PROGRAM NOTES by Phillip Huscher

Antonín Dvořák Born September 8, 1841, Mühlhausen, Bohemia (now Nelahozeves, Czech Republic). Died May 1, 1904, Prague.

Slavonic Dances, Op. 72, nos. 2 and 3

Dvořák composed his second set of eight Slavonic Dances for piano duet in the summer of 1886 and orchestrated them between mid-November and January 5, 1887. The orchestra consists of two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, triangle, cymbals, bass drum, and strings. Performance time is approximately fourteen minutes.

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s first subscription concert performances of selections from Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances, op. 72 were given at the Auditorium Theatre on November 11 and 12, 1892, with Theodore Thomas conducting.

It was Antonín Dvořák’s first set of Slavonic Dances that established the composer’s international reputation. In 1878, after Dvořák won the Austrian State Music Prize for the fourth year in a row, the critic Eduard Hanslick, who had served on the judges’ committee each year, took the unusual step of writing to Dvořák to tell him that Johannes Brahms had taken “a great interest in your fine talent.” As a result of that letter—an immediate morale booster and a potential career maker in the long run—Dvořák and Brahms met later that year. Brahms was so certain of Dvořák’s promise that he even had arranged for his own Viennese publisher, Fritz Simrock, to take on a foreign composer he had never heard of. Simrock promptly published some vocal duets Brahms admired and then commissioned the Slavonic Dances, which quickly proved so popular as piano duets that he asked Dvořák to orchestrate them. It was Brahms’s gypsy-influenced Hungarian Dances (another Simrock commission) that served as models for the Slavonic Dances—not only in their sophisticated handling of folk traditions, but also in their ultimate transformation from parlor music to orchestral showpieces.

Simrock, shrewd publisher that he was, demanded sequels from both of his star composers. Brahms wrote two more books of Hungarian Dances in 1880. At first, Dvořák, by now an international star, hesitated. “I have not the slightest inclination to think of such light music at present,” he wrote to Simrock. The real problem, of course, was duplicating the whirlwind success of the first set. “To do the same thing twice is devilishly difficult.” Finally, however, Dvořák gave in, and he produced a second set of Slavonic Dances in 1886.

Dvořák borrowed the material for his Slavonic Dances from the rich folk tradition of the Bohemian and Moravian culture in which he was raised. He brilliantly translated the leaping dances, galops, and polkas of his ancestors into big stylish numbers that enjoyed popularity first in the parlor as piano duets, at a time when the piano was an unrivaled home entertainment center, and then, in supple orchestral colors, as concert fare. Although the dances in the first set were mostly based on Czech dance forms, the second collection looks farther afield. It is also richer in its harmonic language and more obviously the work of a born symphonist.

At this concert, we hear the first three dances from the op. 72 set. We begin with an odzemek from Slovakia, a brilliant leaping dance with two quiet interludes, the second one based on a melody Dvořák would rework seven years later in his American String Quartet. The next dance, arguably the most familiar number in the series, is a dumka, a melancholy dance with a contrasting middle section. (One of Dvořák’s signature compositions is his so-called Dumky Piano Trio in E minor—dumky is the plural of dumka— which manages to make classic chamber music form out of a string of six separate dances.) We end with a lively dance made particularly interesting by its unpredictable phrase lengths and interweaving violin

(more) parts. It is one of the works that confirms Brahms’s hunch that Dvořák would quickly mature into a composer of unexpected depth and lasting interest.

Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

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