Referring to Antonín Dvořák's Symphony no. 6, op. 60 (1880), Michael Beckerman wrote: ‘It is perhaps the most conventional of Dvořák's symphonies – a kind of dues-paying to the Viennese symphonic tradition.’Footnote ¹ Indeed, discussions of Dvořák's Sixth Symphony – henceforth referred to as the D major SymphonyFootnote ² – typically focus on its connections with Vienna. This is not surprising: Dvořák wrote the symphony specifically for the Vienna Philharmonic to be performed during the 1880–1 season; he dedicated it to the Viennese conductor Hans Richter (1843–1916); and he solicited Brahms's opinion on the score before submitting it to the publisher Fritz Simrock. Although the work was eventually rejected by the Vienna Philharmonic, its many allusions to the symphonies of Brahms and Beethoven have been analysed extensively by scholars,Footnote ³ and they led David Brodbeck to describe it as a piece in which Dvořák ‘speaks German with an unusual degree of clarity’.Footnote ⁴

Dvořák's Czech critics tell a different story. After its première in Prague on 25 March 1881 as part of the city's Slavonic concert series, it was dubbed the ‘Czech Spring Symphony’ in the music journal Dalibor.Footnote ⁵ Contemporary Czech critics repeatedly drew attention to the symphony's Czechness, calling it ‘a work with an eminently Czech character’ and ‘purely Czech in the shape of all of its motifs’.Footnote ⁶ Nowhere is this reading of the symphony more apparent than in a statement made following its performance in Brno in 1883: ‘We Czechs were in a state of bliss’, the critic recalls, ‘over the fact that this orchestral masterpiece speaks to us in pure Czech.’Footnote ⁷ The critic goes on to assert that the language of the symphony is a kind of refined Czech such that ‘even the Germans could not resist [it]’.Footnote ⁸ Regardless of the work's Viennese associations and the comparisons with Austro-German composers made in the German press, Czech critics were certain that when they listened to Dvořák's symphony they were hearing Czech.

These two conflicting narratives may seem irreconcilable; however, a study of the symphony's Czech context reveals that, in portraying the work as a distinctly nationalist composition, Czech critics were laying claim to Dvořák. Political tensions and Dvořák's growing international renown in the early 1880s made Czech critics eager to take ownership of the composer, giving Czech labels to a work that could be interpreted as conforming to the Austro-German tradition. Although Czechs were still under Habsburg rule at this time (and would remain so until 1918), the Czech nationalist cause was steadily gaining ground. Dvořák's symphony had its début in Prague in the wake of the controversial Stremayr language ordinance – an ordinance that benefited the Czechs and widened the rift between the Czechs and Germans of Bohemia and Moravia, giving rise to the kind of territoriality that is evident in reviews of this work. Its Prague première also came after a period of negative attention to Dvořák in the Czech press over his apparent willingness to allow exclusively German titles and texts to appear on his printed scores. Suspecting that Dvořák was beginning to give priority to the German public, Czech critics were quick to redirect the composer's focus toward audiences at home. By concealing the symphony's Viennese background and emphasizing its ‘Czech’ elements, these critics sought to appropriate the work and use it to promote their nationalist agendas.

Setting the stage for Dvořák's symphony: the Stremayr language ordinance and its aftermath

The première of Dvořák's D major Symphony came shortly after the Stremayr language ordinance was instituted. Named after the Austrian Minister of Justice Karl Ritter von Stremayr (1823–1904) and established in April 1880, the ordinance recognized Czech as an ‘external’ administrative language, along with German, in certain linguistically mixed parts of Bohemia and Moravia. (German had previously been the only external administrative language permitted.) This meant that communication between government officials and members of the public could be conducted in Czech in these regions. German, however, continued to be the only ‘internal’ administrative language, used by government officials to communicate among themselves. The Stremayr ordinance was part of a larger project, spearheaded by the conservative Minister-President Eduard Taaffe (1833–95) and meant to pacify the many nationalities that coexisted in Austria. While German liberal nationalists had dominated in the early years of the dual monarchy (established in 1867), a political shift occurred when Taaffe took office in 1879. This shift seemed to work in the Czechs’ favour, since Taaffe – with his anti-liberal, pro-Slavic ‘Iron Ring’ government – was perhaps more willing than previous Austrian leaders to address Czech concerns. Having boycotted the provincial diets and the Reichsrat for several years over issues of Bohemian state rights,Footnote ⁹ the Czechs put an end to their practice of passive resistance in the late 1870s and submitted a memorandum to Emperor Franz Joseph in 1879, petitioning for linguistic equality. In this document, they drew attention to Article 19 of the Fundamental Laws of 1867, which states that ‘each nationality has an inviolable right to preserve and cultivate its nationality and language. The equal rights of all languages customarily spoken in the lands, in the schools, government offices, and public life are recognized by the state.’Footnote ¹⁰ The Austrian government's response to this memorandum was speedy: within months of its submission, Taaffe introduced the Stremayr ordinance, which was to have far-reaching implications for both the Czechs and the Germans who populated the regions in question.

