is required for such polyphonic writing, since all the independent melodies must cooperate harmoniously; and Dvořák, who got little academic training as a boy, is not a great contrapuntist. Just here, however, his band experience coming to his aid, he was saved from writing lumpish, doughy stuff—in which one poor tune in the soprano vainly attempts to hold up a heavy weight of amorphous «accompaniment»—by his extraordinary knack of vitalizing his entire mass of tone through rhythmic individualization of the parts. Taking a skeleton of simple harmony, he manages to write for the different voices such salient and individual rhythms that they stand out with almost the grace of melodious contrapuntal parts. It is a sort of metrical yeast to keep his bread from being soggy. Numerous examples will at once occur to students of his scores, particularly from the Slavonic Dances and Rhapsodies. A third form of his orchestral mastery might be pointed out in the well-calculated special effects for single instruments, such as the oboe duet that concludes the first movement of the Suite, opus 39, which occur everywhere in his scores. But that is, after all, a commoner form of skill, whereas rich sonority and life in the fabric as the result of rhythmic individualization of the parts, can be found in few scores so highly developed as in those of Dvořák.
As regards structure, Dvořák is felicitous but eccentric. He does not lay out his plans with the careful prevision of one to whom balance and symmetry are vital. His scheme is not foreordered, it is sketched currently. Thus, for example, his modulation is singularly radical, impulsive and haphazard. He loves to descend unexpectedly upon the most remote keys, never knows where he will turn next, and when he gets too far from home returns over fences and through no-thoroughfares. Often, with him, a change of key seems dictated merely by a desire for a particular patch of color; he wishes to brighten the tonal background with sharps or mollify it with flats, and plump he comes to his key, little caring how he gets there or where he is going next. His use of contrasts of tonality is thus characteristic of his love of color-effects for themselves and his willingness to subordinate to them purity of line. Again, it is probably not forcing the point to see in his use of uneven rhythms, such as five and seven bar periods, another instance of the same tendency to license. Undoubtedly in part a legacy from Bohemian folk-song, which is particularly rich in them, his uneven rhythms seem to be also in part due to a certain fortuitousness of mind. It is as if he closed his phrase, without regard to strict symmetry, wherever a good chance offered. The theme of the Symphonic Variations, opus 78, is an example. It is interesting to contrast this rhythmic trait of Dvořák's with Grieg's accurate and sometimes almost wearisome precision of outline. Both men derive from folk-music a love of incisive meter—their music has a strong pulse; but Grieg, who is precise, lyrical, sensitive to perfection of detail, is really finical in his unfaltering devotion to square-cut sections, while Dvořák, more wayward, less perfect and exquisite, strays into all sorts of odd periods. His somewhat arbitrary treatment of tonality relations and of rhythm is thus illustrative of a general laxity of method highly characteristic of the man. In contrast with a jealously accurate artist like Grieg, he is felicitous more by force of genius than by wisdom of intent.
Dvořák's childlike spontaneity is in no way better exemplified than by his attitude toward folk-music, and here again he may profitably be contrasted with Grieg. Both devotees of local color have enriched art with unfamiliar lineaments and unused resources, yet their modes of procedure have been quite different. Grieg, traversing the usual mill of German musical education, turned consciously to Norwegian folk-song to find a note of individuality. Struck with the freshness of the native dances, he transplanted them bodily into his academic flower-pots. His courtship of the national Muse was conscious, sophisticated, and his style is in a sense the result of excogitation. Dvořák, on the contrary, growing up in his small Bohemian village, unable to get classic scores, assiduously fiddling throughout his youth at village fêtes where the peasants must have a scrap of tune to dance by, became thoroughly saturated with the rude music. It moved in his veins like blood; it was his other language. Thus the two men were at quite polar standpoints in relation to nationalism. With Dvořák it was a point of departure, with Grieg it was a goal of pilgrimage. And so, while the Norwegian has tended to immure himself in idiosyncrasy, the Bohemian has rubbed off provincialisms without losing his inheritance. His music, while retaining the sensuous plenitude, the individual flavor, the florid coloring, with which his youth endowed it, has acquired, with years and experience, a scope of expression, a maturity of style, and a universality of appeal that make it as justly admired as it is instinctively enjoyed.
Imperceptibly we have passed from technical analysis into personal inventory. And indeed, all Dvořák's peculiarities of style may be viewed as the inevitable manifestations of a nature at once rich and naïve. His music makes a delightfully frank appeal. It is never somber, never crabbed, never even profound. It breathes not passion, but sentiment. It is too happily sensuous to be tragic, too busy with an immediate charm to trouble about a remote meaning. Even when he is moving, as in the Largo of the New World Symphony, is it not with a gentle, half-sensuous pathos, a wistfulness more than half assuaged by the wooing sweetness of the sounds that fill our ears? To him music is primarily sweet sound, and we shall misconceive his aim and service if in looking for something deep in him we miss what is, after all, very accessible and delightful for itself—the simple charm of his combinations of tone.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE. —Dvořák's fecundity is surprising. He has written cantatas, oratorios, a mass, a requiem, and hymns for chorus and orchestra; five symphonies, five overtures, four symphonic poems, the well-known Slavonic Dances and Rhapsodies, concertos for piano, violin, and violoncello, the inimitable Suite, op. 39, the Symphonic Variations, op. 78, and other orchestral works of smaller proportions; seven string quartets, a sextet, three trios, a terzetto for two violins and a viola, two string quintets, a piano quintet, a piano quartet, a sonata for violin and piano, and a serenade for wind instruments; and, finally, many piano works and songs. He is at his best in his orchestral and chamber works, of which the following are typical: the Slavonic Dances, op. 46 and 72, the Slavonic Rhapsodies, op. 45, the Suite, op. 59, the Symphony, «From the New World,» op. 95, and the Scherzo Capriccioso, op. 66; the Sextet, op. 48, the Quartet and Quintet on negro themes, op. 96 and 97, the Piano Quintet, op. 81, and the Piano Quintet, op. 87. Though these compositions lose much in transcription, they are all obtainable in four-hand piano arrangements. The piano music is somewhat unidiomatic except the later things, but the Mazurkas, op. 56, the Poetische Stimmungsbilder, op. 85, and the Humoreskes, op. 101, are worth knowing. Of the songs, nine of the best are published separately by the house of Simrock, and the two most popular ones, «Gute Nacht» and «Als die Alte Mutter,» are to be had in Schirmer's series entitled «Gems of German Songs.» A study of these will probably arouse a desire for more, and the student may buy the Gipsy Songs, op. 55, and the Love Songs, op. 83. The duets, «Klänge aus Mähren,» not very well known, are characteristic.
FOOTNOTES:
[D] A graphic picture of the sleepy little place is given in the essay on Dvořák in «Studies in Modern Music,» W. H. Hadow, Second Series. Macmillan, New York, 1894.