The credit for bringing Dvořák to the United States belongs to Jeanette M. Thurber (1850-1946), wife of a wealthy New York businessman. Mrs. Thurber was one of those dedicated philanthropists to whom the musical life of this country has always owed so much. In 1885-86, she founded both the National Conservatory of Music and the American Opera Company. One of her greatest achievements was a scholarship program for minority students, which enabled many Blacks and Native Americans to become professional musicians. Another was to persuade Antonín Dvořák to come to the United States from his native Bohemia and become the director of the Conservatory.

After a long round of negotiations, Dvořák arrived in the United States in 1892, for what would be a stay of three years. He was accompanied by his wife, two of his six children, and a secretary. His duties at the Conservatory were not very onerous. He had to teach composition three mornings a week and conduct the student orchestra on two afternoons. This schedule left him enough time for conducting at public concerts as well as composing.

Mrs. Thurber later claimed it was at her suggestion that Dvořák first started to work on his Symphony in E minor. As she recollected,

He used to be particularly homesick on steamer days when he read the shipping news in the Herald. Thoughts of home often moved him to tears. On one of these days I suggested that he write a symphony embodying his experiences and feelings in America—a suggestion which he promptly adopted.

This prompting would hardly have sufficed, had Dvořák himself not felt ready to ‟embark” on a new symphony. But embark he did, and when the score was finished the next spring, he made the following inscription on the last page of the manuscript: ‟Praise God! Completed 24th May 1893 at 9 o'clock in the morning. The children have arrived at Southampton (a cable came at 1:33 p.m.).” The four children Dvořák had left behind joined their parents in New York a few days later. Thus, both the beginning and the end of this symphony's composition seem to be connected with ships leaving and arriving.

Much ink has been spilled over the question as to whether the E-minor Symphony incorporates any melodies Dvořák heard in the United States, and whether the symphony is ‟American” or ‟Czech” in character. Dvořák’s interest in both Negro spirituals and American Indian music was evident, but he actually knew very little about the latter and, as far as the former was concerned, relied mainly on a single source of information. Harry T. Burleigh, an African-American student at the Conservatory, who later became a noted composer and singer, performed many spirituals (and also Stephen Foster songs) for Dvořák, who was very impressed but his knowledge of American musical traditions must have remained limited. The composer did not claim to have used any original melodies, trying instead to ‟reproduce their spirit,” as he put it in an interview published three days before the symphony's premiere.

We will understand what Dvořák meant by this if we compare the famous English horn solo from the symphony's slow movement with the spiritual ‟Steal Away,” which was propably among the songs Dvořák had heard from Burleigh. Many years later, music critic H. C. Colles, interviewing Burleigh, asked him to sing the songs he had sung to Dvořák, and noted that ‟the sound of the English horn resembled quite closely the quality of Burleigh’s voice.” Both melodies share the same rhythmic patterns and the same pentatonic scale. It is no wonder that Dvořák’s melody was subsequently adopted as a spiritual in its own right under the title ‟Goin’ Home,” with words by one of Dvorák’s New York students, William Arms Fisher. Several other melodies in the symphony have similar songlike shapes, suggesting folk inspiration. One instance where a possible model has been identified is the first movement's second theme, which is strongly reminiscent of the spiritual ‟Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”

Another link between the ‟New World” Symphony and the New World has to do with an aborted opera project based on The Song of Hiawatha. It was another one of Mrs. Thurber's suggestions that Dvořák write an opera on Longfellow's poem, with which he had long been familiar, having read it in Czech translation 30 years before. The opera never quite got off the ground, but it has been shown that the slow movement was conceived with Minnehaha’s Forest Funeral from Hiawatha in mind. Additionally, the Scherzo was inspired by the dance of Pau-Puk-Keewis.

Discussions of the ethnic background of Dvořák’s themes should not, however, divert the attention from other aspects of this symphony that are at least equally compelling. For beautiful melodies alone, whatever their provenance may be, do not a symphony make. In his Ninth, Dvořák proved not only his supreme melodic gifts, but also his mastery in organizing his melodies into coherent and well-balanced musical structures.

The opening horn theme of the first-movement Allegro molto, already hinted at the preceding slow introduction, serves as a unifying gesture that returns in each of the symphony's movements. In the second-movement Largo, it appears at the climactic point in the faster middle section, shortly before the return of the English horn solo. In the Scherzo, it is heard between the Scherzo proper and the Trio; this time, the energetic brass theme is transformed into a lyrical melody played by the cellos and the violas. Between the trio and the recapitulation of the Scherzo, the theme resumes its original character. The same melody can also be found in the finale shortly before the end, in a coda that incorporates quotations from the second and third movements as well. The ending of the symphony, then, combines the main themes from all four movements in a magnificent synthesis.

Notes By Peter Laki