Matching Musical Bookends

When life seems overheated and claustrophobic, when winter, as Willa Cather put it, "hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen,” one of the remedies, I have found, is to open the windows of music and let in Antonin Dvorak. Play Amid Nature or the Seventh Symphony; and the plangent, pastoral sounds sweep away all that seems weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable, as it seemed to Hamlet cooped up in his castle. Freshets of melody pure as birdsong, high-hearted bursts of instrumental color awaken the inner air of being and dispel the gloom. To sojourn with Dvorak’s music can be as revivifying as a walk in the woods.

One of the thrilling discoveries for any music lover who wades in beyond the standard repertoire is to learn that Dvorak wrote a good deal more than the "From the New World” Symphony. He wrote nine symphonies in all, as well as concerti, overtures, suites, songs, two sets of Slavonic dances, Masses, a dozen operas, and a number of beguiling tone poems, from Silent Woods to The Noonday Witch.

Dvorak also wrote chamber music, and the list of those pieces doesn't stop with the "American" Quartet or even the popular Piano Quintet or “Dumky" Trio. The two untarnished works heard on this program, for example, fall into the chamber music category. Here, too the air is stirred by a musical freshness, though more by gentle breezes, if one may extend the metaphor, than by the heady winds that blow through the later symphonies.

Dvorak, in fact, wrote two serenades, the more frequently heard being the ingratiating one in E for strings, op. 22. Double that number and you find the Serenade in D minor, op. 44, which makes up the centerpiece of this MHS presentation. Neatly and scrupulously fashioned, it was written in the late 1870s, when things were going well for the composer. Thanks mainly to Brahms, his work was getting attention. His newest scores could be sure of performance.

Still in his thirties, he had been able to give up playing the violin and the viola in Prague orchestras and, after a period of teaching and playing the organ at St Adalbert’s Church in Prague, to devote himself to composing His first important work for chorus and orchestra. Hymnus, had attracted wide attention when it was first performed in 1873. Since then he had written several operas and received a government grant.

Listen to the Finale of Dvorak's Serenade in D Minor, Op. 44

 

It was during this period in his life, then, that Dvorak composed his spontaneous and totally charming Serenade in D minor for woodwinds. It starts Moderato with a kind of march, followed by a graceful Minuet and a songful Andante con moto, ending up with a vigorous Finale. All is light and air in its sunny pages, qualities captured to perfection in this performance by the Orchester der Beethovenhalle Bonn under Dennis Russell Davies.

Listen to the original version of the first movement of Dvorak's Bagatelles, Op. 47

Flanking the serenade before and after, like matching musical bookends, are sets of bagatelles (op. 47) composed during the same happy period. Here, too, the predominant spirit is one of joy and the music seems to have flowed from Dvorak’s pen as naturally as though it wrote itself (this illusion, as is so often the case, was actually the result of painstaking craftsmanship.) The Bagatelles are heard before the Serenade in an arrangement for small orchestra by conductor Davies They are heard again in their original orchestral garb at the end of the concert. It was no hardship to hear them a second time.