World Premiere: December 16, 1893
Last HSO Performance: June 17, 2023
Instrumentation: 2 flutes with 2nd doubling piccolo, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion and strings
Duration: 40 minutes

Born September 8, 1841 in Nelahozeves, Bohemia.
Died May 1, 1904 in Prague.

There would not have been a “New World” Symphony without Mrs. Jeanette Thurber, one of America’s most ardent and effective supporters of the arts during the decades around the turn of the 20th century. The daughter of a Danish immigrant violinist, she was born Jeanette Meyers in 1850 in a small town 150 miles north of New York City, immersed in music as a child, and trained in the field at the venerable Paris Conservatoire, whose support by the national government became the model she sought to duplicate at home. Aided by the fortune of her husband, Francis Beatty Thurber, a wealthy grocery wholesaler, she obtained a state charter in 1885 to establish a National Conservatory of Music in New York City, which she intended not just as a school for training the country’s most talented musicians, but also as a radically progressive social institution, admitting women, Blacks, Native Americans and even handicapped students on an equal basis. In 1891, the school was incorporated by a special act of Congress and authorized to grant diplomas and confer honorary degrees.

To direct the National Conservatory, Mrs. Thurber turned in 1892 to a composer and educator of international renown — Antonín Dvořák, who was already well-known in New York through his chamber and piano compositions (the Slavonic Dances of 1878 and 1886 were an international hit) as well as the symphonies and shorter orchestral works that the New York Philharmonic had programmed a dozen times during the previous decade. When Mrs. Thurber tempted Dvořák with a breathtaking $15,000 per annum (some $500,000 today and several multiples of Dvořák’s salary at the Prague Conservatory) with the expenses for resettling his family also included, he agreed to a term of three years. Soon after arriving in New York in September 1892, Dvořák wrote to a friend in Prague, “The Americans expect great things of me and the main thing is, so they say, to show them to the promised land and kingdom of a new and independent art, in short, to create a national music…. There is more than enough material here and plenty of talent.” Despite Mrs. Thurber’s dedicated efforts to sustain the National Conservatory, its spending outstripped available resources, government funding never materialized, and competition from the Institute of Musical Art of New York, established in 1904 (and which became the Juilliard School in 1926), forced her institution to close in 1928. The “New World” Symphony that she and her school inspired from its most famous faculty member remains a permanent part of that legacy.

It was precisely Mrs. Thurber’s liberal admission policies that motivated the “New World” Symphony in the person of Henry Thacker Burleigh, a gifted Black singer, pianist and songwriter from Erie, Pennsylvania, who won a scholarship to the National Conservatory in 1892 and became a student of Dvořák. Burleigh sang many of the traditional melodies for his teacher, who recognized in them some similarities in expression and construction to the folk music of his Czech homeland. “Dr. Dvořák was very deeply impressed by the Negro spirituals from the old plantation,” Burleigh recalled. “He just saturated himself in the spirit of those old tunes.” Dvořák’s response appeared in the New York Herald: “The Negro melodies of America can be the foundation of a serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States.... There is nothing in the whole range of composition that cannot find a thematic source here.” 

Inspired by Henry Burleigh’s songs, heritage and personality (Burleigh went on to a distinguished career as soloist at New York’s St. George’s Episcopal Church and Temple Emanu-El, nationally known baritone recitalist, composer of 300 songs, and charter member of ASCAP), Dvořák began the Symphony “From the New World” in December 1892 and completed it in May (its sobriquet may have been suggested by Mrs. Thurber). “I should never have written the Symphony as I have,” he said, “if I hadn’t seen America.” The work triumphed at its premiere, given on December 16, 1893 in Carnegie Hall by conductor Anton Seidl and the New York Philharmonic, and immediately earned a place in the orchestral repertory that has never diminished.

The “New World” Symphony is unified by the use of a motto theme that occurs in all four movements. This bold, arching phrase is played by the horns as the main theme of the opening movement, having been foreshadowed in the slow introduction. Two other themes are used in the first movement: a sad melody for flute and oboe that exhibits folk characteristics, and a brighter tune resembling the spiritual Swing Low, Sweet Chariot for the solo flute. The second movement was inspired by the forest funeral of Minnehaha in Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha, and the third by the dance of the Indians at the feast. The finale employs a sturdy motive introduced by the horns and trumpets after a few introductory measures in the strings.

©2026 Dr. Richard E. Rodda