Dvorak’s New World Symphony: as legend has it, the sound of a music that heralded a new dawn for American music, the product of the then-New-York-based composer’s own statement “in the Negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music”.

This E Minor Symphony was the first that Dvořák completed in his two-and-a-half year stay in the US. He was brought over by a wealthy patron of the arts to set up a music conservatory, the forerunner of today’s Juilliard School. And the fact that Dvořák was influenced by the spirituals and songs that he heard from one of his most important pupils, Harry T. Burleigh, is not in doubt. But apart from a strong allusion to Swing Low, Sweet Chariot in the second main melody of the first movement (compare them yourself!), it’s astonishing that Dvořák’s own clear statement to the New York Herald at the time of the symphony’s premiere – at Carnegie Hall with the New York Philharmonic on 16 December 1893 – was not properly attended to. “It is merely the spirit of Negro and Indian melodies which I have tried to reproduce in my new symphony. I have not actually used any of the melodies”. Later, in 1900, he said in a letter: “leave out that nonsense about my using Indian and American motifs – it is a lie!” and again, “It was my intention only to write in the spirit of these national American melodies”. That “lie” went so far as imagining that the soulful cor anglais melody in the slow movement (which may have associations of different kind of folk spirit for anyone of my vintage, of a kid on a bicycle struggling up a cobbled street with batch of wholemeal loaves in a prelapsarian vision of the country-bumpkin-far-west – that Hovis ad, basically!) was itself an authentic “American melody”: in fact, the words of “Goin’ Home” were added to the tune years later by another of Dvořák’s pupils.

So how many of these American melodies had he actually heard? As this account at antonin-dvorak.cz shows, Dvořák’s only possible encounters with Indian as opposed to “Negro” melodies up to the time he wrote the E minor symphony would actually have come in Prague in 1879, when a group of Iroquois Indians came to display their dancing, songs, and equestrian war-tricks to the Czechs, and it’s likely Dvořák saw notated examples of the tunes they sang made by a friend of his. Otherwise, he could perhaps have seen Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in New York – but that’s all. The symphony is also often heard as a pre-Copland evocation of America’s wide-open spaces, but Dvořák only made his first trip away from the metropolis to the vastnesses of the America’s inland after he had completed the piece (although he did add the title, “From the New World”, when the symphony was being copied out while he was on holiday in Spillville, Iowa, with its large community of Czech immigrants, where he wrote the “American” string quartet and his E flat major String Quintet).

So does that mean that all of those supposedly direct connections between Dvořák’s symphony and American identity are mostly fiction, the result of critics and audiences hearing what they want to hear in a new piece of music, rather than what it actually is? In a sense, yes, but there is a deeper connection between the tunes of the piece and a broader community of folk melodies, tunes that come from Celtic, European, as well as indigenous American forms. In imbibing “the spirit” of the spirituals and melodies that he really did hear, from Harry T. Burleigh and others, Dvořák created tunes that are capable of resonating with any folk traditions that use the pentatonic (five-note) scale, or which employ the flat seventh as opposed to the leading note of the scale, as most jazz scales do; technical reasons why the New World Symphony can legitimately be heard as an evocation of some kind of musical otherness, of voices and “spirits” from outside the conventions of the late 19th century European symphony.

And yet that’s exactly what this piece is. It is a late-romantic European symphony, just one that happened to be composed in, and influenced by, Dvořák’s experience in the US. Some critics realised that at the time: the composer Victor Herbert, asked if he thought the piece would catalyse a new American school of composition, replied, “Yes, if the composers are Dr. Dvořák”. Not exactly a thriving future for “American” music, then.

With its community of themes that appear throughout the symphony (in one brilliant place in the finale, Dvořák seamlessly combines tunes from the slow movement, the scherzo third movement, and the finale), Dvořák extends principles that he knew from Beethoven, Brahms, and Schumann. But as well as the traditional ways of hearing Dvořák’s 9th – either as an American evocation or a late-romantic triumph of thematic cycles and integration – there are others, too. The music plays with memory, both in the way that melodies from the first movement, say, return in every successive movement, but also with a larger idea of reminiscence, nostalgia, and something darker. That slow movement (which starts with those surreal, sublime brass chords, music that returns with visionary power, in a completely different, dramatic context near the end of the finale) isn’t as simple as an unforgettable tune and a series of contrasting rustic episodes. For me, that music sounds more and more like a lament, a keening.

If Dvořák really was remembering Harry T. Burleigh’s voice (and you can hear him here!) – the cor anglais was a closer musical analogue for the human voice than the clarinet that Dvořák originally planned to play the tune – then the music is a token of the spirituals he heard him sing, with their own reflections of hope achieved through terrible adversity; it also could be a tribute to Dvořák’s far-away homeland, or even to the lands of the American Indians that Dvořák knew were taken from them. Today, precisely because of its redolent, immediate power, I think that melody is an emblem of a lost pastoral innocence that becomes and ever-more impossible dream. I feel the same ambivalence at the very end of the symphony, when the music wrenches itself from an epically slowed-down minor-key version of the main tune of the finale to a blaze of major-key glory: somehow it’s that abyss of darkness before the dawn that seems to haunt my memory after the symphony has finished.

Five key recordings

Karel Ancerl/Czech Philharmonic Orchestra: dynamic, vivid, earthy, lyrical, unpredictable.



Charles Mackerras/Prague Symphony Orchestra: a lifetime of experience in this repertoire shines through Mackerras’s live performance.

Claudio Abbado/Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra: Abbado and the Berlin Phil make the New World genuinely “new”, in simultaneous joyfulness and profundity.

Rafael Kubelik/Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra: sensational playing from an earlier generation of Berlin Phil players; sensational and unique imagination from Kubelik.

Marin Alsop/Baltimore Symphony Orchestra: one of the most insightful, intelligent, and impassioned of recent recordings.

•Roger Norrington conducts the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra in Dvořák’s New World Symphony at the Proms on 3 September.