Antonín Dvořák’s sojourn in the United States from 1892 to 1895 came about through the efforts of Mrs. Jeanette B. Thurber. A dedicated and idealistic proponent of an American national musical style, she underwrote and administered the first American music conservatory, the National Conservatory of Music in New York. Because of Dvořák’s popularity throughout Europe, he was Thurber’s first choice for a director. The fact that he spoke no English was of little consequence since the language of musical discourse was German. He, in turn, was probably lured to the big city so far from home by both a large salary and convictions regarding musical nationalism that paralleled Mrs. Thurber’s own.

Thirty years before his arrival in New York, Dvořák had read Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha in a Czech translation and was eager to learn more about the Native American and African-American music, which he believed should be the basis of the American style of composition. He also shared with Mrs. Thurber the conviction that the National Conservatory should admit African-American students. One of them, Henry Burleigh, who became an important African-American composer in his own right, is credited with exposing his teacher to African-American spirituals.

While his knowledge of authentic Native American music is questionable – his exposure came through samples transcribed for him by American friends and through Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show – he became familiar with African-American spirituals through Burleigh, as well as indirectly via the songs of Stephen Foster. He incorporated both of these styles into the Symphony No. 9, composed while he was in New York.

Just as Dvořák never quoted Bohemian folk music directly in his own nationalistic music, he did not use American themes in their entirety. Rather, with his unsurpassed gift for melody, he incorporated characteristic motives into his own themes. Nevertheless, any listener with half an ear can discern “Massa Dear” (also known as “Goin’ Home”) in the famous English

horn solo in the second movement. We can deduce the importance of these musical motives from the fact that they appear as reminiscences in more than one movement, especially in the Finale. The symphony, however, is hardly an American pastiche; the second motive in the Largo movement is a phrase of wrenching musical longing that many listeners interpret as the composer’s nostalgia for his native Bohemia. The New York music critic and Dvořák’s friend, Henry Krehbiel, claimed that the movement was inspired by incidents from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha. Which incidents, however, have never been definitively determined. Krehbiel posited the scene in which Hiawatha woos Minnehaha, while others have suggested Minnehaha’s funeral. Incidentally, Dvořák had also intended to compose an opera on Hiawatha, which never left the drawing board.

The third movement as well, in its rhythmic thumping, the pentatonic scale and the orchestration dominated by winds and percussion, is meant to portray an Indian ceremonial dance described in Longfellow’s poem. Dvorák’s symphonic use of what he believed to be an authentic Native American musical idiom may have reflected his initial ideas for the opera.

One of the most important features of the Symphony is its thematic coherence. Whatever the origin of the melodies, they all have a modular characteristic in that they can be mixed and matched in many different ways. In the last movement, Dvořák brings nearly all of the Symphony's themes together, sometimes as one long continuous melody, sometimes in contrapuntal relationship to each other.