After conducting a highly successful performance of Dvořák's Third Slavonic Rhapsody (Op. 45, No. 3) in Vienna, the great conductor Hans Richter asked the 38-year-old Dvořák late in 1879 to write a symphony for him and the Vienna Philharmonic.  Dvořák began working on August 27 of the next year, and the composition was ready by October 15.  After playing through the symphony for Richter, Dvořák was able to report to a friend on November 23:  "Richter likes the Symphony immensely and embraced me after each movement, and the first performance will be on the 26th [of December]."

However, it soon turned out that there were unexpected difficulties in the way of the performance.  Richter had to postpone the premiere several times, citing illnesses in his family and other problems.  Dvořák later found out that the real reason was the presence of strong anti-Czech feelings in Vienna.  There were powerful voices at the Philharmonic Society that objected to a Czech composer's works being performed in two successive seasons, and the symphony was turned down in spite of Richter's enthusiastic advocacy.  Dvořák then offered the work to his good friend Adolf Čech, who conducted the first performance in Prague on March 25, 1881.  Within the next two years, the symphony was heard in Leipzig, Graz, Budapest, New York, Frankfurt, Cologne, Amsterdam, and London.  In the last-mentioned city, Hans Richter was at last able to conduct the symphony, three weeks after August Manns had given the London premiere.  As for Vienna, the first performance there was at a concert of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, conducted by Wilhelm Gericke on February 18, 1883.

The Sixth Symphony is a milestone in Dvořák's artistic development.  The first of his symphonies to be published and to become an international success, it is one of his finest achievements to date.  Despite some striking reminiscences of Beethoven and Brahms, the symphony speaks a language that is Dvořák's own from beginning to end.  (It should be noted that Brahms was one of Dvořák's greatest champions, who used all his influence to promote his younger colleague's music.)

Through the use of a specific part-writing device called "horn fifths," the symphony's opening motif evokes associations with nature, more specifically the forest as seen by Romantic artists.  All the melodic material of the first movement is in some way related to this opening.  The movement is in regular sonata form, with distinct development and recapitulation sections, but instead of modulating to the dominant key of A major, the exposition chooses a softer-sounding tonality—B minor—as its tonal goal.  Throughout the movement, idyllic lyrical sections alternate with more agitated and grandiose passages.  Dvořák leads us to believe that he will close the movement in the lyrical mode in pianissimo when suddenly four measures of forte break in and provide a very different kind of ending.

The second-movement Adagio is based on a soulful theme, first played by the violins with a counterpoint on the oboe.  Time and again, the music becomes more dramatic, but the main theme never stays away for very long and returns to close the movement in a special instrumentation (wind instruments only).

The third-movement Scherzo has the subtitle "Furiant," a Czech folk dance characterized by an alternation of duple and triple meter.  Dvořák's immediate model was probably the Furiant from Smetana's opera The Bartered Bride, in which three groups of two beats each are followed by two groups of three beats each.  Dvořák's Furiant combines this rhythmic idea with highly chromatic harmonic writing, hardly a popular device; the symbiosis of these two disparate elements gives the movement its unique character.  There is a central Trio section that is much plainer in both harmony and rhythm; the rare feature here is that part of the melody is given to the solo piccolo.

Like the opening Allegro, the finale is an example of how a long and complex movement can be built from a single melodic idea:  if one looks closer, one finds that the movement's two main themes are closely related.  The movement has an irresistible drive that never lets up.  There is a dazzling Presto at the end.  In it, the rushing eighth-notes of the violins serve as counterpoint to the main theme, whose notes, in a gesture that is utterly humorous, are separated by rests.  Finally, the brass transforms the theme into a kind of hymn, and the symphony ends with a climax, radiant and grandiose.