The ordinance was a significant gain for the Czechs: for the first time, they were granted the right to use their native language for all business transactions with ‘certain designated courts and governmental agencies’.Footnote ¹¹ Peter Bugge writes that, in many respects, the ordinance merely gave formal sanction to something that had been going on in practice for some time.Footnote ¹² Although it appeased the Czechs, the policy placed German Bohemians and Moravians at a disadvantage, since they were far less likely than the Czechs to be bilingual. Jeremy King summarizes the situation well when he writes that

Naturally, Germans protested against the ordinance in a number of ways. Shortly thereafter, a new organization – the Deutscher Schulverein (German School Association) – was formed, with its headquarters in Vienna and a large following throughout Austria. The members of this organization sought to create and maintain German-language schools in areas of the empire where German-speakers were in a minority and state-funded education was being conducted in a language other than German.Footnote ¹⁴ The Stremayr ordinance also gave momentum to the burgeoning Joseph II cult, which idealized the rule of the iconic emperor.Footnote ¹⁵ The Germans of Austria were already inclined to reflect upon Joseph II's reign, since 1880 marked his centenary; however, the Stremayr ordinance seemed to cast the emperor in a whole new light. It had been Joseph II who had made German the official language of the state and the language of instruction in all institutions of higher education in Austria. While Derek Sayer suggests that Joseph's language policy was motivated by a desire for efficiency, rather than a desire to ‘Germanize’ Austria,Footnote ¹⁶ the policy was reinterpreted by Germans in the 1880s and understood in increasingly ethnic terms. Likewise, the Stremayr language ordinance served to strengthen the growing pan-German movement in Austria. In an effort to distance themselves from the other nationalities of the empire, these pan-Germans advocated closer partnerships with Germany on the basis of linguistic ties.

A monarchy-wide census was held decennially, but for the first time in 1880 citizens were asked to cite their language of daily use (Umgangssprache), as opposed to their national language (Landessprache). Since the census did not allow people to claim allegiance to the monarchy as a whole and contained no direct questions about nationality, language was interpreted by many as a marker of national affiliation.Footnote ¹⁷ As Robert Evans puts it, at the time of the 1880 census ‘linguistic self-ascriptions quickly became subsumed in national ones’.Footnote ¹⁸ When the census was published in early 1881, the numbers were staggering: Czech-speakers were far more widespread than anyone had previously thought, which added fuel to a debate that had already been raging for the better part of the previous year. By 2 April 1881 – a year after the Stremayr ordinance had been established – a committee met with Taaffe, seeking not only to reverse the ordinance, but to legalize German as the official state language (Staatssprache) of Austria. Similar efforts would continue to be mounted on the part of the Germans in the coming years in what William Jenks calls the ‘German counterattack’.Footnote ¹⁹ On the local level in Prague, the most significant outcome of the ordinance was the split in 1881 of the Charles University into two separate Czech and German institutions, with minimal contact between them.Footnote ²⁰ What was meant to be a benevolent gesture, designed to pacify relations between the diverse groups coexisting in a multinational state, seemed only to widen the gulf between them.

The impact of these politics on Dvořák's D major Symphony was inevitable, since the work was written with the intention that it be premièred by the Vienna Philharmonic. The symphony had been commissioned by the orchestra's conductor, Richter, during Dvořák's visit to Vienna in 1879, when a performance of Slavonic Rhapsody no. 3 had met with moderate success. By the time that Dvořák offered up the finished symphony to Richter in the autumn of 1880, however, the controversial language ordinance had been set in place, putting a damper on relations between Czechs and Germans. Although Richter assures Dvořák several times in his letters that he considers the new symphony to be beautiful,Footnote ²¹ the planned Viennese performance of it was deferred several times throughout the 1880–1 concert season and eventually cancelled. Reasons for the Vienna Philharmonic's reluctance to perform the symphony are never fully articulated in the correspondence between Dvořák and Richter. Richter is perhaps most candid in a letter written at the end of the season, reassuring Dvořák that ‘it was not artistic reasons that made it impossible for me to perform [the] beautiful work [in Vienna]’,Footnote ²² but offering no further explanation. According to John Clapham, the symphony was rejected because members of the orchestra had raised objections to performing the work of a Czech composer in two successive seasons.Footnote ²³

Brodbeck takes this interpretation a step further, making a connection between the Stremayr language ordinance and the symphony's cancellation. He points out that the Vienna Philharmonic had hardly maintained a position of political neutrality in these debates about language; in February 1881, for example, the orchestra participated in a benefit concert in order to further the cause of German hegemony.Footnote ²⁴ Brodbeck argues that, in spite of the symphony's references to the Austro-German mainstream, the work was ultimately dismissed in Vienna because it had been composed by a Czech.Footnote ²⁵ In other words, the members of the Vienna Philharmonic did not judge Dvořák's symphony on the basis of what they heard, but on the basis of the composer's ethnicity. In the same way, when the symphony was premièred in Prague, the Czech critics chose to ignore its affinities to Brahms and Beethoven and were bent upon claiming it as their own, even if the work itself did not quite fit the bill. As a result, descriptions of the symphony's Czechness in the reviews are often vague. Although most critics were convinced that they heard Czech, very few of them substantiated their assertions with concrete musical evidence. More than the music, it was the politics of the day that conditioned responses to Dvořák's symphony both in Vienna and in Prague.

