THE SYMPHONIES OF DVORAK: A critical
survey of what the current catalog has to offer.
The rediscovery of four early symphonies made it possible to promote the Czech master to the exalted ranks of the great nine-symphony composers.
By Irving Kolodin
LONG with the rest of the world, Antonin Dvorak was of the opinion that he had written fewer than nine symphonies, the number Czech musical research has authorized for the complete edition circulated within the last decade. That is borne out by the manuscript title page of his E Minor Symphony, which bears the words "Znoveho sveta" ("From the New World") and the figure "No. 8," later emended This is not because he had forgotten he had written a C Minor Symphony and a B-flat Major one (which now bear the numbers "1" and "2"), but because, by 1893, the year of the completion of the New World, he was quite sure that they had been successfully suppressed.
Dvorak's symphonic sequence, as it now stands, can be divided into the historic five published during his lifetime (Nos. 5 through 9) and the prehistoric four (Nos. 1 through 4). What, realistically, is the reason for including the earliest in the sequence? More a matter of supply than of demand, I would say.
But the efforts of Czech musicologists to promote Dvorak to the ranks of the great nine-symphony composers (Beethoven, Schubert, Bruckner, Mahler) has had one positive outcome: it has re located the early, charming F Major Symphony to its proper chronological fifth position rather than its old one following the D Major (now No. 5) and the D Minor (now No. 7). But it still retains the inappropriate designation "Op. 76," a bland deception initiated by the publisher Simrock and one to which Dvorak strenuously objected. It may be doubted that this small gain has been worth the large effort and expense incurred in causing all the world's sup ply of Dyadic scores, reference materials, and recordings to be renumbered if not replaced. Still, for better or for worse, the symphonies once numbered 1 through 5 are now, respectively, as follows: No. 1 is No. 6, No. 2 is No. 7, No. 3 is No. 5, No. 4 is No. 8, and No. 5 is No. 9. The numbers 1 through 4 have been properly taken over by the products of Dvorak's youth.
Symphonies 1-4
For those with a curious turn of mind, prying into the secrets the ma ture Dvorak thought safely buried, like family skeletons, does have its fascination. The first two symphonies show the composer in his twenties-a viola player in the orchestra of the Provisional Theater in Prague with a delight fully Schubertian quintet (Op. 1, Philips 839754) already to his credit attempting to wing his way into the symphonic empyrean but failing, Icarus-like, to remain airborne. He was, as of 1865 (when Symphonies 1 and 2 were composed) what is known in Central Europe as a Musikant: a man with a natural flair for playing an instrument or composing, but possessed of neither broad formal training nor the sophistication that might come from long, practical experience.
There is, of course, no lack of aptitude. But through the first two symphonies we are audibly mired in structural complexities, a morass out of which the composer tries to pick his way, step by sticky step, never quite succeeding.
Orchestrally, the strings are fighting the brass, the woodwinds try to act as peacemakers, and the overused percussion keeps putting in a disruptive voice as intense as it is inappropriate. For those bent on knowing Dvorak in this prehistory period, London Records offers the whole sequence in performances by the London Symphony under Istvan Kertesz: Symphony No. 1, in C Minor, Op. 3, CS 6523; Symphony No. 2, in B-flat Major, Op. 4, CS 6524;
Symphony No. 3, in E-flat Major, Op. 10, CS 6525 (with the Op. 67 Hussite Overture); and Symphony No. 4, in D Minor, Op. 13, CS 6526 (including the In Nature's Realm Overture, Op. 91).
As promising a prospect as this pre sents, the reality of it is less rewarding.
My impression is that Kertesz didn't know these obscure works well enough to teach them to an orchestra to which they were equally unfamiliar. Balances are uncertain, and the brass and percussion are more out of hand than in.
