In 1892 Dvořák was hired to direct New York’s National Conservatory of Music. During his two-year stay in this country, he composed his last symphony.

“I have just finished a new symphony in E minor,” he wrote in a letter. “It pleases me very much and will differ very substantially from my earlier compositions. Well, the influence of America can be felt by anyone who has a `nose’.”

Dvořák always claimed that the title referred to his “impressions and greetings from the New World,” but critics immediately accused him of wholesale theft of American folk music. While part of the first movement does resemble the spiritual Swing Low Sweet Chariot, the melody of the second movement was later borrowed by William Arms Fischer, one of Dvorák’s pupils, for his pseudo-spiritual Goin’ Home. Certain resemblances in the last movement to Three Blind Mice can also be regarded as allusions to the Czech folk song Weeding Flaxfields Blue.

“Omit that nonsense about my having made use of `Indian’ or `American’ themes--that is a lie,” wrote the composer.  “I tried to write only the spirit of national American melodies.”
The Symphony received its first performance in Carnegie Hall in New York on December 15, 1893. H.L. Mencken’s review described the work as “a first rate work of art, honestly constructed and superbly written. It is clear, it is ingenious, it is beautiful.”

~Notes by Charley Samson, copyright 2024.