Threats of losing Dvořák: ‘The covetous Germans will write […] “unser Dworzak!”’

The D major Symphony's Prague première in 1881 also followed hot on the heels of some negative criticism of Dvořák in the Czech press. Only a few years earlier, Dvořák had made an international breakthrough, and since he was the first Czech composer to receive such attention outside his homeland, the Czechs did not quite know how to come to terms with it. While Czech critics were immensely proud of Dvořák's accomplishments and reported regularly on his activities abroad,Footnote ²⁶ the composer's foreign successes, particularly in German-speaking Europe, gave them cause for concern. Some critics felt that Dvořák was catering too much to non-Czech audiences at the cost of neglecting the home crowd. One such critic was Václav Juda Novotný (1849–1922), who wrote several articles for Dalibor in autumn 1880, accusing Dvořák of pandering to the German public.

The first of these articles, dated 1 October 1880, is worth quoting in full. It reads as an emphatic warning to Dvořák, urging him to pay more heed to Czech audiences if he wishes to maintain a loyal following in the Czech lands:

Here, Novotný expresses a genuine fear of losing Dvořák to the Germans. The remark ‘if Dvořák cares to remain one of us’ is particularly striking, as it shows that, even though national affiliations were becoming increasingly consolidated in the Czech lands toward the century's end, nationality was, to some extent, still malleable. Novotný uses terms that denote ownership, contrasting ‘our ingenious Dvořák’ (‘geniální náš Dvořák’) with a hypothetical proclamation made by the ‘covetous Germans’: ‘unser Dworzak’, where the composer's name is deliberately spelt in German, perhaps to heighten the absurdity of such a statement.

Novotný reiterates his point in another article penned some weeks later. In this case, he does not mention Dvořák by name:

By bringing the composer Václav Laub (1857–1911) into the discussion, Novotný strives to prove to Dvořák that it is possible to insist upon Czech texts when working with German publishers. The article contains even stronger language than the previous one, as Novotný sees the publications as instances of Czech composers ‘completely ignor[ing] the language of their nation’. At a time when language was seen as a signifier of nationality, this was a serious accusation indeed.Footnote ²⁹ For Novotný, Dvořák's involvement on the international scene and, more specifically, his attempts to court a German audience were allowable only as long as they did not pose a threat to the composer's Czech identity or prevent the Czech public from having equal access to his music.

The results of this public reprimand of Dvořák were twofold. At first, the composer was essentially ignored in Dalibor. As Alan Houtchens observes, Dvořák is conspicuously absent from the journal for three months, being given only passing mention in occasional concert advertisements.Footnote ³⁰ The message behind this silent treatment is clear: if Dvořák had seen fit to ‘ignore the language of [his] nation’, the writers for Dalibor would respond by ignoring Dvořák. By early 1881, however, Dvořák had reached an agreement with Simrock. As a reaction to Novotný's accusations, Dvořák had written to the German publisher in October 1880, explaining the situation and declaring: ‘I am also obliged to show consideration for my countrymen, so that they too would be able to sing my songs in Czech.’Footnote ³¹ After some hesitation,Footnote ³² Simrock complied, and a promise always to include Czech texts along with the German translations had managed to put Novotný's fears to rest. Novotný is most direct in his last article on the subject, written after the matter had been resolved:

Satisfied with the way in which Dvořák had handled the situation, Novotný, who served as editor of Dalibor at that time, was no longer compelled to give him the cold shoulder on the journal's pages.

What followed as a second result of this negative attention in the press was an exaggerated need to prove to the readers of Dalibor that Dvořák's works were, in fact, very Czech.Footnote ³⁵ It was especially important for Czech critics to do so in the case of the symphony – a genre that had long held German connotations. Prior to Dvořák, the symphony was not much cultivated in the Czech lands,Footnote ³⁶ where opera reigned supreme as the medium with which composers could best serve the Czech cause.Footnote ³⁷ Moreover, the symphony as a genre lacks explicit extramusical associations, offering the possibility for various meanings to be inscribed onto it. Karen Painter describes the symphony as ‘an open arena to be invested with meaning […] prey to the broadest cultural and political aims’.Footnote ³⁸ The review of Dvořák's D major Symphony for Dalibor was one of the first extensive articles on the composer to appear in the journal after the controversy over his published scores. Written by Novotný himself, the review gave the critic occasion to redeem Dvořák by characterizing this piece as a Czech nationalist composition;Footnote ³⁹ critics writing for other newspapers and journals, probably aware of the recent incident involving Dvořák's vocal publications, portrayed it in much the same way.

