(Born September 8, 1841, in Nelahozeves; died May 1, 1904, in Prague)
Dvořák studied the violin and organ as a child, and at the age of sixteen, left home to study in Prague. Five years later, he joined the orchestra of the National Theater as a violist (in those days an instrument usually taken up only by failed violinists), but he was almost thirty before one of his own major compositions was successfully performed. Then his career took off, and he eventually became a figure of world importance. He held a post as professor of Composition at Prague Conservatory, was the recipient of honorary degrees from Cambridge University in England and the University in Prague, and, during his three-year residence in the United States, was director of a conservatory in New York. Chamber music had an important place in Dvořák’s life; many of his earliest works were quartets and quintets modeled after those of Beethoven and Schubert that he played with his colleagues while developing his craft.
One of the gifted and eager youths who flocked to Dvořák’s classes in New York was an African-American musician, Henry Thacker Burleigh (1866-1949), who was to have a distinguished career as a composer and singer. Burleigh spent long hours teaching the composer the spirituals and slaves’ work songs that Dvorak had in mind when he wrote, “The future music of this country must be founded upon what are called Negro melodies. These beautiful themes are the product of the soil, the folk songs of America, and composers must turn to them. All great musicians have borrowed from the songs of the common people.” Dvořák borrowed from them, but not by quotation. As he later explained, “I tried to write in the spirit of the American folk melodies.”
After his first academic year, Dvořák happily left the noise and tumult that even then plagued New York to spend the summer in Spillville, Iowa, a tiny town settled by Czech immigrants, where he felt very much at home. There he composed two major works in his newly invented “American” style, this Quartet and the String Quintet, Op. 97. (The New World Symphony, which he had completely sketched in New York, was orchestrated in Spillville.) He arrived there on June 5,1893, and between June 8 and 10, sketched the entire quartet, noting, “It went quickly, thank God. I am satisfied with it.” On the 12th, he began to write out the finished score, headed, “Second composition written in America.” On the 23rd, he completed the work. As soon as parts were copied out, he and some friends played through it, and on January 12, 1894, the Kneisel Quartet gave the premiere in New York.
The quartet’s beauty and freshness of expression have less to do with America than with Dvořák s delight on discovering Bohemia here, in Spillville. The syncopated rhythms and the pentatonic scales may possibly suggest the kind of melody that he learned from his African American students, or as is sometimes claimed, from the Native Americans who lived near Spillville, but he would probably not have learned enough of the latter’s style to begin using it in so important a work only three days after his arrival there. The simple truth is that many of the music’s characteristics that vary from the classic standards of Germany and Austria can also be heard in the folk music of Bohemia and in many works that Dvořák wrote long before he arrived in America.
The Quartet opens, Allegro, ma non troppo, with a quietly joyous, expansive movement, whose original themes, clearly stated and defined, are classically organized and treated. The Lento slow movement is an extended melancholy duet for the first violin and cello, or sometimes the second violin, with a gently rocking accompaniment. Next comes a scherzo, Molto vivace, in which the predominance of a single theme makes the music seem almost to be a set of free variations. The warbling figure is a witty reflection on the song of what Dvorák called “a damned bird, red, but with black wings,” perhaps the scarlet tanager. The Finale is a rondo, Vivace, ma non troppo, a jolly romp that pauses only for a brief chorale of the kind that Dvořák improvised at the Spillville church organ.