Slavonic Dances
A few friends kept up a meeting at a café in the afternoons, and to one of those meetings, in 1878, Dvořák brought an envelope.
One of the friends, Josef Zubatý, later a linguist of note, wrote in his recollections that he would not easily forget with what triumph Dvořák “brought to the usual afternoon meeting at our cafe an envelope in which he had been sent for the first series of Slavonic Dances the first fee (or first decent fee) he received for published work; it was, if I am not mistaken, 200 or 250 marks.”
The edition that prints his recollection gives the fee, in a note beside it, as 300 marks, paid by Simrock for eight dances for piano duet.
In Zubatý's account Dvořák had come through the worst of his hardships and was still some way from comfortable: the state grant from Vienna was his chief income, the fee from a better-paid lesson made up the rest, and he could at last afford a piano at home, “not his own, to be sure, but on hire.”
At the beginning of 1878 Simrock's firm brought out the Moravian Duets, the first of Dvořák's works to carry its name. In the first days of January Dvořák had gone to Vienna to thank Brahms in person, only to find that Brahms had left on a concert tour of Germany and Holland, so he called on Hanslick instead, and at Hanslick's request left a number of his compositions with Brahms's housekeeper.
Brahms answered in March. He was sorry to have been away, he accepted the dedication of a string quartet, and he said that going through Dvořák's things gave him the greatest pleasure. “You write somewhat hurriedly.” When Dvořák came to fill in the many sharps, flats and naturals he had left out, Brahms suggested, he might look a little more closely at the notes themselves.
Brahms wrote to Simrock again on the fifth of April, about to leave Vienna for Italy with two friends, and said that he would not have written at all if it had not been for thinking of Dvořák. “I don't know what further risk you are wanting to take with this man.” He had no idea about business, he went on, and did not care to make recommendations, since he had only his own eyes and ears to go by; but if Simrock meant to go on with it, he should get Dvořák to send his two string quartets and have them played to him. “I am an incorrigible philistine — I should publish even my own works for the pleasure of it.”
Simrock wanted dances. Dvořák wrote eight of them between March and the seventh of May 1878, for two players at one piano, and made an orchestral version the same year: dances in the rhythms of Czech and Slavonic dances, in a set that opens with a furiant, a fast Czech dance, written in bars of three with strong accents that fall in twos across them, so that the tune stamps against its own beat.
Otilie was born on the sixth of June 1878. At the end of July Dvořák applied to Vienna for the grant for the fifth time.
What sold the dances was a newspaper notice by a man who had never met the composer. Louis Ehlert, a Berlin critic who lived at Wiesbaden, reviewed the Slavonic Dances and the Moravian Duets together that year in the Berlin Nationalzeitung. He had been in a very bad humour, he began, buried in a heap of new music, when two works by a composer unknown to him took all his attention. He set down what he had managed to learn about the man: a Czech, living in Prague, until a few years before a viola player in the opera there, with very little in print and a good many quartets and symphonies said to be finished. “This is all I could find out about him.”
“I consider the Slavonic Dances,” Ehlert wrote, “to be a work which will make its triumphant way through the world in the same way as Brahms's Hungarian Dances.” How much of their material had been taken from Czech folk music he did not know, he wrote, and it did not matter; the dances could be scored for orchestra straight away, as they stood, and humour had an important place in them. “Dvořák writes such jolly basses that the heart of every musician worth the name must laugh within him.”
In Prague, on the seventeenth of November 1878, Dvořák gave the first concert of his own, at the Žofín. Ten days later Ehlert wrote to him from Wiesbaden, in answer to a letter from Dvořák. “In Berlin my critique produced a positive 'run' on the music shops and, I can say without exaggeration, made you a name over night.” At the end of the letter he added: “If you have a picture of yourself, send it to me.” Dvořák dedicated to him, in gratitude, the serenade for wind instruments he had written that January.
Prague took notice as well. František Bayer, later a zoologist, was present when Smetana, staying with a friend in Prague while the dances were coming out in Berlin, said that the young composers ought at least to show old Smetana their published work. The friend saw to it, and the next day Smetana looked through the score and praised it without reserve, and said that Dvořák handled his themes “in a truly Beethoven-like manner”.
In December Dvořák went to Vienna to see Brahms, and on the fourth of January 1879 Brahms came to Prague and visited the Dvořáks; what passed between them is not recorded, except in a letter Dvořák wrote to Brahms later that year. On his last stay in Prague, Dvořák wrote, Brahms had been kind enough to draw his attention to a number of things in his works, and “I have since found many bad notes which I have put right.”
The dances went abroad ahead of him. A selection was played in London on the fifteenth of February 1879, and in March the grant from Vienna came to him for the fifth time, four hundred gulden. That summer he made his first visit to Berlin, and wrote to his friend Alois Göbl, secretary on Prince Rohan's estate at Sychrov, that he “arrived in Berlin on Tuesday and went straight to Simrock who was expecting me.” The violinist Joseph Joachim, director of the Musikhochschule in Berlin, held a soirée for him at seven, at which his new string quartet and sextet were played. Dvořák was writing a violin concerto for Joachim that year, and in December Joachim wrote to thank him for the parcel with the score.