The incident would not be soon forgotten, as is evident in an article that appeared in Dalibor in 1883. Here, the unnamed author writes in no uncertain terms about Dvořák's commitment to making his printed scores accessible to Czech audiences:

It was a review by Eduard Hanslick (1825–1904) of Fibich's Piano Quartet, op. 11, that had incited this outburst.Footnote ⁴¹ The Czech critic's comments in response to Hanslick show, as Brodbeck has demonstrated, how vastly Prague in the 1880s had changed since the time of Hanslick's youth, when language was not yet taken as an earmark of nationality per se.Footnote ⁴² For composers of Dvořák's generation, something as seemingly trivial as the language of a work's title could mean the difference between ‘nationally indifferent’ and ‘self-consciously Czech’.Footnote ⁴³

It has already been noted that Novotný's complaints against Dvořák in 1880 were motivated by a fear of losing him to the Germans. This fear was not wholly unfounded, since the composer was lured to Vienna several times throughout his career by some of his colleagues. The most overt invitation came from none other than Hanslick. In a letter to Dvořák dated 11 June 1882, Hanslick offers two pieces of advice. First, he urges Dvořák to familiarize himself with ‘good German poetry’ and to use these poems as texts for his vocal works. As Hanslick phrases it:

These words stand in stark contrast to Novotný's, showing just how much Dvořák was being pulled in different directions. Hanslick's second suggestion to Dvořák is that he consider spending some time away from his homeland: ‘In general,’ writes Hanslick, ‘it would, in my opinion, be a great advantage for your artistic development and for your success if you lived for one or two years at a distance from Prague; Vienna would be best.’Footnote ⁴⁵ Understanding that such a suggestion might be met with considerable hesitancy on Dvořák's part, Hanslick continues: ‘You do not have to become a defector as a result. However, after such big early successes, your art needs wider horizons, a German environment [and] a larger non-Czech public.’Footnote ⁴⁶ Whether Czech critics were aware of Hanslick's advice is unclear.Footnote ⁴⁷ If they knew about it, they certainly would have seen this as a potential threat, since any recommendations made by Hanslick were likely to be taken very seriously: the critic had been instrumental in launching Dvořák's international career, and Dvořák held him in high regard.Footnote ⁴⁸ A further beckoning to Vienna may have come from Dvořák's other staunch supporter in the Austrian capital, Brahms. Though perhaps not as forthcoming as Hanslick, Brahms does confess in a letter to Simrock dated 7 November 1887 that he had wanted Dvořák to move to Vienna several years earlier.Footnote ⁴⁹ Dvořák would not be persuaded, but the pressures that he faced from these men – especially Hanslick, who had left his own Bohemian origins far behind – are not to be underestimated. Eager to quell any signs that Dvořák was making the German public a priority, critics in Prague did not hesitate to remind the composer that his ultimate loyalty lay with the Czechs.

A ‘Czech Spring Symphony’

Language was a heated topic of debate in the Czech lands among both politicians and music critics; it had been a large point of contention for representatives in the Austrian parliament in the spring of 1880 and for Novotný on the pages of Dalibor in the autumn of the same year. Becoming increasingly synonymous with nationality, language – whether used for business transactions or for music publications – was not insignificant, but sent a powerful message. It was against this political and cultural backdrop that Dvořák's D major Symphony was premièred in Prague in March 1881. Issues of language in Dvořák's symphony are complicated by the fact that the genre lacks words. The unnamed critic for Dalibor cited in note 40 above stipulates that vocal compositions and ‘instrumental works with particular Czech significance be given Czech titles’.Footnote ⁵⁰ This would seem to exclude the symphony; yet the genre was by no means immune to language politics, as Dvořák himself would later demonstrate. Some of his most fiery exchanges with Simrock in 1885 had to do with the language in which the title of his Symphony in D minor, op. 70, was to appear on the opening page of its published score.Footnote ⁵¹ Language figured no less prominently in critical discussions of the D major Symphony. No gesture as simple as changing a text from German to Czech could be used to persuade the public that the symphony was a nationalist work. In the absence of a Czech text, the critics had to find other means of doing so.