There is, however, in each of these works, no lack of something to say; the abiding difficulty for Dvoiak at this point in his career is "How?" In No. 3, for example, the gruppetto (turn) for which Wagner's Rienzi Overture is abidingly remembered is not, in this in stance, a case of one good turn inspiring another. Symphony No. 4 comes closest to sounding whole, especially in its melodious minor-key andante sostenuto. Kertesz has a better grip on the problems in this one, but Witold Rowicki's is even firmer: profiting from the LSO's earlier indoctrination into the work under Kertesz and blessed with better engineering, he produces on Philips 6500 124 a more assured and brighter-sounding product (the disc is rounded out with a performance of the Othello Overture). (overleaf)
Symphony No. 5 As of March 1874, when he finished (pending later revision) the 13- Minor Symphony, No. 4, Dyadic the symphonist might have been characterized thus: "Eager, intense, crude. Shows a smiling melodic side now and then to balance the brooding dramatic one, which he appears to favor." Six years later, when he produced his D Major Symphony (formerly known as No. 1), more than a subtle transformation had begun. Many of the earlier excesses had been curbed, and instrumentation was no longer a problem.
The composer was, to be sure, six years older, but he was much more than six years wiser. The reasons for this were both internal and external.
These years were, as were nearly all years for Dvorak, a time of unremitting work-hard, purposeful, self-critical work. Between 1873 and 1879 he wrote a large number of chamber-music com positions in which he worked and re worked his concepts of form and structure. In 1877 he wrote the fanciful, di verse, and-above all-artfully orchestrated Symphonic Variations (of which there is a beautiful performance by Kertesz and the London Symphony on London CS 6721). Those were the internal reasons.
Within this same span of years, Bedfich Smetana completed Vltava (Die Moldau) in 1874 and his great E Minor Quartet (Aus Meinem Leben) in 1876.
Here, for the first time, was high-level certification for the use of Czech folk material in instrumental music. Dvorak responded to the stimulus in 1878 with his first series of Slavonic Dances (Op. 46) which not only demonstrated who he was to all of Europe but also perhaps revealed the composer for the first time to himself. Also contributing to this self-revelation was the 1879 Czech Suite for orchestra (Op. 39), a work in which Charles Mackerras conducts the English Chamber Orchestra capably on Philips 6500 203.
Clearly, the F Major Symphony of 1875 (which was somewhat revised twelve years later prior to its publication) was an effort on Dvorak's part to move away, symphonically, from what he had been doing previously. More forthrightly melodious, less portentously dramatic than its predecessors, and with a particularly good scherzo, it foreshadows a new balance of elements in the even more personal works to come. Kertesz's version with the London Symphony (London CS 6511, which also contains the overture My Home, Op. 62) is assured, understanding, and firmly controlled.
Symphony No. 6 Hardly less important in Dvorak's move to higher symphonic ground, if not to greater knowledge of what to say, was a new solution to the ever-vexing question "How?" This helping hand was provided by the momentous appearance of Johannes Brahms' first two symphonies: the C Minor (No. 1) in 1877, the D Major (No. 2) in 1878.
Possibly Brahms had written as many prehistoric symphonies as Dvorak, but he was evidently more adept at sup pressing them.
Of the two "instant" masterpieces now presented to him (and to the world) for study, Dvorak gravitated E "... his first series of Slavonic Dances perhaps revealed the composer for the first time to himself." with a sure instinct and a clear sense of his own identity to the songful, com passionate, non-Olympian D Major.
The eventual result was his Symphony No. 6 (1880) in the same key, and from it emerges the image of Dvorak standing on Brahms' shoulders the better to discern his own future direction. The moment when Dyadic begins to flex his own muscles and reward our budding faith in him as a symphonist can be pin pointed almost to the measure: it is around number 310 in the first movement of this D Major. Instead of using his thematic material as building blocks in the old academic way, he weaves out of it a tapestry of idea and incident that qualifies as a true development, a satisfactory bridge between exposition and recapitulation. Add to this the first of his symphonic scherzos in a Czech dance rhythm (here it is a swift-moving furiant), and Dvorak's orchestral personality jumps into clear focus.
