Symphony No. 8 in G major, Op. 88
Related Artists/Companies
Antonín DvorákUpcoming Performances
National Symphony Orchestra: Iván Fischer, conductor/Mischa Maisky, cello, plays Tchaikovsky - Jan 28 - 30, 2010
NSO Principal Conductor Iván Fischer leads Tchaikovsky's Rococo Variations and Lensky's Aria featuring cellist Mischa Maisky, whose performances are marked by "sentiment and dancing energy" (The New York Times).
Past Performances
Washington Korean Symphony Orchestra - Nov 23, 2002 at 7:30 PM
National Symphony Orchestra: Itzhak Perlman, Conductor/Emmanuel Pahud, Flute - May 15 - 17, 2003
About the Composition
Another prominent element in his work, of course, was his spontaneous and enthusiastic response to his native culture. This too was part of his nature as a creative artist, and it is not at all surprising that he recommended a similar approach on the part of the aspiring American composers who were his pupils during his three fertile years as director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York (1892-1895). The Symphony in G major was already behind him when he arrived in the New World, and it marked some notable occasions for him here, as it had done earlier in England.
This eminently lovable and truly great work was composed at a time when Dvořák had achieved not only the recognition already noted, but, far more importantly, the self-confidence of knowing he had chosen the right path. Not at all surprisingly for a musician of his time, he was strongly influenced by Wagner in his early works. For him, in fact, that influence was strengthened by direct contact: he actually played the viola in an orchestra Wagner conducted in a concert of his own works on a visit to Prague in 1863. The early symphonies and other works Dvořák composed in the dozen years that followed that event carry the Bayreuth master's strong imprint, with fairly direct allusions in the Third and Fourth symphonies to Tannhäuser, the Overture to which was the concluding number in that 1863 concert.
But it was with music influenced more strongly still by the songs and dances of his native soil—specifically a set of Moravian Duets for soprano and alto—that Dvořák attracted the admiration and meaningful support of Johannes Brahms, who not only recommended him for an Imperial Prize in Vienna but put him in the good hands of his own publisher, Simrock of Berlin. Simrock had enjoyed a great success with Brahms's own Hungarian Dances, originally for piano duet, and it was he who urged Dvořák to undertake a similar cycle, his Slavonic Dances. Not only did he compose the first of his two books of those dances (the eight that constitute his Op. 46) as soon as he came under Simrock's wing, in 1876, but he then proceeded to orchestrate all of them, and in that form they reached a far wider audience and made a much deeper impression.
At that time Dvořák composed several other works in various forms with specifically Czech content. There was a triptych of Slavonic Rhapsodies for orchestra (Op. 45), and such dance forms as the furiant and the sousedská found their way into symphonies and chamber music. The last of his four piano trios, Op. 90 in E minor, is built entirely on the form known as the dumka, in consequence of which that work is known by the plural form of that term: it is the Dumky Trio.
Dvořák composed his Symphony in G major in 1889 and conducted the premiere in Prague on January 2 of the following year. Less than three months later he introduced the work in London at a concert of the Philharmonic Society, the organization that had commissioned Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and had provided the commission for his own splendid Seventh, which he had introduced there in April 1885. He conducted the Eighth in England again in June 1891, when he was given an honorary doctorate at Cambridge University. For some time the work was called his "English"Symphony, simply because its first publication was in England, when Dvořák was briefly on the outs with Simrock. But the work is Czech through and through, and Dvořák seemed to be pleased that it was received that way.
There is a conspicuous interrelationship of themes from one movement to another in several of Dvořák's symphonies and chamber works, among which are examples of "cyclical"treatment of a basic theme or motif. The last and best-known of his symphonies, the one in E minor which he composed in America and called From the New World, is an especially clear example of this characteristic practice, mingling variation, metamorphosis, inversion, and outright quotation of themes as the respective movements succeed one another. The Symphony in G major, which stands next in the hearts of so many listeners (and is ranked a bit higher by more than a few musicians), perhaps goes farther than any of the others in this respect, but also in a somewhat subtler way than the others.