One such means was failing to acknowledge that the symphony had anything to do with Vienna. Nowhere in these reviews is there mention that the piece was supposed to be premièred in the Austrian capital and that its performance in Prague had been arranged only after it was rejected by the Vienna Philharmonic. Czech critics could hardly have been ignorant of the symphony's backstory. Journalists in Prague were generally well informed about musical events taking place in other European cities, and Dalibor had a Viennese correspondent, entrusted with the task of reporting on musical activities there. Furthermore, Dvořák's attempt to have the symphony performed in Vienna had been quite an ordeal – one that could scarcely have been kept quiet. It involved lengthy negotiations with Richter and required Dvořák to visit the city in November 1880. All of these factors suggest that the critics withheld this information deliberately, even if divulging it might have given them an opportunity to show that the Viennese were prejudiced.Footnote ⁵² It would have been difficult to convince readers of the work's Czechness if they had known that this ‘Czech Spring Symphony’ had actually been designed for the Vienna Philharmonic and that Prague had been only Dvořák's second choice for its première.

Dvořák's early Czech biographer Otakar Šourek (1883–1956) goes so far, in the second volume of his monograph (originally published in 1917), as to construct a counter-narrative for the symphony's origins. In Šourek's words,

Apart from claiming that the symphony evokes images of rural Bohemia, Šourek hypothesizes that it was inspired by Dvořák's trip in the summer of 1880 to the town of Zlonice, where he had attended school from 1853 to 1856. Šourek then proceeds to downplay the work's similarity to Brahms's Second Symphony.Footnote ⁵⁴ Although he recognizes that the two works are written in the same basic tonality and that they resemble each other at the beginning of their respective finales, he writes:

Much like the early critics, Šourek strives to weaken the work's ties to the Viennese symphonic tradition.

In addition to deflecting attention away from Vienna, Dvořák's Czech critics use their reviews to underscore the one aspect of the symphony that was indisputably Czech: the Scherzo. The idea that the Scherzo was the most ‘Czech’ movement in any given symphony by a Bohemian composer was well established. It had been the Scherzo of Smetana's ‘Triumphal’ Symphony (Triumph-Sinfonie, 1853) that had continued to be performed during the 1860s and 1870s, even as the rest of the work faded into oblivion.Footnote ⁵⁶ Critics had also emphasized the ‘Czechness’ of the Scherzo movements in the Dvořák symphonies that had previously been given in Prague. Premièred as a stand-alone movement in 1874, the Scherzo of his D minor Symphony, now referred to as his Fourth, was considered to be Czech to its core – a piece in which the composer ‘uses motifs from Czech folk songs with masterful skill’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Likewise, following the 1879 performance in Prague of his F major Symphony, currently known as his Fifth, the Scherzo was called a ‘true Czech pearl’ that ‘speaks to us in a completely Czech way’, while the symphony's other movements were thought to be foreign in their conception.Footnote ⁵⁸ This Czech criticism from the past set up the expectation that the Scherzo movement of Dvořák's D major Symphony was also going to be uniquely Czech.

The piece did not disappoint: in fact, the D major bears the distinction of being the only Dvořák symphony explicitly to include a furiant movement in place of the Scherzo.Footnote ⁵⁹ A furiant is, by definition, a fast-paced dance in triple metre, with regular four-bar phrases; its most characteristic feature is the hemiola rhythm that temporarily displaces the basic beat in the opening two bars. In a series of anecdotes written for Dalibor in 1911 – exactly 30 years after the symphony's Prague première – Novotný claims that the idea of composing a furiant occurred to Dvořák after attending Mass with his friend Alois Goebl (1841–1907) in Vysoká – a small town in which Dvořák would later purchase a summer home. Novotný tells a colourful tale, complete with dialogue, about how Dvořák was struggling with the Scherzo movement of his symphony in the summer of 1880, whereupon Goebl invited him to a festive Mass taking place in the town as part of a pilgrimage:

Although the accuracy of Novotný's story is questionable, this excerpt is telling for what it reveals about perceived notions of ‘Czechness’ in Dvořák's Scherzo. Providing an account that is similar to Šourek's, Novotný situates Dvořák not in cosmopolitan Vienna nor even cosmopolitan Prague, but in the Bohemian countryside, and attempts to demonstrate that the composer was keenly attuned to his rural Czech roots when writing the furiant movement of his symphony.

Indeed, the furiant had clear Czech associations during the late nineteenth century. No definition of the dance is given in the reviews of the D major Symphony, but a striking description can be found in a critique from 1879 of Dvořák's Czech Suite – a piece that concludes with a furiant. The critic writes: ‘The most successful number, which prominently surpasses all the others, is the closing “furiant”. Here the orchestra is all laughs and jokes […] The second part [of the piece] shows the furiant spirit of the stubborn Czech skull – this purely Czech obstinacy.’Footnote ⁶¹ Writing in 1924, Zdeněk Nejedlý (1878–1962) provides a more nuanced definition of the furiant, noting that the dance is meant to be taken as a parody, mocking the haughtiness, self-importance and presumptuousness of a Czech farmer.Footnote ⁶² Even so, the dance's origins are not quite as simple as these critics would have their readers believe. The first notated furiant – included in Rittersberg's collection of folk songs from 1825 – actually sets a German text: ‘Furiant, furiant, furiant, du bist mein lieba Monn.’Footnote ⁶³ This furiant melody acquired a Czech text by 1844; however, even as late as 1863, in Rieger's Encyclopedia (Riegrův slovník naučný), the furiant – though defined as a Czech dance – is still described as a type of piece that is well known to both nationalities in Bohemia. A German text is provided in the entry, alongside the Czech one.Footnote ⁶⁴ Mirko Očadlík reportedly added another layer to the story, suggesting in the course of a university seminar that the root of the word ‘furiant’ is neither German nor Czech, but French, coming from the expression fou riant (‘laughing fool’) and originating at the time of the Napoleonic wars.Footnote ⁶⁵ In spite of its broader associations in the early nineteenth century, the furiant had developed exclusively Czech connotations by the time Dvořák's symphony was premièred in 1881, especially after the dance's appearance in what would become the quintessential Czech work: Smetana's Prodaná nevěsta (The Bartered Bride), first heard in 1866 and having risen to immense popularity by the early 1870s. With his D major Symphony, Dvořák no doubt played a role in further consolidating these perceptions of the furiant.