A thus-far unmentioned contender for the favor of enthusiasts of recorded Dvorak makes his appearance with this symphony. Rafael Kubelik would have been mentioned several paragraphs earlier had Deutsche Grammophon maintained in circulation the performances of the first five symphonies he re corded with the Berlin Philharmonic (originally issued, together with the last four, as DG 2720 060 10). In addition to possessing sound musicianship, being an expert jouster in the conductorial lists, and rejoicing in a reputation for symphonic marksmanship, Kubelik is something no previously mentioned personality in this survey can claim to be-a native of the same terrain as the composer. Kubelik's reading of Dvorak's Sixth (DG 2530 425) is, like his Mahler Sixth, energetic, hearty, and expansive. I find it a little more indulgent (in the slow movement, scherzo, and finale) of Dvorak's love affair with the timpani than is my taste, but it is, on balance, the best available performance, a little more tightly held together than the Kertesz/London Symphony version (London CS 6495) which includes the Carnival Overture as a bonus.
Symphony No. 7
If there is a distinction to be made between the first six symphonies of Dyadic and the last three, it is that Nos. 1 to 6 remain the concern of conductors who have made a specialty of them while the final three are, in ever increasing measure, being picked over by any conductor who can persuade a record company to put him, and them, on its production schedule. This is great for diversity, if not so great for suitability of interpreter to what is being interpreted. Symphony No. 7, for instance, is a work whose vocabulary requires a more than generalized sense of phraseology. In this score the difference in aspiration and temperament be tween Smetana, the originator of the Czech national school of music, and Dvorak, its leading doctoral candidate, begins to emerge. The much beloved Smetana of The Bartered Bride, the tone poems, and the E Minor Quartet never undertook a symphony; Dvorak was determined to make that domain his own, and eventually he succeeded magnificently.
There is a homespun quality to Dvorak’s music, skeins of Brahms and of his own Czech heritage contributing to the mixture. But if one adopts the warm, Mediterranean manner of Carlo Maria Giulini (London Philharmonic Orchestra, Angel S-37270), the nappy texture tends to turn more than a little silken.
The textural trend turns, on the other hand, toward Harris tweed in Colin Davis' collaboration with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra (Philips 9500 132). This isn't at all bad, though I find the Davis tread in this work a little elephantine, a little over-weighty. Phil ips also has a version by Rowicki with the London Symphony (6500 287) which becomes hung up in the finale, after three good preceding movements, on the famous allusion to the Schubert C Major Symphony. For me, a hint is sufficient, and finger-pointing, musical or otherwise, is always in poor taste.
Vaclav Neumann and the Czech Phil harmonic are very much on familiar territory (Vanguard SU-7), but the orchestral reproduction is somewhat dull, a fault that also disbars Kertesz and the London Symphony (London CS 6402) from competition on the highest level here.
I would cite the well-phrased performance of Leonard Bernstein (Columbia MS-6828) as a little rich in specific detail-inner voices highlight ed, orchestral details over-polished, the scherzo heavy of foot for a dance movement. I have the highest regard for the marvelously shaped, beautiful-sounding collaboration of George Szell with the Cleveland Orchestra, but it is presently purchasable only in Columbia D3S-814, which locks the buyer into Szell/Cleveland performances of Symphonies Nos. 8 and 9 as well. Good as these performances are, not every one will applaud the elimination of optional viewpoints. This brings the issue squarely to a choice between Kubelik and the Berlin Philharmonic (on DG 2530 127) or Zubin Mehta and the Israel Philharmonic (London CS 6607). For this work-where plasticity, honest sentiment, and warmth of feeling count--my body thermometer says "Mehta."
Symphony No. 8
Were I to be asked which, among all the nine symphonies of Dvorak, is my personal favorite, the answer would come quickly and decisively: the G Major, No. 4 or No. 8 in the old and new numbering systems, respectively. Note that I am not equating "favorite" with "greatest." In the instance of Schubert, for example, the C Major Sym phony could readily be accorded both descriptives. But, though I would agree that the New World undertakes an expression on a larger canvas than the G Major and succeeds marvelously, I would also insist that anyone who doesn't know the G Major doesn't really know Dvorak well. It is a score that assays high on anybody's test for musical gold: a spirited first movement, full of thrust and flowing ideas; a narrative kind of slow movement; followed by a dance piece of irresistible lilt and per suasion. And need I say more about the G Major, for those as yet unacquainted with it, than that, as fine as the preceding movements are, the fully fulfilled variations-finale in itself contains more music than those three combined? The Eighth constitutes such a gourmet collation of musical treats that there can be no argument except about who serves it up the best. At the outset there is Herbert von Karajan, who has chosen the Vienna Philharmonic (Lon don CS 6443) to assist him in making the most of his musical discrimination, conductorial skills, and sonic sense.
