Stabat Mater

“Married and father of one unprovided child, has no property.” The Town Clerk's Office of Prague set those words against the name of Antonín Dvořák, teacher of music, born in 1841 and living at house number 1364, on the twenty-fourth of June 1874, and declared them established, “due official investigation having been made”.

The certificate was his own request. On the fifteenth of June he had written to the clerk for “a certificate in German confirming that I am without means”, because one had to be enclosed with his application for a state grant for artists, and the application had to be sent in by the thirtieth of the month. The office took nine days. Apart from his salary as organist and the 60 gulden a month he earned by private teaching, it found, he “has no other source of income”. The unprovided child was Otakar, not yet three months old. The certificate went to Vienna with the application, and with them went the scores of his two most recent symphonies and a number of his other works.

The grant was Vienna's. Every year the Austrian Ministry of Education gave state grants to “young, poor and talented artists”, poets as well as musicians. Its adviser on music was Eduard Hanslick, a writer on the theory of music and for many years the critic of the Vienna daily Neue Freie Presse, and with him on the board that judged the applications sat Johann Herbeck, director of the Vienna Court Opera.

The news of an opera had gone round the choir at St Adalbert's before any of this. According to Foerster, a member of the choir who also sang at the Czech opera brought word that Dvořák had handed in an opera to the theatre, and that “nobody had the courage to ask the presumed author.” Then came a long wait. When the rehearsals began, the reports that reached the choir said nothing about whether the music was any good, and at last, as Foerster put it, “The theatre returned the score to the composer.” It had been found unworkable in rehearsal.

Dvořák, Foerster went on, “consigned the rejected score to the flames of his poor man's fire and began to write again.”

The score did not go into any fire. It turned up long after its composer's death, and the National Theatre in Prague staged that first version on the twenty-eighth of May 1929.

The second half of Foerster's sentence holds. Dvořák kept the libretto, by Bernard Guldener, who wrote under the name B. J. Lobeský, with its Czech king of long ago who loses his way hunting in a deep forest and falls in with a poor charcoal burner's family without telling them who he is, and between the seventeenth of April and the third of November 1874, while he held the organist's post and taught for his living, he set the whole of it to music a second time, from the beginning, keeping not one bar of what he had written before.

Three weeks after he finished, on the twenty-fourth of November, Adolf Čech conducted the first performance of the new King and Charcoal Burner at the Provisional Theatre. This time, Foerster wrote, the reports that came back to the choir had grown better from Sunday to Sunday, and people spoke of a “surprising wealth of melodic beauty” and of the dramatic tension of the principal scenes. The first night was a success, and the theatre gave the opera six more performances.

Probably that autumn, he came to know Leoš Janáček, then a student at the Prague Organ School, and the two of them became friends.

On the eighth of January 1875, by the Czech Dvořák Society's chronology, the ministry in Vienna awarded him a state grant of four hundred gulden.

In the first months of that year he wrote a string quintet, and he entered it in a competition held by the artists' association Umělecká beseda, under a motto dedicating it to his nation. In March he made a short study trip to Vienna, on the twelfth of that month the Association of Czech Dramatists and Composers elected him to its committee, and between the third and the fourteenth of May he wrote a serenade in five movements for string orchestra.

He began Vanda on the ninth of August, an opera in five acts to a libretto that Václav Beneš Šumavský and František Zákrejs had made from a Polish original, the story of a princess of Kraków who chooses a knight of no great rank over a German prince, and who, when the prince brings war on her people, gives up her own life.

Their second child, a daughter, Josefa, was born on the nineteenth of August 1875. She died two days later.

That August he sent the ministry his second application, and he worked on Vanda through the autumn, finishing the score on the twenty-second of December, the month in which he also met Jean Becker, leader of the Florentine Quartet.

In February 1876 the quintet won Umělecká beseda's prize, and on the eighteenth of March it had its first performance, in Prague; between the two, on the fifth of March, the ministry awarded him a second grant, of four hundred gulden again. On the seventeenth of April Čech conducted the first night of Vanda at the Provisional Theatre, where public and critics alike received it well, and the theatre gave it four times that year.

Through all of those weeks he had a larger piece in hand. On the nineteenth of February he began a setting of the Stabat Mater, the medieval Latin poem of the mother standing at the foot of the Cross, and on the seventh of May he finished it: seven movements, for four solo voices, chorus and piano, written in eleven weeks while he was still the organist at St Adalbert's and still teaching.