In September the third of his Slavonic Rhapsodies was played in Berlin. Brahms wrote from Vienna that month that the rehearsals of Dvořák's new works had won him the sympathy of the musicians there “in quite an extraordinary measure”.
In November the Rhapsody was played in Vienna, by the Vienna Philharmonic under Hans Richter, the conductor of the Court Opera. Dvořák went to hear it. He told Göbl that of the sixty new pieces the orchestra had tried over, by Richter's count, his was the one it liked best, and that at the concert, on the sixteenth, he had been made to show himself to the audience. “I was sitting beside Brahms at the organ in the orchestra and Richter pulled me out.” Richter embraced him on the spot, and the next day gave a dinner for him at his house, with all the Czech players in the orchestra invited. The Philharmonic wanted a symphony from him for the following season, and he promised one.
A daughter was born on the thirteenth of January 1880 and given her mother's name, Anna.
Between the eighteenth of January and the twenty-third of February he wrote seven Gypsy Songs to poems by a Czech poet, and dedicated them to the Viennese tenor Gustav Walter. Simrock published them that year with German words only. In the autumn Dvořák asked him for a Czech edition, because in Bohemia the songs were wanted with Czech words, and “it is an attention I am due my countrymen to make it possible for them to sing my songs in the Czech language.” Simrock agreed, and in February 1881 the songs came out with Czech words and an English translation.
Songs My Mother Taught Me is the fourth of these Gypsy Songs of 1880, Když mne stará matka in Czech. The words, and the mother in them, are Adolf Heyduk's: in the poem a Gypsy thinks of the songs his old mother taught him, and of teaching them now in his turn.
In the spring he was in Berlin again. On the first of April he wrote to Göbl that he had played his new violin sonata with Joachim the day before, and that Joachim had been very delighted with it; the quartet was to be played that day, and after that the concerto. “Tomorrow we shall go through the Concerto really properly.”
In August he went to Wiesbaden to meet Ehlert at last. Ehlert was not at home. He was spending the summer at Falkenstein for his wife's health, and Dvořák and a violinist trained in Prague, who led the theatre orchestra at Wiesbaden, had to take a carriage out to him there, and were asked to dinner at his house on the Thursday. Dvořák wrote it all to Göbl at seven in the morning, and added underneath: “At the moment I am sailing down the Rhine to Cologne.”
In the autumn the symphony he had promised Vienna was finished, and he wrote to Simrock that he had “made every effort to produce a living work which would also give me pleasure”, and in November he took it to Vienna and played it through on the piano to Richter, who, he told Göbl, “likes the Symphony immensely and embraced me after each movement”, and who fixed its first performance for the twenty-sixth of December.
The Stabat Mater was performed for the first time on the twenty-third of December 1880, in Prague, by the orchestra and chorus of the Provisional Theatre, conducted by Adolf Čech, three years after Dvořák had finished the score. Simrock published it the next year.
In December Richter wrote again: his orchestra was so overburdened with work that the symphony would have to wait until the beginning of March. Dvořák answered on New Year's Day 1881 that he could hardly have come to Vienna at Christmas in any case, a season “every father of a family likes to spend in the circle of his dear ones”, and that the Stabat Mater had taken up his time, since he had had to be at the rehearsals.
The symphony, the Sixth, had its first performance in Prague, on the twenty-fifth of March 1881.
On the twelfth of August 1881 the National Theatre in Prague burned. Magdalena was born five days after the fire.
The Vienna Philharmonic, whose players chose their own programmes, did not take the symphony up: they had played his Rhapsody the season before, and were unwilling to give a new Czech composer's work two seasons running, and it was in London that Richter conducted it, on the fifteenth of May 1882.
The violin concerto was still not done. In September 1882 Dvořák wrote to Simrock, whom he now addressed as “Dear Fritz”, that he had been in Berlin and played it through twice with Joachim, who had made the alterations in the solo part himself, and that he was very glad it would be finished at last. “The revised work lay a whole two years with Joachim.” There was to be a rehearsal with orchestra at the Hochschule in November.
His new opera Dimitrij had its first night in Prague on the eighth of October 1882, and later that month, when the Court Opera at Dresden gave The Cunning Peasant, Dvořák was there. On All Saints' Day he wrote to his father and mother at Kladno. He enclosed money for their rent, with fifteen gulden more as a contribution and five for extras, and he told them that the opera had pleased. “The Queen of Saxony was also at the theatre, which is undoubtedly a great honour.” In November he was in Berlin with Joachim for the rehearsal of the concerto.
In the middle of December 1882 his mother, Anna Dvořáková, died at Kladno. She was sixty-two. He went to her funeral there on the seventeenth.
Anna had a son, Antonín, on the seventh of March 1883.
That same month the Stabat Mater was sung in London, conducted by the English conductor Joseph Barnby. It went well enough that it was to be given again the following year, and the composer was invited to come and conduct it himself.
He was forty-one, and he had never been to England.
