His muse: America

A dozen years ago, the onetime Manhattan home of Antonin Dvorak was torn down to make way for an AIDS clinic. Protests were raised to no avail. A New York Times editorial supporting this act of cultural vandalism was headlined “Dvorak Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.” The editorial warned of city streets “dotted with shrines because a celebrity passed through.”

It is true that Dvorak only lived in New York from September 1892 to April 1895. His impact, however, was disproportionately great. Though his “New World” Symphony, composed in New York, has forever been the most popular symphony written on American soil, the heroic scope of Dvorak’s American sojourn has until recently been incompletely remembered. One could even say with some confidence that if the Dvorak House on East 17th Street still existed, the findings of Michael Beckerman would be sufficient to silence arguments that its most famous occupant -- once the most famous musician in the United States -- had merely “passed through.”

More than any other scholar since Dvorak’s time, Beckerman has demonstrated the degree to which Dvorak penetrated the American psyche. Charged by Jeannette Thurber, the visionary music educator who lured him to New York, to support the creation of an American national school of music, Dvorak devoured American sights and sounds. In search of American folk music, he embraced plantation song and Indian chant. Researching the American soul, he stumbled upon our most sensitive national sagas: the slave trade and the Indian Wars. He singularly influenced and inspired more than a generation of American composers. He produced his own most enduring symphony and string quartet, both charged with a New World accent. In the annals of Western concert music, there is really nothing else like it.

Dvorak’s search for America was a topic of heated debate. In Boston, he was denounced as a “negrophile.” In New York, a city of immigrants, he was taken to heart. He was constantly discussed, and occasionally quoted, in the daily press. About the “New World” Symphony, he testified that the middle movements were inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha,” once the most read of all American literary works.

The exact relationship between “Hiawatha” and Dvorak was never made clear. Beckerman has pursued this connection with exemplary tenacity. Starting with the Indian dance of the Scherzo, with its tom-tom accompaniment, he has limned a series of programmatic suggestions that, as a whole, will persuade reasonably credulous listeners to hear this familiar music with new ears.

Not all of Beckerman’s detective work is musical. He has demonstrated that the most famous words Dvorak ever uttered -- his prescription, as quoted in the New York Herald, that “the future music of this country must be founded upon what are called the negro melodies” -- were in fact written by the yellow journalist James Creelman, whose other accomplishments included getting shot in the Spanish-American War.

Many of Beckerman’s revelations were first published in scholarly journals. They are here assembled and amplified in a book by no means exclusively intended for scholars. The tone of the prose is chatty. And, in place of printed musical examples, there is a CD, keyed to the text, of musical examples mainly played (and even sung) by the author. Track 69, for instance, juxtaposes a theme from the Larghetto of Dvorak’s Violin Sonatina with a tune from his “Hiawatha” sketchbook entitled “Minnehaha” -- and so clinches yet another Beckerman argument: that this famous little movement, once popularized by Fritz Kreisler as the “Indian Lament,” is a portrait of Hiawatha’s wife as described by Longfellow. Its oscillating major and minor modes evoke Minnehaha’s “wayward moods” of “shade and sunshine.” Its tinkly rolled keyboard chords, high in the treble, evoke Minnesota’s Minnehaha Falls, after which Minnehaha was named, and which Dvorak enthusiastically visited.

A Russian Israeli pianist of my acquaintance, who has long performed the Dvorak Sonatina, insists that its American accent is purely speculative. And there are doubtless dozens of Old World conductors who still believe that the “New World” Symphony is -- as was first proclaimed in Boston, by way of minimizing “barbarian” ingredients flavoring music so incontrovertibly stirring -- as Bohemian as any other by Dvorak. In the face of the evidence marshaled by Beckerman, these ignorant assurances may once and for all be dismissed. The most astonishing of Beckerman’s CD tracks sample his own “Hiawatha Melodrama” (performed by the Pacific Symphony at its Dvorak festival last season), in which verses from Longfellow’s poem are laid upon passages from Dvorak’s symphony, each a musical picture worth 1,000 words.

