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Updated: June 13, 2025
When Dvorák is himself, and does not pass outside the boundaries within which he can breathe freely, he produces results so genuine and powerful that one might easily mistake him for a great musician; but when he competes with Beethoven or Handel or Haydn, we at once realise that he is not expressing what he really feels, but what he thinks he should feel, that he is not at his ease, and that our native men can beat him clean out of the field.
They made plain how much of beauty the chamber music repertory offered the amateur string player; not only in the classic repertory Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Spohr; in Schubert, Schumann, Brahms; but in Smetana, Dvořák and Tschaikovsky; in César Franck, Debussy and Ravel.
At the age of seven he began the study of the piano with Alfred M. Livonius, with whom he went to Vienna at the age of seventeen. There he studied the piano with Anton Door, and composition with Fuchs, completing in two years a three years' course in harmony and counterpoint. Returning to New York, he studied with Rafael Joseffy and with Doctor Dvôrák for one year.
It seems a poet of distant land at the same time and in the same tones uttered his longing for his own country and expressed the pathos and the romance of the new. Dvôrák, like all true workers, did more than he thought: he taught Americans not so much the power of a song of their own, as their right of heritage in all folk-music.
Then, too, I have presented transcriptions by Arthur Hartmann, Francis Macmillan and Sol Marcosson, as well as some of my own. Transcriptions are wrong, theoretically; yet some songs, like Rimsky-Korsakov's 'Song of India' and some piano pieces, like the Dvořák Humoresque, are so obviously effective on the violin that a transcription justifies itself.
He has the Slav fire, rash impetuosity, passion and intense melancholy, and much also of that Slav naïveté which in the case of Dvorák degenerates into sheer brainlessness; he has an Oriental love of a wealth of extravagant embroidery, of pomp and show and masses of gorgeous colour; but the other, what I might call the Western, civilised element in his character, showed itself in his lifelong striving to get into touch with contemporary thought, to acquire a full measure of modern culture, and to curb his riotous, lawless impulse towards mere sound and fury.
And now, let me play Chopin to you, or Dvorak? Shall I play you a fantasy by Dvorak? He writes passionate, curiously-coloured things. ERNEST. No; I don't want music just at present. It is far too indefinite.
I remember the Philharmonic in its glory one evening, when it had a couple of distinguished foreigners to a kind of musical high tea, very bourgeois, very long and very indigestible. One of the pair of distinguished foreigners was Mr. Sauer; the other, Dvorák, was the hero of the evening.
Antonin Dvôrák, brought this idea into general prominence, though it had been discussed by American composers, and made use of in compositions of all grades long before he came here. The vital objection, however, to the general adoption of negro music as a base for an American school of composition is that it is in no sense a national expression.
Instead of that, as she ended a Dvorak dance, he contented himself with one short exclamation which was more eloquent than many words. "Good!" he said, and Cicely was satisfied; but she only said, "Wait, and let me try once more." She turned back to the piano and, after a random chord or two, she played the Alan Breck Overture, played it so well that even its creator was pleased, as he listened.
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