PROGRAM NOTES

Antonín Dvořák - Violin Concerto in A Minor, Op. 53

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

Violin Concerto in A Minor, Op. 53

The year the Chicago Symphony was founded, the orchestra gave the American premiere of an important new work during its third week of concerts. The program book for October 30, 1891 (exactly fourteen days after the orchestra’s inaugural concert), lists Dvořák’s Violin Concerto as “new,” and the program annotator, like anyone writing about contemporary music, hedged his bets on Dvořák’s future reputation. Of the Bohemian composer’s recent decision to relocate to the United States, a new world he would later famously depict in a symphony, he said only, “it remains to be seen to what extent the influences of another civilization may affect his musical expression.”

Dvořák was hardly unknown at the time, even if he hadn’t yet written some of the works on which his reputation rests today, including the New World Symphony and the Cello Concerto. In fact, Theodore Thomas, the Chicago Symphony’s founder and first music director, picked Dvořák’s Husitská Overture as the final work on the orchestra’s very first concert. And later that season, Thomas programmed more Dvořák: the Scherzo capriccioso that opens this week’s concert, one of the Slavonic Rhapsodies, and the D major symphony (no. 6, but then known as no. 1) that was composed the same year as the violin concerto. Thomas was something of a Dvořák champion—he had already given the American premiere of the great D minor symphony (no. 7) in New York—and he later got the idea of inviting the composer to appear at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in August 1893. Dvořák’s violin concerto, little more than a decade old when the Chicago Symphony introduced it, is the second of the composer’s three concertos, following one for piano written in 1876 and preceding the great cello concerto by some fifteen years.

Dvořák had learned to play the violin as a small boy, and he also composed marches and waltzes for the village band. In Zlonice, he studied piano, organ, and viola, eventually becoming a decent enough violist to earn a living as an orchestra musician when he couldn’t make any money from his compositions. After he moved to Prague in 1857, he became principal viola in the orchestra for the new Provisional Theater (later the National Theater). For the rest of his life, he treasured the memory of playing a concert there in 1863 under his idol, Richard Wagner, that included the overture to Tannhäuser, the prelude to Tristan und Isolde, and excerpts from Die Meistersinger and Die Walküre. In 1871, Dvořák left the orchestra to devote more time to composition, but he soon realized that he would have to teach to get by. For many years, his father doubted the wisdom of his son’s choice of music over the life of a butcher, the family business.

Then in 1873, Dvořák’s works began to attract attention. The successful premiere of his patriotic cantata Heirs of the White Mountain on March 9 launched his fame in his homeland. Later that year he married Anna Cermáková, the sister of the Prague actress Josefina, who had, nearly a decade before, rebuffed his advances. (Like Mozart and Haydn, he married not his first love, but her sister.) In 1874, Dvořák took stock of his situation: he had begun to taste success; his wife was pregnant with their first child; and he looked forward to the pleasures, comforts, and traditions of family life. But he craved recognition and he needed money. In July, he entered fifteen of his newest works in a competition for the Austrian State Music Prize, a government award designed to assist struggling young artists. The judges were Johann Herbeck, the director of the Imperial Opera in Vienna; Eduard Hanslick, a man of famous, often caustic, opinions, and one of the most influential critics of the nineteenth century; and, sitting on the panel for the first time, Johannes Brahms, the biggest name in Viennese music. Dvořák won the first prize of four hundred gulden, and he felt a kind of encouragement and validation that money can’t buy. The citation praised his “genuine and original gifts,” and noted, not unfairly, that he possessed “an undoubted talent, but in a way which as yet remains formless and unbridled.” (He competed and won again the next three years in a row.)

It was Brahms who introduced Dvořák to violinist-composer-conductor Joseph Joachim, who encouraged Dvořák to write a violin concerto. Joachim gave the premiere of Brahms’s violin concerto on the first day of 1879, shortly before Dvořák started to compose his; it was a banner year for violinists. When Dvořák sent Joachim the manuscript of his new score that November, the violinist mailed back pages of suggested improvements, and by May 9, 1880, Dvořák told his publisher that he had redone the entire concerto accordingly, “without missing a single measure.” Joachim made still further changes to his solo part—“Although the work proves that you know the violin well,” he wrote, “certain details make it clear that you have not played it yourself for some time”—and then arranged for a run-through in Berlin in November 1882. But he never played the concerto in public; the premiere was given nearly a year later in Prague by Frantisek Ondrícek. (Plans for Joachim to perform it in London in 1884 fell through.)

It’s clear from the powerhouse opening of this work that Dvořák knew and admired Brahms’s new violin concerto. (Brahms later returned the compliment: after hearing Dvořák’s cello concerto, he is reported to have said, “Why on earth didn’t I know that one could write a cello concerto like this? Had I known, I would have written one long ago.”) The entire first movement is serious and dramatic, and for all its richness of color and harmony, it’s still classical in formal outline. A short cadenza leads the way to the spacious, gloriously lyrical Adagio, nearly as long as the symphonically scaled first movement. The sparkling finale is one of the composer’s best, and the proudly Czech turn of its themes and syncopated rhythms suggest that, for all his fascination with America, Dvořák was still something of an “old world” composer.

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

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