This week’s theme is…More Syndication! Enjoy some more of my favorite episodes in rerun 🙂
More Syndication, Day 3 – New World Symphony by Antonin Dvorak
Jeannette Meyers Thurber had a dream.
Born in 1850 in a small New York town, she had studied music at the Paris Conservatory in her teens and then returned to the United States. Her marriage to a wealthy grocery wholesaler endowed her with the resources, connections, and freedom necessary to champion the cause of creating a distinctive American music, a commodity she sensed to be lacking in the culture of the young but precocious nation. This quest motivated her to found the National Conservatory of Music of America in 1884, intended to be a haven of education for gifted American music students. She continually sought federal funding for this project so that the students could attend based on their artistic merits and not the depth of their pockets. While the egalitarian vision was realized, it was not through federal funding, which Thurber was never able to secure, but the philanthropy of herself and other wealthy patrons who funded the school’s operating budget and instructor salaries.
There are several European cultures which boast incredibly rich and formidable musical legacies, legacies which nourish disproportionately large swaths of the world’s population in relation to the quantity of creative minds who worked within them. These legacies vary in strength, but they resonate richly for both the efforts of their geniuses and also for the unique configurations of idiosyncratic cultural mannerisms that define them. The German legacy, for instance, is rich with polyphonic rigor, formal clarity, and existential introspection. The Italian legacy is recognizable for its dazzling sparkle, attractive flamboyance, and unabashed heart-on-sleeve emotion. The French, British and Russian legacies are also strong, and there are other legacies that are perhaps a tier below those in significance (like Dvorak’s native Bohemian legacy). But Jeannette Thurber began to worry that, at the rate they were going, America’s musicians may not have gotten around to solidifying a legacy of their own capable of competing upon the stage of world history without a little push, and she thought her Conservatory was just the force that was needed to provide it.
While Thurber founded and guided the National Conservatory, she did not participate in its daily operations. For this, she needed instructors and a director. The first director hired was the Belgian baritone singer Jacques Bouhy, who held the position from the Conservatory’s opening in 1885 until 1889. Bouhy main claim to fame was his singing of the role of the toreador Camillo in the premiere production of Bizet’s Carmen 10 years before the Conservatory opened. While the school grew and operated well under Bouhy’s directorship, Thurber understood that in order to realize her vision of catalyzing the creation of an American musical legacy, she may have greater success with a composer who had performed a similar feat himself in another culture, and so she found the Bohemian Antonin Dvorak to be the next director beginning in 1892.
The Italian and German musical legacies owe much of their strength to good timing, and also to strong patronage systems that fostered the generation of numerous works of art, musical and otherwise. Both Italian and German artists were provided with continuous opportunities by courts and churches to produce prolifically, all the while steeped in the culture of the Renaissance which encouraged rigorous learning and mastery of skill. The German and Italian musicians began their path of creating distinct national legacies as early as the 1500s, and, during the ensuing centuries in which the patronage system crystallized and provided a previously unheard of level of stability, their national musical cultures flourished to an unimaginable degree. Not every culture in European history was so fortunate to experience this perfect storm. Russia, for example, began to develop its musical legacy more than 300 years after the Renaissance of Central Europe. For more about that process, read this post. The scrappy and oft-occupied Bohemians were another such culture whose musical championship did not start until the mid 1800s. The first notable composer to work in a distinctively Bohemian manner was Bedrich Smetana, inspired initially to create his works by revolutions against the occupying Austrian Empire. Smetana was a child prodigy, gifted on the piano and violin. He created lovely concert works and operas that seem to be inspired by the sounds and flavors of Bohemia. It is thoroughly nationalistic music, never quite attaining to the glory and grandeur of the German tradition.
To make that leap required a genius the stature of Antonin Dvorak, who came a mere two decades after Smetana, but was somehow able to fuse his elder Bohemian’s sensibility with a German grandeur, creating works that operate on multiple levels and therefore have a greater claim to international interest and posterity. And this was acknowledged by one German in particular, Johannes Brahms, who, after judging one of Dvorak’s symphonies in an Austrian competition, recognized his genius and quickly came to regard him as an artistic equal. After that the two began a lifelong friendship, with Brahms helping to open some major doors in order for Dvorak’s career to take off. Dvorak became steadily prolific, creating works that emanate a carefree Bohemian take on life, all the while clothed in the masterful orchestration and formal mastery of the German symphony.
This is exactly what Jeannette Thurber was looking for, and she enticed Dvorak to assume directorship of the American Conservatory with a generous salary and the promise of 4 months of vacation from teaching each year in which to pursue his own creative efforts. Dvorak was fascinated by the American music he absorbed, although it is sometimes hard to tell exactly from which sources he would have consumed it. But he and Thurber were united in their opinion that a robust American music would be best based upon the music of American Indians and Negro spirituals. I’m not sure how much authentic American Indian music Dvorak could ever have been exposed to, but he did have a very direct and reliable source of Negro spirituals, his student Harry Burleigh.
Harry Burleigh had stored a treasury of spirituals from his ancestors and sang them beautifully in his baritone voice. He captivated Dvorak with his singing, and his collection of melodies helped to inspire Dvorak’s most successful and best-known work, the Ninth Symphony, “From the New World”, which was written during his time as the director of the American Conservatory. Listen to the sweeping second movement Largo and pay especially close attention to the beautiful melody, first played by the english horn, which starts at about 50 seconds:
It could be a spiritual, couldn’t it? But it isn’t. It is an original tune written by Dvorak, very much based on the melodic style of the spirituals that he learned from Harry Burleigh. Dvorak here demonstrates his knack, in common with Smetana, of assimilating a body of musical style and then expressing it in original music utterances. Smetana breathed Bohemian folk music deeply, but never actually quoted it. Here is Dvorak doing the same thing with Negro spirituals. Perhaps you’ve sung this song? It was recast by another one of his students, William Arms Fisher, who added words in the 1920s, turning it into the hymn “Goin’ Home”, which is still commonly sung in Christian worship today.
The National Conservatory of Music of America had its day, but didn’t really take hold. It petered out in the early twentieth century and American musicians had to look elsewhere for their inspiration, with many traveling to France in order to drink from the fount of Nadia Boulanger’s phenomenal teaching, which pulled from all the great European music legacies and assisted many a modern composer in fitting their voices into those contexts. As such, Jeannette Thurber’s goal of sparking an American musical legacy did not ultimately succeed, but not before Antonin Dvorak, already so successful in the same task regarding Bohemian music, could show the Americans how it might be done.
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