Some of that teaching was in the house of Jan Neff, who had been born in Moravia, and his wife, Marie Neffová, wrote down her memory of Dvořák in their house, and she began it by saying that it was many years ago. He came to them to teach the piano, and in the evenings he accompanied the family's singing, and what they liked best to sing were duets. The trouble was the choice. They had grown tired, she wrote, of “the hackneyed repetition of Mendelssohn and other German composers”.

Her husband made the suggestion in passing: “Wouldn't it be possible to compose some duets from our own music, for instance from Moravian folk-songs?” Dvořák told him to look out some good texts and he would do the rest, and the family's governess went through a printed collection of Moravian songs and chose about fifteen, to whose old tunes he was to add a second voice and a piano part.

A few days later he came back and refused. “I won't do that,” he told them; “if you like I'll write duets in my own way but I won't write a second part for these things.” Nobody objected. He took the folk verses and wrote music of his own to them, ten duets for soprano and alto with piano, finished in the summer of 1876, and dedicated them to Marie Neffová and her husband. They became the best known of his Moravian Duets.

When she first went through them and praised them, the composer sighed, “A pity I haven't the wherewithal. I'd like to have them published.” Jan Neff said at once that he would see to the publishing, on the understanding that half the edition would be Dvořák's and half the Neffs', and Dvořák agreed, and before the year was out Emanuel Starý, who had founded the first Czech music-publishing firm, had printed eight of the ten.

Then, while Dvořák was away, the Neffs had a number of their copies finely bound and sent them out, without asking him, to leading musicians and critics and to prominent Czech patriots. Bishop Josip Strossmayer, a leader of the Croatian national movement, received his with a patriotic note, and the composer Johannes Brahms and Hanslick received theirs “with the respectful request that they might accept them and give their criticism”, and all of it was done, in her words, “without the slightest inkling on the part of our unsuspecting composer.”

At the end of July he applied to the ministry a third time. On the eighteenth of September 1876 another daughter, Růžena, was born.

On Sunday the tenth of December 1876, in Prague, Čech conducted the first performance of the serenade Dvořák had finished nineteen months before. It is known now as the Serenade for Strings.

There are no winds in it, no brass and no timpani, only violins, violas, cellos and double basses, and it does not begin with the first violins. The second violins have the tune, over a soft pulse in the violas, and in the second bar the cellos answer them; only in the fifth bar do the first violins take the tune up, and with them the double basses come in, plucking. The second movement is a waltz in a minor key. After the middle section the waltz is played again from the beginning: the first violins have the tune, soon doubled in octaves. After the waltz come a quick scherzo, a slow movement and a finale, and the whole serenade lasts under half an hour.

A reviewer wrote that it showed decisive progress in his development, towards greater stability and independence, and the first performance went well enough that the serenade was put straight onto the programme of the next Slavonic Concert.

He applied for a place at a teaching institute on the thirtieth of December, and on the thirty-first, the last day of the year, the ministry in Vienna awarded him his third state grant. It was five hundred gulden.

The first business of the new year was the organ loft. On the second of January the Town Council of Prague acknowledged that Mr Antonín Dvořák, organist to the church of St Adalbert, had asked to be relieved of his duties at his own request from the fifteenth of February, accepted his resignation, and directed the parish office to “cease making payment of salary to the above-named organist” from that day, which was three years to the day after he had been appointed.

In February he began a comic opera in two acts, The Cunning Peasant, to a libretto by Josef Otakar Veselý, and in July, as soon as it was finished, he submitted it to the Provisional Theatre.

In June he travelled round central Bohemia with Janáček. What survives of their walking together is a remark Janáček made to Max Brod, a Prague writer born in 1884, who put it into a book about Janáček decades after that summer: “they used to go for long excursions together on which they were generally silent. Dvořák spoke very little. Often he gave no reply to questions.” Janáček, Brod wrote, set himself hard against the opinion, often heard, that Dvořák was not intelligent: “He thought exclusively in tone,” Brod reported him saying, “and paid no heed to anything else.”

He sent in his fourth application for the state grant on the twenty-sixth of June, and in August his application for a place at a teaching institute was refused.

On the thirteenth of August 1877 Růžena died, of phosphorus poisoning. She was not quite eleven months old. Twenty-six days later, on the eighth of September, which was his thirty-sixth birthday, Otakar died, of smallpox. He was three and a half. They had had three children, and all three had now died, and for the first time since the spring of 1874 there was no child in the house. No words of Anna's own survive in print, and nothing records how she took the deaths.