---------- "There is a homespun quality to Dvorak's music,
skeins of Brahms and of his own Czech heritage contributing . . .
Alas, the effort is found wanting in the balance, the scales being tipped on the performance side by a lack of knowledge of the Dvorak idiom--this cannot be learned from the E Minor ( New World) alone.
Kubelik's virtues and shortcomings in Dvorak are by now well defined, and they are evident here: energy, insight, and perception are lessened by a want of lightness of touch in the final variations (the Berlin Philharmonic is the orchestra, DG 139 181). Mehta and the Israel Philharmonic? The stakes are higher here than in No. 7, and this combination (on London CS 6979) doesn't have the face cards for a winning hand.
Why not, then, the Szell/Cleveland performance (Angel S-36043) with its accompanying Slavonic Dances (E Mi nor, Op. 72, No. 2, and A-flat Major, Op. 46, No. 3)? The appeal of this performance (dated April 28, 1970, and thus the last recorded by Szell, who died on July 30 of the same year) is mighty. Perhaps the only Dvorak sym phony other than the New World to be recorded three times by the same conductor (the earliest Szell recording of the G Major, with the Concertgebouw of Amsterdam, is still to be found on Turnabout 34525E), it here enjoys Sze11's final thoughts on the subject.
These are, to my taste, a little pedagogic, something of a sermon from the podium.
Which brings us in the end to the long shadow from the past cast by the mystic mastery of that old musical smoothie Bruno Walter. What I find distilled in his quietly irresistible effort with the Columbia Symphony (West Coast branch, Odyssey Y-33231) are the Walter feeling for Schubert, for Brahms, even for the Bohemian side of Mahler-the perfect combination for what Dvorak requires in the G Major Symphony. In short, Walter takes it.
Symphony No. 9 (From the New World)
Dvorak would very likely have written a fifth (or ninth) symphony in EMi nor even if he hadn't visited America in 1892-1894, and it would possibly have shared some of the same colorations as the one he did in fact write. As a connoisseur of folk melodies, Dvorak ex pressed a high regard for the examples of Negro and Indian origin with which he became familiar not long after his arrival in America in 1892. But, as a prideful composer, he rejected the simplistic legend that the success of the New World derived from the power resident in such melodies as Swing Low, Sweet Chariot and Deep River.
What he had done, with the skill of a consummate craftsman, was to convert Dvorak...such tunes into themes suitable for symphonic elaboration.
To wonder how his many interpreters deal with such considerations would be an idle speculation; most conductors are interested in results and not causes. One who did speak for the record is the late Leopold Stokowski, whose brief lecture of 1927 is reproduced in a package (RCA CRL2-0334) that combines his New Philharmonia recording of 1973 with the Philadelphia Orchestra version made fifty (!) years ago. He doesn't make a point of the difference between a tune and a theme (a tune is a self-contained entity; a theme is an un-hatched egg full of possibilities), merely identifying one theme as "a wild but soothing Negro lullaby." No real illumination there.
The two performances are clearly a product of the same intuitively theatrical personality, with some-but not all-of the eccentricities of 1927 perpetuated in the version of 1973 (the performance with the deep, non-Dvorakian tam-tam bong in the finale was made in the Fifties). The thrust, the linearity, and the glissandos of the 1927 performance are all, for better or for worse, part of the tonal manner that earned Stokowski his fame.
The great merits of the music are not exactly impervious to the way in which they are rendered, but the most modest of the performances, those by Kertesz (London CS 6527, which also contains the Othello Overture) and Neumann (Vanguard SU-8) are savorous and, to a degree, wholesomely rewarding. Like many others, the Kubelik version (with the Berlin Philharmonic, DG 2530 415) takes the repeat in the first movement.
Kubelik's largo is uncommonly deliberate, but the playing of the orchestra's fine solo personnel is superbly illustrative of the new, high level of artistry and elegance embodied in Dvorak's instrumental texture.
Giulini makes his opening (Philharmonia Orchestra, Seraphim S-60045) a bit choppy, as though he were not quite firmly seated in the Western saddle.
