If the string quartet is thus intimately personal in a high degree, the series of orchestral tone-poems, 'My Country,' dedicated to the city of Prague, is national in scope. Number I, Vyšehrad, depicts the ancient fortress, once a scene of glory, and its melancholy decline into ruin and decay. In Number II, Vltava or 'The Moldau,' the most popular of all, we hear the two tiny rivulets which, rising in the mountain, flow down and unite to form the mighty river Moldau. 'Sárka,' the third (1875), refers to a valley north of the capital, which was named for the noblest of mythical Bohemian amazons. 'From Bohemia's Fields and Groves,' Number IV (1875), is built on several intensely Czechic tunes, and reaches a dizzying climax on a most delightful polka theme. In 'Tabor,' Number V (1878), is introduced the favorite war-chorale of the Taborites. The last of the series, Blaník (1879), pictures the mountain on which the Hussite warriors sleep until they shall have to fight again for their country. The orchestration of the whole series is as brilliant as the themes are spirited and attractive, and they are universal favorites in the concert hall.
Smetana wrote a good deal of choral and piano music, as well as other orchestral works; but it is by 'My Country,' the quartet, and 'The Bartered Bride' that he will continue to be known. Fortunately for him, his greatness was recognized during his lifetime; he was idolized by his countrymen; and he knew the pleasure of public triumphs at the fiftieth anniversary, in 1880, of his first appearance as a pianist, at the opening of the new national theatre in 1881, and on other occasions. But when his sixtieth birthday, March 2, 1884, was honored by a national festival, he was unable to be present for a tragic reason. His nerves had been troubling him for some time. When Die Teufelsmauer was coldly received in 1882 he said, 'I am, then, at last too old, and I ought not to write anything more, because nobody wishes to hear from me.' Later he complained, 'I feel myself tired out, sleepy, and I fear that the quickness of musical thoughts has gone from me.' Gradually he lost his memory and his power to read. He was not permitted by the doctors to compose or even to think music. Only a few weeks before his sixtieth birthday he had to be put in an asylum, and there, without regaining his mind, he died, May 12, 1884.
II
Untoward as was Smetana's personal fate, he was fortunate artistically in having at hand a younger contemporary of genius equal and similar to his to whom he could pass on the torch he had lighted. His friend and protégé, Antonin Dvořák, at this time forty-two years old, had not only felt his direct influence during formative years, but resembled him in temperament and in artistic ideals to a degree remarkable even for fellow citizens of a small country like Bohemia. Both were impulsive, impressionable, unreflective in temper; both found in the strong dance rhythms and the simple yet poignant melodies of the people their natural expression; in both the classic qualities—reticence, restraint, balance—were acquired rather than instinctive. In Dvořák, however, there was an even greater richness and sensuous warmth than in the older man, and his music is thus, in the memorable phrase of Mr. Hadow, 'more Corinthian than, Doric,' has 'a certain opulence, a certain splendor and luxury to which few other musicians have attained.'
Antonin Dvořák, born in 1841, eldest of eight children of the village butcher in Nelahozeves on the Moldau, knew poverty and music from his earliest days. At fourteen he could sing and play the violin, the piano, and the organ. A year later came his first appearance as an orchestral composer. Planning to persuade his reluctant father by practical demonstration that he was destined to write music, he prepared for the village band an original polka, with infinite pains, but alas! in ignorance that the brass instruments do not play the exact notes written. He wrote what he wanted to hear, but what he heard might well have induced him to resign himself to butchery. That it did not, that he still held out against parental opposition and was finally allowed to go to Prague, is an evidence of that tenacity which was in the essence of his character. At Prague he entered the Organ School, played in churches and restaurants, and earned about nine dollars a month, on which he lived. An occasional concert he managed to hear by hiding behind the kettledrums of a friendly player, but classical music he met for the first time when, already twenty-one, he borrowed some scores of Beethoven and Mendelssohn from Smetana. Symphonic composition he acquired laboriously and with surprising skill; the polka and the furiant were in his blood.
He now spent about ten years composing industriously, in poverty and complete obscurity. In 1871 came the long-awaited chance to emerge, in the shape of an invitation to write an opera for the national theatre. In writing this his first opera, 'The King and the Collier' (Prague, 1874), he allowed himself to be misled by his curious facility in imitating other styles than his own. Mr. Hadow tells the story at length. The point of it is that Dvořák, acting on a momentary enthusiasm for Wagner, which his music shows that he afterwards outgrew, committed the surprising folly of giving his countrymen, at the very moment when they were initiating a successful campaign for native art, a Wagnerian music-drama under the guise of Czech operetta! It was only a momentary aberration, but it is worth mentioning because it illustrates a child-like uncriticalness which was as much a part of Dvořák as his freshness of feeling, his love of color, and his persistence. Soon realizing his error he rewrote the music in a more appropriate style. It then appeared that the libretto, too, was wrong. Anyone else would have given the matter up in disgust; but Dvořák had the book also rewritten, and in this third version his work won him his first operatic success.[23]
Soon he began to be known outside Bohemia. In 1875 he received a grant from the Austrian Ministry of Education, on the strength of a symphony and an opera submitted. Two years later, offering to the same body his Moravian duets and some of his recent chamber music, he was fortunate enough to have them examined by Brahms, one of the committee. Brahms cordially recommended his work to Simrock, the great Berlin music publishing house, with the result that his compositions began to be widely disseminated and he was commissioned to write a set of characteristic national dances. The result of this commission was the first set of Slavonic Dances, opus 46, later supplemented by eight more, opus 72. These dances are as characteristic as any of Dvořák's works. Their melodic and rhythmic animation is indescribable; while the basis is national folk-song the themes are imaginatively treated and led through many distant keys with the happy inconsequence peculiar to Dvořák; and the whole is orchestrated with the richness, variety, and delicacy that make him one of the greatest orchestral masters of all time. The same qualities are found in the beautiful Slavonic Rhapsodies, the overtures Mein Heim and Husitska, both based on Czechish melodies, and, mixed with more classic elements, in the two sets of symphonic variations and the five symphonies.
In the choral field Dvořák is best known by his admirable Stabat Mater (1883), written in a pure classical style, as if based on the best Italian models, and of large inspiration. There are also an oratorio 'St. Ludmila' (1886), more conventional, a requiem mass, and several cantatas. Of many sets of beautiful solo songs, special mention may be made of the Gypsy Songs, opus 55, Im Volkston, opus 73, and the 'Love Songs,' opus 83. The duets, 'Echos of Moravia,' are fine. There is much piano music, too, but charming as are the 'Humoresques,' opus 101, the 'Poetic Mood-Pictures,' opus 85, and some others, it may be said that Dvořák is less at home with the piano than with other instruments.
On the other hand, one might with reason place his chamber music even higher than his orchestral work, for it is as admirably suited to its medium, and its soberer palette restrains his almost barbaric love of color. His pianoforte quintet in A major, opus 81, with its broadly conceived allegro, its tender andante, founded on the elegiac dumka of his country, and its immensely spirited scherzo and finale, is surely one of the finest quintets written since Schumann immortalized the combination. As for his string quartets, they must equally take their place in the front rank of modern chamber music, beside the quartets of Brahms, Franck, Tschaikowsky, and d'Indy. The last two, opera 105 and 106, are perhaps the best. Those who charge Dvořák with 'lack of depth' would do well to penetrate a little more deeply themselves into such things as the Lento e molto cantabile of the former.