Every theme and sub-motif in this radiant and robust work would appear to be developed from the opening phrase, the cumulative effect of the first three movements being to point to a finale in variation form as their inevitable consequence (not that this is an unusual phenomenon among symphonies with variation-finales). To note the citation of one of Dvořák's own earlier tunes in the third movement, and of a theme in the finale that Smetana had used, in no way invalidates this notion, for both of these tunes happen to show the same sort of relationship to the preceding ones as all the others in this work. There are, after all, more than a few similar instances of composers' having arrived at pre-existing tunes in the working-out of variations on unrelated (or apparently unrelated) themes. One of the best-known such examples is Beethoven's citation of Leporello's opening aria in Mozart's Don Giovanni, "Notte e giorno faticar,"in his Diabelli Variations for piano. Rachmaninoff, to no one's surprise, arrived at the Dies irae in working out his variations on Paganini's famous Twenty-fourth Caprice; Tchaikovsky arrived at the same tune in his variations on an original theme. This list of such things in variation works is quite endless.
While this marked thematic interrelationship will strike some listeners more strongly than others, none need be unduly concerned about it. It is simply one of the underpinnings of a work in which Dvořák's abundant warmth of heart communicates itself with characteristic directness and rhythmic strength, and with a melodic richness (however derived) and feeling for color seldom equaled and never surpassed even among his finest orchestral scores.
An atmosphere of fairy tales and forest legends is evoked in a brief perambulatory section, and then a sequence of birdcalls, woodland sounds and bluff Slavonic marches fills out the first movement. The second, informed with what might be called a devotional element as well as further pastoral idylls, is not without its sterner moments: toward the end a moment of hushed tranquility is shattered by a somber transformation of the movement's opening motif—still discernible as being related to the birdcalls in the preceding movement.
The third movement is not the specifically categorizable Czech dance Dvořák used in place of a conventional scherzo in some of his other works (though elements of the špacírka, sousedská and mazurka may be heard in it), but is a voluptuous waltz which just as surely evokes a village festival. Its bucolic trio is a tune Dvořák recycled from his 1874 opera The Pigheaded Peasants.
The capstone of the Symphony is its stunning finale, exuding good-natured pomp and revelry in its brilliant fanfares, dizzily whirring variation figures and fierce march episodes—one of which crests in a tune cited earlier by Smetana in "Harvest Home,"the last of the six pieces for piano which the older composer produced in 1875 under the collective title Dreams. (While Dvořák hardly ever quoted folk tunes in his works—his Slavonic Dances are built almostentirely on original themes—this would appear to be one of the few exceptions, and also one of the three or four folk tunes used by both him and Smetana.) Dvořák made no fewer than ten false starts before he was able to shape the theme of this variation movement to his satisfaction, but once he succeeded the music came pouring out with a grand, unforced sweep. At the end there is his characteristic falling back to a quiet, nostalgic episode before the jubilant concluding gesture.
In June 1891, when Dvořák went to Cambridge University in England to receive an honorary doctorate, he conducted a long concert of his works which began with the 80-minute Stabat Mater. In writing to a friend at home he remarked that the event had been "very tiring, with enough music to give one indigestion,"but that at the end "the glory was quite frightening." The concluding work on that occasion was the Symphony in G major, with which he scored a still grander triumph on "Bohemian Day"at the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago, August 12, 1893, conducting an orchestra of 114 players for a wildly enthusiastic audience of some 8,000—a demonstration that surpassed even the one that greeted the New World Symphony at its premiere in New York four months later.
In those days, and for some fifty years after Dvořák's death, his Symphony in G major was billed as No. 4, the number he assigned when he gave the score to his English publisher. His final symphony, From the New World, was originally published as No. 5. It was only in the 1950s that all his symphonies, a total of nine rather than five, were renumbered chronologically and the four early ones Dvořák had left unpublished began to be heard.