The internal movements contain a good deal of fine playing, but the dimensions of the finale as Giulini views them do not measure up to the vast territory with which Dvorak was dealing. Riccardo Muti with the New Philharmonia (Angel S-37230) comes on strong at the end, but one derives little sense of identity with the materials of the three preceding movements. And Rowicki with the London Symphony (Philips 802903) spoils an otherwise intelligent effort with a largo that is all but casual.
A step upward to an extraordinarily high level of orchestral execution is en countered in the versions by a half-dozen world-famous conductors of the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies. All but Klemperer find the repeat in the first movement dispensable. My one-time preference for Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony (RCA VICS 1249E, in electronic stereo and including Schumann's Manfred Overture) has now been backed down to admiration for the real sense of "performance" that emanates from this February 2, 1953, effort. Otherwise, the verdict is much too fast, insufficiently reflective.
The Fritz Reiner/Chicago Symphony version (RCA LSC-2214) is one of the best, for all that it is now nearly twenty years old, a resounding foreshadowing of the orchestra-to-be under Solti. Outstanding, in the finale, is a splendid example of a controlled accelerando which Reiner builds with a musical, though almost computerized, precision. Antal Dorati, with the New Philharmonia, doesn't quite pass this test without suggesting the parade ground in the finale (London Phase 4 SPC 21025). Ormandy performs a small miracle in producing the Philadelphia Orchestra sound with the London Symphony strings (Columbia MS 7089), but he doesn't quite achieve the larger miracle of breaking out of the four-square rhythmic frame that has surrounded much of his work in recent years.
Herbert von Karajan is no more successful (in a rich-sounding version with the Berlin Philharmonic, DG 138 922) in imparting a sense of the Dyadic idiom to Symphony No. 9 than he is in Symphony No. 8 with the Vienna Philharmonic. Klemperer, it should be mentioned, adds to his virtuous preference for the repetition in the first movement (with the Philharmonia on Angel S-36246) a prime suggestion of the symphony's American locale. As the four movements succeed each other in a continent-spanning stroll, they bring to mind nothing so much as "Ol' man river," who "jus' keeps rollin' along." The trip lasts a leisurely 44"59' with Klemperer as opposed to a brisk 39"12' with Giulini.
["(Bernstein's] is a fantastically unified performance that poses many challenging questions and supplies the persuasive answers"
But there is still one more New World, one more premium orchestra, one more first-rank conductor to encounter. In his 1962 recording with the New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein is almost too fervently incisive, but what he assembles, measure by measure, movement by movement, is a fantastically unified performance that poses many challenging questions and supplies the persuasive answers.
For example, why take the repeat in the first movement? Because Dvorak's "first ending" shows that he has plot ted a return to the beginning as an inherent part of his musical scheme. Why restrain the largo to a level barely louder than a piano throughout? Because the context is not only reverential in spirit, but, when fully understood, sacramental. Why the dry, precise articulation of the dotted figure for strings in the scherzo? Because the note pattern otherwise lacks definition and hence character. Why the triumphant trilling of woodwinds at measure 6 after No. 11 in the finale? Because Dvorak has here converted his sophisticated forces into the likeness of skirling pipes to celebrate his conquest of distances and dangers. Nobody else in all the versions I have sampled comes close to equaling this insight. Nobody else understands the specifically American element in this score as Bernstein and the Philharmonic of that time did together.
IN the aftermath of the stupendous success of the New World at its world premiere in Carnegie Hall on December 16, 1893, under the direction of Anton Seidl, Dvorak cited to his publisher Simrock the only comparable ovation he could recall: "alla Mascagni in Wien." It was a reference to the over whelming response of the Viennese when Cavalleria Rusticana was first performed in Italian under the composer's direction in September 1892.
When the proof sheets of the score of the New World were ready they went to Brahms, who had generously agreed, in Dvorak's absence in America, to read them. When this information reached Dvorak, he wrote back, saying: "I can hardly believe there is in the world such a musician" (who would do for a colleague what Brahms did for him). It was, of course, after thirty years of undeviating effort, an undoubted tribute, the final accolade: one who had begun as a mere Musikant had become a Musiker worthy of the esteem of Brahms himself.
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