The significance of introducing a Czech dance into the symphony was not lost on the critics, and the furiant is highlighted in their reviews, usually being discussed ahead of the other movements. Several critics attest that the furiant was a crowd favourite and had to be repeated at the symphony's première. As Novotný puts it in his review for Dalibor, ‘Czech character springs forth in the most apparent way from the third movement, the adorably worked-out “furiant” […]. This number seized and fired up the abundant audience at once, inspiring thunderous expressions of praise, and it had to be repeated.’Footnote ⁶⁶ The third movement is also singled out by the reviewer for Pokrok, who states that ‘the outward result of the performance of Dvořák's symphony was very honourable; from each movement to the next, the interest of the audience increased, and the praise did not want to let up until the third movement was repeated and until the composer made two appearances on the podium’.Footnote ⁶⁷

Even more than the third movement, it is the fourth that the reviewer for the newspaper Národní listy characterizes as particularly Czech. Here, the critic detects references to ‘numerous folk songs’ which, in his view, are so ‘familiar’ as to give the Finale ‘an almost excessive rural nationalist character’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Novotný also hints at this idea, asserting that the Finale as a whole lacks unity because it is too much of a ‘mosaic’ of ‘trivial’ motifs.Footnote ⁶⁹ Although the critics do not identify any of these tunes or motifs by name, their approach set the pattern for much of the subsequent Czech scholarship on the piece. Efforts to show that some of the symphony's principal themes were derived from Bohemian folk songs continued well into the twentieth century (see Table 1).Footnote ⁷⁰ While some theories are more convincing than others (Antonín Sychra, for instance, uses an early sketch of the symphony's opening theme to support the claim that this material was loosely based on the Czech folk song ‘Já mám koně’ (‘I Have Horses’)), such endeavours are problematic. Rather than clarifying Dvořák's inspiration, this scholarship points to a clear trope in the Czech reception of the D major Symphony that can be traced back to its first performance.

The context in which the symphony was premièred in Prague was one that further encouraged critics to exaggerate the work's ‘nationalist’ features. First heard at the Slavonic concert of the Academic Readers’ Society at Žofín Hall, the piece was part of an all-Slav programme.Footnote ⁷¹ In use since 1830 and capable of seating an audience of 400, Žofín Hall, though small by Viennese standards, remained the most spacious concert hall in Prague until the opening of the Rudolfinum in 1885 and played host to most of the city's orchestral concerts.Footnote ⁷² The Slavonic concert series itself was established in 1877, and performances were held annually for 19 consecutive seasons. During the 1880s, these concerts became a meeting ground for the Czech intelligentsia and often provided opportunities for national and political demonstration.Footnote ⁷³ The Academic Readers’ Society, with which the concert series was initially affiliated, was even forced to disband in 1889 for its participation in ‘provocative’ political manifestations.Footnote ⁷⁴ While the reviews of Dvořák's symphony do not suggest that the event was associated with any specific political activity, the composition was premièred before a sizeable audience and in an environment that was hospitable to overt displays of nationalism; this only served to reinforce Czech readings of the piece being published in the press.

