Neglected Bohemian Treasures
While he is best known for works featuring orchestra or small chamber ensembles, Antonín Dvořák also left us a number of significant choral compositions based on biblical and traditional liturgical texts. Prominent among the instrumental works is his Symphony No. 9 in E minor, nicknamed the “New World Symphony,” composed in 1893 while Dvořák was living in the United States. This work may be the most popular of all orchestral works in the classical repertoire, and when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin traveled to the moon in 1969, they took with them a cassette tape containing Dvořák’s exuberant, sometimes wistful, and finally triumphant symphony. One giant leap for all mankind indeed!
While Dvořák was living in New York in the mid-1890s, he also composed a song cycle of Biblical Songs for voice and piano. Later orchestrated by the composer, theseten brief works set texts from the sixteenth-century Kralice Bible, the first complete translation into Czech of the Scriptures. Since this cycle requires only two performers, recordings are plentiful and performances not uncommon.
But Dvořák’s larger-scale sacred choral works deserve much more attention than they have received. Since Dvořák was a devout Roman Catholic, it should come as no surprise that his oeuvre includes settings of the Mass, the Te Deum, the Stabat Mater, and a Requiem. In each of these works one can hear evidence that confirms the judgment of biographer Neil Wenborn: “For the listener, his characteristic musical gift is spontaneity, the ‘heavenly naturalness’ of melodic invention remarked by so many reviewers, both in his own time and since.”
Stabat Mater
In September 1875, while Dvořák was working on the score for one of his eleven operas, he and his wife suffered the death of their two-day-old daughter. Within a few months Dvořák began work on his first large-scale sacred composition, a stirring and passionate musical interpretation of the Stabat Mater Dolorosa, the 20-stanza medieval poem describing the grief of the Virgin Mary as she witnesses the death of her Son (see “With Mary and a Cloud of Witnesses” in the March/April 2020 Touchstone for more about this emotionally wrenching text).
After several months he set this work aside to attend to some other projects. Then, in the late summer of 1877, tragedy struck their household again, when their eleven-month-old daughter Růžena swallowed a poisonous liquid—a solution of phosphorus kept for making matches—and died soon thereafter. A month later (on Antonín’s 36th birthday) their first-born, three-year-old Otakar, succumbed to smallpox. The household was suddenly childless, and Dvořák soon resumed work on his Stabat Mater.
The work was completed in November 1877 but not performed until 1880, when it was received with great public acclaim. Over the next few years, it was widely performed throughout Europe, even impressing American audiences with performances in New York and Pittsburgh. The work’s popularity in England would play a significant part in Dvořák’s future career.
Dvořák divides the 20-stanza poem into ten movements, the first being the longest and most dramatically gripping; as Michael Steinberg observes, its opening minutes “in their breadth, with their poignant chromatics, and their fortissimo outbursts (attesting to Dvořák’s love of Schubert, particularly the ‘Unfinished’ Symphony), compellingly draw us into the agony-filled atmosphere” of the scene at the foot of the Cross.
Each of the work’s ten movements has a different musical texture and emotional quality, thanks to Dvořák’s sensitive deployment of vocal forces—full chorus, soloists, small ensembles of soloists—and his genius for orchestration. From time to time, one hears in the melodies intimations of Dvořák’s musical roots in the sounds and rhythms of his native Bohemia. Melvin Berger remarks that “writing mournful music did not come easily to the genial and generally cheerful composer, so it seems natural that he would somewhat temper the gloominess with the optimism of many folk-tinged melodies.”
Mass in D Major
Ken Myers is the host and producer of the Mars Hill Audio Journal. Formerly an arts editor with National Public Radio, he also serves as music director at All Saints Anglican Church in Ivy, Virginia. He is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
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