I attended a high school orchestra concert recently – the group’s final concert of the year – and the teacher allowed seniors to select pieces they particularly enjoyed playing over the years to be part of the program. One student chose an abridged version of Tchaikovsky’s “Serenade for Strings,” a beautiful piece to be sure.
That made me wonder if other composers wrote “serenades” for strings, so I ran a Google search. Of course, Tchaikovsky’s work topped the list in the results of my search, but the second piece mentioned was Antonín Dvořák's Serenade for Strings in E Major so I picked that as the piece I would listen to this week. Perhaps I have heard this work before – most likely on the radio – as some of it did sound a bit familiar, and it is a decent piece. I did like it, but I can’t say that I did love it. Dvořák's Serenade is in five movements:
It is a pleasant enough piece, and descriptions for each of the movements can be found HERE. However, it really didn’t capture my attention or my desire to hear it again (last week, when I listened to Philip Glass’ Violin Concerto, I kept listening to that final movement over and over again). Dvořák's piece has some drama, but not like the emotion and force of the opening movement of Tchaikovsky’s Serenade. It has joy, but not like the jubilant strings of Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 4. It has melancholy, but not like the Adagio by Samuel Barber. Dvořák's serenade is just – pleasant. A likable piece to listen to, but just a bit too “meh” for my taste.
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Written in 1893, the String Quartet in F Major was composed by Antonin Dvořák when he was vacationing in the Czech community of Spillville, Iowa. It has been nicknamed (not by the composer) the “American” for its presumed association with American folk songs, African-American music and spirituals, and perhaps even a Native American tune.
However, British music critic Paul Griffith doubted specific American influences, and he once wrote, “In fact the only American thing about the work is that it was written there." Others have shared his skepticism about the connection to Americana in the piece. Still, Dvořák did write in a letter, “As for my new Symphony (which he himself named 'From the New World'), the F major String Quartet and the Quintet, I should never have written these works ‘just so’ if I hadn’t seen America.” Although I have not been able to find specific references to American tunes, folk songs, or spirituals among the passages within the four movements, portions of the quartet do most certainly evoke the sound and character of 19th century America. As a matter of fact, this quartet calls to mind more about Walt Whitman and his time than Gustav Holst’s “Walt Whitman Overture” which I reviewed four weeks ago, HERE. Dvořák’s quartet is composed of four movements:
I enjoyed the quartet very much, and to be honest, some of it sounded vaguely familiar. Did that have something to do with potential connections to American folk songs and spirituals? Or had I actually heard this piece before -- maybe as a selection on the radio as I’ve had it playing in the background? I know that I’ve never heard the quartet played live in concert, nor have I owned an album or CD that featured this work. The first movement opens with fluttering violins, and three measures in, the viola introduces a spirited and folksy melody that is echoed and developed throughout the piece by all four instruments. A second soft and sweet melody begins about a minute and a half into the work, and later, after a short fugato bridge, the movement repeats and restates these melodies. In typical fashion, the second movement slows things down with a bit of melancholy expressed first by the violin. The lament is then shared and developed throughout the piece. Still, in the vein of a spiritual, the tone conveys joy even when speaking of sadness, and it never conveys hopelessness. The tempo picks up again in the third movement with a cheerful refrain. There’s a bit of drama here and there with shifts to passages in a minor key, but overall the verve and buoyancy continue through the third and fourth movements. The fourth movement is bright and jaunty to be sure. So, did Dvorak allude to specific folk songs or spirituals within his quartet? Or like music critic Paul Griffith wrote, is “the only American thing about the work is that it was written there”? The quartet does convey a sense of Americana, but the architecture (or -- if you prefer -- the grammar) of the piece isn’t purely American in the way of something like Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” or -- to cite a more modern example -- a string quartet by Mark O’Connor. O’Connor’s String Quartet No. 2 (nicknamed “Bluegrass”), HERE, is so American, in fact, that he probably should have called it his “Fiddle Concerto No. 2.” An article on Wikipedia about Dvorak’s quartet does note, “While the influence of American folk songs is not explicit in the quartet, the impact of Dvořák's quartet on later American compositions is clear. Following Dvořák, a number of American composers turned their hands to the string quartet genre, including John Knowles Paine, Horatio Parker, George Whitefield Chadwick, and Arthur Foote. The article gives the final word to British composer and conductor Neil Butterworth who wrote, "The extensive use of folk-songs in 20th century American music and the 'wide-open-spaces' atmosphere of 'Western' film scores may have at least some of their origins" in Dvořák's new American style. |
A New Hope:As the header above says, each week I will listen to a piece of classical music that I've never heard before, and then I will report out what I thought about it. Archives
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