Appropriating Dvořák's D major Symphony: a question of genre

In their attempts to claim Dvořák's symphony as a distinctly Czech composition, critics were inevitably forced to confront its genre. Appearing alongside the symphonic poems of Smetana (Richard III) and Fibich (Vesna) as well as Władysław Żeleński's First Polonaise, the symphony must have seemed rather anomalous on the 1881 concert programme. Since the early 1870s, the leading critics in the Czech lands had upheld the symphonic poem as the most appropriate vehicle for expressing ‘Czechness’ in the realm of instrumental music. Otakar Hostinský (1847–1910) published a lengthy defence of programme music in Dalibor in 1873.Footnote ⁷⁵ That same volume of Dalibor carried a series of articles by Novotný, outlining the history of the sonata, the symphony and the symphonic poem.Footnote ⁷⁶ In both studies, the critics champion programmatic genres in the name of progress and modernity. Novotný, in particular, makes note of the nationalist direction that the symphonic poem was taking in more recent works like Fibich's Záboj, Slavoj a Luděk (Záboj, Slavoj and Luděk, 1873) and the cycle Má vlast (My Country, 1872–9) that Smetana had just started to write. Czech composers continued to add to this growing body of programme music during the mid- to late 1870s. While Hostinský alludes to a certain sense of scepticism from Czech audiences toward the symphonic poem in 1873, the genre had become deeply entrenched in the musical culture of the Czech lands by 1881, and as a symphonist, Dvořák stood outside this emerging tradition. Czech critics sought to take ownership of Dvořák nonetheless, while simultaneously explaining how it was that he had deviated from the course they had prescribed for Bohemian composers. For all of their dismissive remarks about the symphony and the ‘German’ connotations it seemed to carry, the genre actually proved to be very well suited for this kind of appropriation.

In order to reconcile Dvořák's cultivation of the symphony with their nationalist project, Czech critics employed several strategies in their reviews of the D major Symphony. They present the symphony as proof of Dvořák's ability to handle more complex forms than mere dance pieces and orchestral miniatures, thereby demonstrating that Czechs could boast remarkable achievements in so-called ‘serious’ genres of music. Novotný takes this approach in his review, stating that Dvořák,

In some of his earlier writings, Novotný had disapproved of the symphony, even declaring on one occasion that ‘only a fool would continue to write in the old forms [of the symphony], when he has newer, more flexible ones at his disposal’.Footnote ⁷⁸ But he was willing to put all this aside in 1881 so that he might claim Dvořák's work as a substantial acquisition for the Czechs. Echoing Novotný, the critic for the conservative newspaper Pokrok speaks of the symphony as the genre in which ‘orchestral music reaches its pinnacle’Footnote ⁷⁹ and asserts that because of the genre's prestige, Dvořák's new symphony was met with considerable anticipation from Czech audiences.Footnote ⁸⁰ The symphony had long served as a marker of compositional maturity. As Mark Evan Bonds shows, it was universally regarded as ‘the most ambitious and challenging of all instrumental genres in the nineteenth century’.Footnote ⁸¹ Dvořák's engagement with it was, thus, taken as a matter of Czech pride. Perhaps as a manifestation of this pride and as a means of indicating the weightiness of the genre, the D major would be referred to in Dalibor as Dvořák's ‘Great’ Symphony for some time after its première, long after the subtitle that Novotný had given it – ‘Czech Spring Symphony’ – had fallen into disuse.Footnote ⁸² Even if Czech critics believed that Czech energies would best be expended in other areas of instrumental composition, they took advantage of the symphony's illustrious position when addressing Dvořák's work.

By 1881, Czech readers did not have to be convinced of Dvořák's skill in this area. He had no Czech ‘giant’ marching ahead of him, and as early as 1873, absolute instrumental music had been described by the Czechs as Dvořák's domain. In an article for Dalibor dated 4 April 1873, Novotný reflects on the recent performance of Dvořák's orchestral composition Májová noc (May Night) with the following words:

Novotný's phrase ‘the field of instrumental music’ does not necessarily exclude programmatic genres. Ludevít Procházka (1837–88) carves out a narrower niche for Dvořák: writing in Národní listy within a few days of Novotný and commenting on the same orchestral piece, he declares that ‘the extraordinary loveliness pouring forth in [Dvořák's] instrumentation points especially to his true calling in the realm of absolute instrumental music’.Footnote ⁸⁴ David Beveridge marvels at the swiftness with which these critics seem to be willing to dismiss Dvořák's vocal works, considering that no Dvořák opera had yet been performed in the Czech lands at that time,Footnote ⁸⁵ and barely a month earlier, both men had borne witness to the tremendous success in Prague of Dvořák's Hymnus: Dědicové bílé hory (Hymnus: Heirs of the White Mountain), a choral piece. Perhaps even more surprising is the degree of confidence that the critics place in Dvořák's instrumental works, which likewise had been given little exposure up to that point. Although it would appear that critics drew these conclusions after a very limited sampling of Dvořák's oeuvre, the composer's alleged area of expertise was demarcated quite early in his career. His reputation would remain intact throughout his life, as is evident in the writing of Emanuel Chvála (1851–1924). In his contribution to the collection of essays on Dvořák from 1912, Chvála characterizes Dvořák as a symphonist at heart, even when working in other genres:

The symphony's lack of extramusical associations further worked in the Czech critics’ favour when they reviewed Dvořák's D major Symphony, as it gave them the opportunity to fill in what the composer had left unspecified. This meant not only accentuating the Czechness of Dvořák's symphony, but also invoking the language of the favoured symphonic poem. Beckerman considers the D major to be the ‘most absolute’ of Dvořák's symphonies – that is, ‘the least likely of [the composer's] later symphonies to have a program lurking behind it’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Yet this symphony, perhaps more than any of Dvořák's other works in the genre, inspired poetic effusions from Czech critics. The reviewers for Dalibor and Národní listy make frequent mention of imagery from spring in their articles on the symphony, even though no such extramusical ideas are suggested in the score.Footnote ⁸⁸ Once again it is Novotný who takes this the furthest, arguing that the difference between Dvořák's symphony, to which he applies the epithet ‘spring’, and Fibich's symphonic poem entitled Vesna (Spring), which was premièred at the same concert, lies primarily in the number of movements; otherwise, for Novotný, the two works are similarly evocative:

In some respects, such comments were not new for Novotný, who had argued in 1874 that Dvořák's Symphony in E♭ major had been misclassified and ought to have been designated as a series of symphonic poems, rather than as a symphony.Footnote ⁹⁰

References to Czech nature and the Czech people abound in Šourek's discussion of Dvořák's D major Symphony in his biography of Dvořák, cited in note 53 above. In fact, Šourek's description of the piece is strongly akin in its language to the critic Chvála's assessment in 1880 of Smetana's Má vlast. Referring to this best-known cycle of symphonic poems by Smetana, Chvála writes: ‘As is evident from the titles, Smetana drew poetic material for his symphonic poems from the soul of his nation: the glorious history of the Czechs, the poetry of the Czech people, the desires of the nation and its hopes for the future inspired Smetana to artistic creation.’Footnote ⁹¹ These same kinds of images surface time and time again in Czech criticism on Dvořák's symphony. By applying the subtitle ‘Czech Spring Symphony’ to Dvořák's work, Novotný, then, did not merely seek to give it a specifically Czech programme; the idea of giving a work a programme of any kind had itself become a Czech preoccupation by that time. In spite of its deviation from established generic norms in the Czech lands, critics took hold of Dvořák's symphony and moulded it to their purposes, capitalizing on the admiration that symphonies seemed to inspire in audiences, Dvořák's own reputation as a symphonist and the fact that the genre does not strive to refer to anything outside itself.

Conclusion

Dvořák's D major Symphony came in the midst of strained relations between the Czechs and Germans of Austria. After the Stremayr language ordinance, it became more crucial than ever to define exactly what was German and what was Czech. Although the Vienna Philharmonic had made it clear that Dvořák was to be counted as an outsider when they refused to perform his symphony, the threat that Dvořák might eventually end up on the German side of this divide was still very real for many Czech critics. It had not been uncommon in the past for musicians of Czech origin to emigrate to German-speaking Europe, and Hanslick and Brahms urged Dvořák at various points in his career to make the move to Vienna. What is more, Dvořák had recently come under fire in Dalibor for allegedly giving priority to German audiences. For Novotný, it was only a matter of time before the Germans would start taking ownership of Dvořák. In order to ‘eliminate the danger that [Dvořák's] pieces could be estranged from [Czech] repertoire’,Footnote ⁹² as Novotný expresses it, Czech critics used their reviews of the D major Symphony to claim Dvořák and prove to the public that his music was unequivocally Czech. They did this by concealing the symphony's Viennese connections and exaggerating its ‘Czech’ elements, thereby justifying Dvořák's cultivation of this ‘German’ genre, even as his compatriots gravitated toward the symphonic poem.

Dvořák does not react to these reviews in any of his letters; however, he would probably have seen no inherent contradiction between the symphony's Czech and German narratives and may have even played a role in constructing them. In a letter dated 13 March 1881 – less than two weeks before the Prague première – Dvořák asks Richter to return the score and parts of the symphony to him as soon as possible; he leads Richter to believe that these materials are needed for the symphony's publication in Berlin, when in fact they were required for the Prague performance.Footnote ⁹³ Just as Czech audiences were being kept in ignorance of the symphony's Viennese backstory, so too were Dvořák's acquaintances in Vienna unaware of his plan to have the work premièred in Prague. Becoming increasingly adept at cultivating multiple audiences, Dvořák dealt with the snub from the Viennese crowd by surreptitiously bringing about a performance in an environment in which he was guaranteed to get a sympathetic response.

The Czech reception of Dvořák's D major Symphony ultimately shows just how much issues of language and nationality were intertwined in the Czech lands during the late nineteenth century. Sayer describes Prague, in particular, as ‘a city where the question of the relation of language and identity has been a fraught one’.Footnote ⁹⁴ At a time when the Czech lands were linguistically mixed, the decision to communicate in either Czech or German was not arbitrary, nor was it a matter of mere practicality, but it carried deep meaning. The kind of rhetoric concerning language that was common in contemporary political debates spilled over into Czech music criticism of this period, and perceived musical language served as an important earmark of national affiliation. Thus, when Dvořák's symphony was performed on home soil in the early 1880s, critics and audiences were determined to hear Czech, no matter how much German he spoke.