In October he took up the Stabat Mater again, scored it for full orchestra, enlarged it to ten movements, and finished it on the thirteenth of November. The version for voices and piano had been begun six months after Josefa's death, and this one was made in the weeks after Otakar's. The work has been heard in the light of those dates ever since.

What he finished runs to nearly an hour and a half, for soprano, contralto, tenor and bass soloists, a chorus, and an orchestra with an organ in it. It begins with the orchestra alone, on a single note, repeated and held, and against that note a line that comes down by semitones; it is a long time before anyone sings. In the tenth and last movement, Quando corpus morietur, the music of the opening comes back, and the work ends with a fugue on the single word Amen.

That autumn he and Anna moved to a flat at number 10 Žitná street. On the twenty-sixth of November Anna's elder sister, Josefína Čermáková, married Count Václav Kounic, the owner of the estate of Vysoká, near Příbram, and became Countess Kounicová. On their wedding day the count and his bride invited him to Vysoká, the first invitation he had there.

On Sunday the second of December the orchestra of the Provisional Theatre, conducted by Ludevít Procházka, played a new work of his at the Žofín hall in Prague, at a concert given to raise money for a new church in the Smíchov district: the Symphonic Variations, which he had written between the sixth of August and the twenty-eighth of September. The theme is his own. He took it from a chorus for men's voices, The Fiddler, to words by the poet Adolf Heyduk, and on it he built a set of variations, a little over twenty minutes of music, ending in a fugue that at its height turns into a polka.

By the end of 1877 Brahms sat on the board that judged the grants. He was a North German, born in Hamburg eight years before Dvořák, who had first come to Vienna in 1862 and made the city his home, and he was the composer of A German Requiem.

Around the same time Hanslick wrote to Dvořák from Vienna. The fourth application had succeeded at a recent session with the Minister. Hanslick also told him what to do next: to write to Brahms, and to have a German translation made of his Moravian duets, which Brahms had liked, so that Brahms could recommend them to his publisher. He did both.

On the third of December, from the new flat, he wrote to Brahms. The grant had been awarded, he told him, “on your kind recommendation and that of the Professor”, meaning Hanslick. He thanked Brahms for it and for “the favour with which (as Prof. Hanslick tells me) you received my Czech vocal duets”, and asked him for exactly what Hanslick had proposed, an introduction to his publisher, which would be of immeasurable value, he wrote, “not only for me but also for my beloved country”, and he offered to send some of his chamber music and orchestral works for Brahms to look at.

Brahms's answer was short. “Forgive my being in haste today but I should not like to have the matter delayed.” He had already written about the duets to Fritz Simrock, who published his own music in Berlin, and he gave Dvořák the firm's address in the Friedrichstrasse and told him that the one thing needed was a good German translation. “In any case I beg you not to rush the matter so that the work may not suffer in consequence.”

Dvořák had been away from Prague for some days, and the letter reached him late; when he answered it, on the nineteenth, the German translation of the duets, made by the Czech composer Josef Srb-Debrnov, was already finished and a copy was on its way to Simrock. “May this letter of mine be an auspicious one,” he wrote near the end. Between the seventh and the eighteenth of December he had also written a string quartet.

The letter Brahms sent to Berlin was dated the twelfth of December, and he began it with the name, and with how to say it. “In connection with the State grant, I have for several years past had great pleasure in the works of Antonín Dvořák (pronounce Dworschak) in Prague.”

In Brahms's account the composer had sent the duets in himself that year, among other things, with his application; in Marie Neffová's, it was her household that had sent them, and what Brahms had seen was the printed volume, which he supposed the composer had paid for, with its title and its texts in Czech. “When you play them over you will be, like I was, delighted, and as a publisher you will be particularly delighted with their piquant charm.”

A very good translation would be needed, Brahms wrote; quite a number of texts had already been translated by a man who had lately died, and failing those there was a man in Prague who might do. “Dvořák has written all sorts of things, operas (Czech), symphonies, quartets and piano music. There is no doubt he is very talented. And then he is also poor. I beg you to think the matter over. The ‘Duets’ won't give you much thought and will possibly sell well.”

At the end he wrote out the address of the flat in Žitná street. He signed himself J. Br.