But no act of Dvorak denial compares to the learned commentaries that minimize or discount the New World complexion of the “American” Suite. This obscure 1894 opus, little-known even in America (where it deserves repertoire status), is a virtual lexicon of Americana: of cakewalk and plantation song, of vistas majestic or poignantly vacant. The finale is an Indian dance that, upon modulating to the major, turns into a minstrel song.

I wish Beckerman had taken the time to document in full the range of Dvorak’s New World vocabulary here revealed: how, for example, he imitates a banjo just before the coda to the finale. Rather, Beckerman attunes his hearing to something subtler. In Dvorak, as in most classical music preceding the 20th century revolutions of Stravinsky and Schonberg, the relationship of tonic and dominant harmonies imparts directionality. In the “American” Suite -- in Dvorak’s American music generally -- this relationship is frequently sidestepped. The result is music casual or serene, “popular” or pastoral, disdaining dramatic or erotic urgencies and rising instead to a poetics of stasis. When Beckerman heretically but accurately proposed the “American” Suite as “the most characteristic and revealing work of [Dvorak’s] American period,” this is what he has in mind.

Two overriding claims of “New Worlds of Dvorak” (one about Dvorak, the other about Dvorak and America) are powerfully posed but not clinched. It is Beckerman’s central contention that Dvorak’s American output singularly reveals the composer’s “inner life” and so propels new appreciation of his creative stature. “That Dvorak was modest, straightforward, and uncomplicated,” writes Beckerman, “is true beyond a doubt.” But “he was also fully aware of his own worth, deceptive, and complex. That is why he is worth writing about, and more important, why he is” -- Beckerman’s most extreme claim -- “no second-tier Master but rather the equal of Wagner, Beethoven, and Brahms.”

One Dvorak attribute that emerges is the kind of psychological and emotional stress Gilded Age Americans termed “neurasthenia.” Beckerman’s diagnosis is agoraphobia. The symptoms, in Dvorak’s case, included fear of storms and of the electrical wires powering New York City trams, and an unwillingness to venture outdoors without a companion. Beckerman proposes a creative personality comparably susceptible to tenebrous storms of feeling.

Supporting this portrait is a further psychological extrapolation: that Dvorak’s American prestige and the gripping supremacy of Wagnerism in 1890s New York emboldened a composer shadowed in Vienna by his sometime model and patron Johannes Brahms. It was in the United States, Beckerman believes, that Dvorak crucially explored his fundamental affinity with Wagner. Upon returning to Prague, Dvorak eventually abandoned symphonies and string quartets for tone poems and operas. There is recklessness in this argument: that Dvorak wrote big operas does not make him a Wagner any more than his big symphonies necessarily make him a Beethoven. This page of Beckerman’s brief is a premise, not a proof.

The book’s other great claim tackles the perennial question: How “American” is Dvorak in America? Very American is the answer implicitly amassed by Beckerman’s many examples of American borrowings, of new compositional materials and strategies. But there is much more to be asked and said. Not the least informative aspect of Beckerman’s inquiry is its lineage of controversy. The unmotivated ferocity of Boston’s attack on Dvorak -- on his peasant origins, his lack of formal learning, his “barbarian” Slavic nationalism -- registered the unwanted credibility of Dvorak’s inclusive American vision, in contradiction to an America of Pilgrim fathers and Brahmin bloodlines.

This tumultuous reception history, not to be found in “New Worlds of Dvorak,” helps to frame Dvorak’s -- and Beckerman’s -- message. Above all, the panoramic fullness of the American cultural landscape with which Dvorak intersects ultimately invites a fuller treatment than Beckerman attempts. In this regard, it is doubtlessly demonstrable that Dvorak furnishes the closest musical equivalent to the “American sublime.” The simple forms and open chords of Dvorak’s pastoral style, his penchant for elegiac reverie or God-in-nature grandeur, his painterly poetics of stasis are to American music what Frederic Church and Albert Bierstadt were to 19th century American visual art.

To calibrate Michael Beckerman’s achievement: Excepting Richard Taruskin, no present-day American music historian has so fundamentally altered our understanding of a major European composer. Taruskin’s 1,750-page “Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions” exhaustively contextualizes Stravinsky via excursions into Russian literature, theater and visual arts. Dvorak in America invites comparable extra-musical excursions, for which Beckerman’s intrepid book will doubtless prove an indispensable inspiration, guide and goad. *