A Czech’s caution to our New World

Czech composer Antonin Dvorak’s most famous work is his Symphony No. 9, “From the New World.” He wrote it while living and working in the New York City (and vacationing in Iowa!) during the last decade of the 19th century.

Many hear in Dvorak’s 9th his wonder and awe at this “new” world, as well as his longing for his “old” homeland. Some suggest that Dvorak displays in this work an unusual-for-that-time awareness of the music of both Native Americans and African Americans.

I listened to the New York Philharmonic/Bernstein performance of the New World Symphony yesterday afternoon while walking the track at our gym. I drove there pondering America today in the light of the possibility of major war in the Middle East, and the often-unhelpful role our nation has played in that region for decades. (“It’s complicated,” as we often must conclude, and who am I to sort it all out?(

In any case, here is what I heard Dvorak saying about us in that symphony. Whether he intended to say it or not, it is what spoke to me as I walked:

Movement 1: America can make, create, fabricate, and dominate anything we put our minds to, and we will fight and dance through any obstacle along our way.

Movement 2 (the famous Largo/Goin’ Home movement): But I miss my homeland...or maybe I miss the agrarian life that seemed both simpler and slower, oriented more to growing things than to creating them.

Movement 3: Let’s dance furiously, forgetting the past and charging to the future...enough of longing and nostalgia!

Movement 4: The New World’s empire is heralded, replacing the empires of the Old World. America is No. 1, and the main minor theme transitions into a bright major in the last few bars...until a long, quiet chord ends it all.

It’s that final chord that always gets to me. Why doesn’t the New World Symphony end with a bang? It deserves a loud, dramatic, final statement in place of the slowing dying and decaying whisper it receives from its composer.

Long-time Cleveland Orchestra commentator Klaus Roy posed the final chord matter this way in the liner notes on our hometown band’s 1959 recording of the New World: “… Dvorak must have realized, as he wrote the words ‘From the New World' across the title page just before the first performance, that he was implying a tragic side to the vitality of this country, an atmosphere not to be explained away by ‘homesickness’ on his part.”

Is Antonin Dvorak, proud Czech that he forever remained, expressing second thoughts about his celebration of this New World? Is he, whose homeland has been subject to empire for centuries, uncomfortable with the prospect of American dominance of the world? Does he consider how white America has subjected the people of color who share this continent with it, and wonder if we would ultimately sacrifice our ideals in pursuit of wealth and power?

I think Dvorak composed that final chord for us Americans. He put it there so that, before we stand up and cheer our New World, we spend a quiet moment reflecting on who we are, on how we are seen by others, and on what we want to be remembered for in history.

That last chord invites us to think before we shout, to reflect before we react, to ask before we answer...practices tragically lacking in our New World, and almost everywhere, in these tumultuous times.