When Dvorak Discovered the New World

Pacific Symphony’s American music festivals are quickly becoming a significant, signature achievement in the Southland. With their intimacy and interactive format, the two central chamber music programs offer special opportunities for rewards and insights.

Before the Dvorak in America Festival, which ends with an orchestra program Wednesday and Thursday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, it was easy to regard Dvorak’s three-year sojourn in the United States in a superficial and inaccurate way: He came over for money, grew homesick, went home to Bohemia.

Not quite. He came in 1892 at the invitation of Jeannette Thurber, a visionary educator who wanted him to help in her project of creating a national school of American music. He loved the idea. He found music here that profoundly influenced him, and in turn he inspired hundreds of American composers to pursue Thurber’s project.

Arguably his three greatest works were written during this time: the “New World” Symphony, the “American” String Quartet and the Cello Concerto in D minor.

The guiding force behind the festival is Joseph Horowitz, who offered low-key, urbane, knowledgeable introductions and commentary in the course of the two weekend programs in Founders Hall at the center. Saturday afternoon, the topic was “Dvorak and the American Indian”; Sunday evening, it was “Dvorak and Plantation Song.”

Both halves of the afternoon program opened with Benjamin Hale’s splendid Eagle Spirit Dancers performing authentic dances and songs that could have wowed Dvorak in the touring shows he saw while he was here. (He already was a fan of Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha,” having read it in Czech and later in English. He planned a “Hiawatha” opera, which never materialized, but the Scherzo of the “New World” Symphony depicts, he said, a scene from Longfellow’s poem.)

The influence of Indian music in the Thurber-Dvorak project was then traced through works of the Czech master, Americans Charles Wakefield Cadman and Arthur Farwell, and German Ferruccio Busoni.

Each composer filtered the influence in a different way, from Cadman’s audience-friendly art music idealizations to Busoni’s mystical, sometimes proto-Copland flights, to Farwell’s bold, clear marriage of Impressionism with what would emerge as the Broadway style of Rodgers and Hammerstein. Amazing stuff.

Far from feeling indignant at Indian culture’s being expropriated and exploited, Navajo Ben Hale said in the discussion that followed, “a lot [of Indians] would find it humorous because of the different instruments--piano and violin--instead of rattle, drum and flute, which come from the world around us, Mother Nature. It just goes off in a different way.”

The accomplished and exciting musicians were violinist Paul Manaster, pianist Robert Thies, baritone James Martin Schaefer (accompanied by Grant Rohan) and the a cappella California State University Fullerton Chorus led by John Alexander. The singers invented the gripping, iconic gestures they used in Farwell’s “Navajo War Dance.”

Sunday, Michael Beckman, a lively and engaging Dvorak scholar at UC Santa Barbara, used musical examples to demolish the composer’s claim that he invented rather than borrowed thematic material for his American works. But he did this playfully, arguing that the borrowing could have been unconscious and that composers do this kind of thing all the time.

Still, those of us in the audience will never hear Dvorak’s music the same way again.

The principal strings of the orchestra--concertmaster Raymond Kobler, violinist Zakarias Grafilo, violist Robert Becker and cellist Timothy Landauer--played the “American” String Quartet with fervor and sweetness and brought freshness and epic seriousness to the final two movements of George Chadwick’s Quartet No. 4 (inspired by the “American” and, when written, in 1896, attacked as being too much influenced by “the negrophile” Dvorak).

The accomplished and versatile Thies, whom Horowitz justifiably called “the workhorse of the festival,” played works by Scott Joplin (Dvorak was a fan of the cakewalk), Dvorak and Art Tatum (a version of Dvorak’s famous Humoresque No. 7--the one everyone knows from cartoons and parodies), with style and aplomb. Baritone Carver Cossey sang two spirituals (arranged by African American Harry Burleigh, Dvorak’s personal assistant in the States) and William Arms Fisher’s words set to “Goin’ Home” with deep feeling.

Although the issue of composers creating a national American style is “still a vexing question,” as Horowitz said, the festival has definitely shown that Dvorak must figure into the center of any answer.

The Pacific Symphony’s Dvorak in America Festival continues Wednesday and Thursday, 8 p.m., Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. $21-$56. (714) 556-2787.