“We three remaining spent
a restless evening -- try to interest ourselves in cards but bored. B + A --
eventually play chinese checkers and parlor golf, while I alternately read in Anna
Karenina and listen to the radio. At last I gave it all up, and played Dvořák 2nd Symphony. It was even more powerful and
beautiful than I remembered.”
“B” is likely Burchfield’s
wife, Bertha. The couple lived in West Seneca, N.Y., near Buffalo, and had five
children. The painter was forty-nine. He notes that “torrents of rain” were
falling. The war is on and television in middle-class homes is still several
years away. They play cards, something my parents did in subsequent decades – canasta with one group of friends, poker
with another. Burchfield was an ambitious reader with good taste. In his
journal he mentions Melville, Gogol, Cather and Sherwood Anderson, among many
others. In his journal for Aug. 6, 1946,
while rain is falling, he writes: “This kind of weather has never been better
described than Tolstoy does in War and Peace.”
Burchfield doesn’t mention
it but September 8 is Dvorak’s birthday. I’ve loved Dvořák (1841-1904) since I was a freshman in college. My roommate’s father was Slovak and his
mother Austrian, and both emigrated to the U.S. after World War II. Mike introduced me to Bedřich Smetana and Leoš
Janáček, as well as Dvořák. That’s when I learned about the American strain in Dvořák’s
music, his visit to the U.S. in 1893 and his stay in Spillville, Iowa.
Burchfield was a soft-spoken,
unpretentious, likable middle-class American man, as well as a great painter. His taste in art isn’t
intended to impress anyone. He's unafraid to express enthusiasm for painting, music, books. He knows what he likes. In his journal on July 29, 1947 he writes:
“A fresh windy morning
with less humidity. In studio studying my recent work, and playing records—The
Dvorak Quintet Opus 106, and V. Williams Symph. & S. I was especially
receptive, and they sounded more beautiful than ever before. My pictures, too,
seemed better than I had expected.”
3 comments:
So in 1942, what was then called Dvorak's 2nd Symphony was in fact his seventh. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6b3VIZVZiek
Dvorak's first four symphonies were unpublished during his lifetime and only discovered thereafter. Even decades after their discovery they were barely known and not considered 'official' Dvorak symphonies until well after World War II. The current numbering system only came into true use around the 1960s when complete cycles of Dvorak Symphonies began to be recorded.
Long time listener, first time caller.
My first Dvorak memory is my father singing "Going Home", from the New World. It's still moving, remembering how it affected him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FMUttpSllY
"William Arms Fisher, a pupil of the Czech composer Antonin Dvorak, wrote the lyrics and adapted the music to the theme of 2nd Movement of Dvorak's New World Symphony.
"The Largo, with its haunting English horn solo, is the outpouring of Dvorak's own home-longing, with something of the loneliness of far-off prairie horizons, the faint memory of the red-man's bygone days, and a sense of the tragedy of the black-man as it sings in his "spirituals." Deeper still it is a moving expression of that nostalgia of the soul all human beings feel. That the lyric opening theme of the Largo should spontaneously suggest the words 'Goin' home, goin' home' is natural enough, and that the lines that follow the melody should take the form of a negro spiritual accords with the genesis of the symphony." -- William Arms Fisher, Boston, July 21, 1922.
Happy coincidence, a first hearing just now of a Chinese version, by the Silkroad Ensemble, on Steve Seel's classics program. (MPR)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uymTSOYYYC0
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