Born on September 8, 1841, in the village of Nelahozeves in Bohemia (then part of the Austrian Empire); Died on May 1, 1904, in Prague
Slavonic Dances, Opus 72
No. 1 in B major: Molto vivace
No. 2 in E minor: Allegretto grazioso
No. 3 in F major: Allegro
No. 4 in D-flat major: Allegretto grazioso
No. 5 in B-flat minor: Poco adagio - Vivace
No. 6 in B-flat major: Moderato, quasi menuetto
No. 7 in C major: Allegro vivace
No. 8 in A-flat major: Grazioso e lento, quasi tempo di valse
Composed: 1886-87
Estimated length: 36 minutes
First performance: The orchestrated versions of Nos. 1, 2, and 7 were first performed on January 6, 1887 in Prague, with the composer conducting the National Theater Orchestra
First Nashville Symphony performance: These are the Nashville Symphony's first performances of the complete Opus 72 on a Classical program.
As a Czech outside the mainstream of Central European musical life, Antonín Dvořák faced limited opportunities in the Prague of the 1870s. He decided to apply for annual government grants administered by a committee in the imperial capital of Vienna and won three times. One of the jury members, Johannes Brahms, connected young Dvořák with his own publisher, Fritz Simrock, who took a chance on a set of folk poetry settings that the Czech had submitted as one of his grant applications.
Hoping to repeat the success story of Brahms’s Hungarian Dances, Simrock then commissioned a fresh series of dances for the lucrative piano four-hands market. With the Hungarian Dances as a template, in 1878 Dvořák wrote an initial set of eight Slavonic Dances (Op. 46) for the keyboard, which he orchestrated at the same time. Their popularity served as his ticket to international fame.
Some years later, in 1885, Simrock requested a sequel along the same lines. His new star composer, however, was by this point reluctant to be seen repeating himself and responded: “Excuse me, please, I am not in the mood for merry music like this… It is very difficult to do the same thing twice.” Yet lightning did strike again, and Dvořák produced a second set of eight Slavonic Dances—also in versions initially for piano duet (written in June and July 1886) and then orchestrated (from November 1886 to January 1887). These were published as Op. 72.
Despite the model of Brahms’s Hungarian Dances (for which that composer also wrote sequels), Dvořák took a different approach to the Slavonic Dances—something more comparable to what Béla Bartók would do with folk music in the following century. While Brahms simply arranged pre-existing tunes, Dvořák crafted melodies of his own. They resemble authentic folk music so convincingly that they could easily be mistaken as transcriptions “from the field.”
The biographer David Hurwitz points out that Dvořák refused the generic title Czech Dances suggested by Simrock, “preferring instead to cast a wider net and include representative dance forms from all over Eastern Europe [hence the choice of Slavonic Dances]. The result of this catholicity not only highlights his desire not to be limited by national labels, it reflects his deliberate intention from the very outset of his professional career to achieve success on an international scale.”
WHAT TO LISTEN FOR
Overall, the eight dances comprising Op. 72 Dances are “more introspective than the ebullient first set,” notes Hurwitz, and show “greater sophistication in the orchestration (particularly in the more subtle use of percussion), with no loss of melodic appeal.”
Dvořák freely moves across dance types originating across the Slavic world, starting with a Slovak dance in B major (odzemek) whose calm central section is framed by rousing music. The melancholy and reflective No. 2 in E minor is a Ukrainian dumka, followed by a Bohemian skočná (No. 3 in F major) and another dumka (No. 4 in D-flat major). After a rather stately Czech spacírka (No. 5 in B-flat minor), a traditional Moravian starodávný (the minuet-like No. 6 in B-flat major) features delightful woodwind scoring. A form of the circle dance from Serbia known as the kolo then amps up the energy level (No. 7 in C major), while a sousedská (No. 10 in A-flat major, the longest of the eight) closes set Dvořák’s set of colorfully imaginative dances with a calmly graceful Bohemian waltz called a sousedská (No. 10 in A-flat major).
2 flutes and piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, percussion (cymbals, bass drum, and triangle), and strings
− Thomas May is the Nashville Symphony's program annotator.
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Michael Francis, conductor
Natasha Paremski, piano
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