On 27 September 1892, Dvořák arrived in New York to begin his appointment as Director of the National Conservatory. Over the next few months his time was split between attending public events at which his music was played and celebrated, teaching duties including composition lessons and conducting, competition adjudicating, and composing. To relax, he walked in Central Park and substituted an old habit of trainspotting with a new penchant for observing the coming and going of trans-Atlantic liners, acquainting himself with the crews. Although his patron Jeannette Thurber avoided burdening Dvořák with administrative duties during his directorship, it was still a busy time and perhaps remarkable that there was time to pen the ‘New World’ Symphony between January and May 1893.
By June, Dvořák was naturally ready for a summer retreat. Initially he planned to return to Bohemia for a family reunion with four of his six children, who had remained at home in the care of his mother-in-law. However, this intention changed after Dvořák's assistant Josef Kovařík told him of a settlement of Czech immigrants in Spillville, Iowa. Now Dvořák decided to arrange a summer itinerary for his whole family in America focused around a stay in Spillville. He maintained his habit of rising early in a daily routine that featured composing, walking, and visiting the nearby church. He met the locals and quickly became part of the community. It was a stable pattern of activity that supported his creative work. Dvořák sketched in outline what would become known as the ‘American’ Quartet in just three days, writing with apparent relief on his manuscript: ‘Thank God. I am satisfied. It has gone quickly’ (Preface, x). The sketch was then developed, and the score written out over ten days in the middle of June.
The quartet celebrates Dvořák's pastoral environment and sense of belonging in a Czech community. Pentatonic melodies, energetic rhythms, and brisk modulations drive the musical argument forwards and are balanced by shorter reflective episodes, while the slow movement offers a more extended exploration of musical melancholy. The whole perhaps recalls Schubert more strongly than any of Dvořák's other musical predecessors, though the exploration of the pastoral topic in a multi-movement work in the key of F major makes it hard to avoid thinking of Beethoven's Symphony No. 6, and perhaps also Mozart's Piano Concerto K. 459 which has no subtitle but evokes the pastoral. It sits comfortably within the traditions of a genre whose works are usually untitled, yet as Dvořák noted with reference to his ‘New World’ Symphony, the String Quintet in E-flat major, and the quartet discussed here, ‘I know I would never have written these pieces this way if I had not seen America!’ (Preface, xii).
While Dvorak's location inspired this work, it created significant practical difficulties for publication. To avoid sending proofs across the Atlantic, his publisher, Simrock, asked Brahms to review them, although the corrections were probably made by another hand, that of the archivist Eusebius Mandyczewski. Exactly which changes were made in this review process is now unknown, meaning that it is not always clear which reading is preferable when Dvořák's autograph differs from the printed scores. As Michael Kube, the editor of this new edition, explains ‘the source situation for this composition must be described as difficult’ (37). While the autograph sketches and full score are preserved in the collection of the Antonín Dvořák Museum in Prague, all manuscript copies are lost. This leaves a substantial gap in documentation of the process between autograph and the final published score and parts. The missing documents include a manuscript copy of the score and parts made by Kovařík in Spillville for an initial playthrough, another set of parts used for the first public performance on 1 January 1894, and, most likely, further copies prepared specifically for the publishers. Kube discusses these issues in the Preface and the Critical Commentary and provides a thorough set of supporting footnotes drawing widely on correspondence to provide helpful evidence of the previous existence of now lost materials. The upshot is that the editor of this modern edition has been able to consult autograph sources unavailable to Simrock, and Simrock worked from copies unavailable to the modern editor.
In the course of his editorial work, Kube examined changes recorded in the autograph in blue crayon that were not necessarily transferred into the copies sent to Germany. These are treated with necessary caution as it cannot be assumed they represent a final version that should take precedence. The critical commentary explains that in most cases the published scores are treated as the main source ‘since they present the work in a more complete and advanced state stage than’ the autograph (37). The autograph still remains extremely useful, and it is often a more reliable source for dynamics and slurs that may have been altered due to lack of space in the published version. The availability of the autograph also helps to untangle some discrepancies between the Simrock full score and parts which seem to have been prepared on the basis of different documents. After describing each of the sources and the overall approach, the editor provides a list of editorial notes that covers almost 14 pages, indicating the scale of the work involved has been substantial.
This new Bärenreiter Urtext offers numerous presentational improvements over the old Simrock edition that enhance the score. Spacing is far more consistent, which is a particular advantage in the case of the performance directions that now avoid overlapping the staves, aiding readability for performers and students alike especially at the text's busiest moments; bar numbers are provided and the positioning of the old rehearsal numbers is maintained, allowing for any references given from the old edition to still be located; and the cello part uses the tenor clef for passages in higher registers, in place of the sometimes confusing older convention of writing in the treble clef an octave higher than sounded. A comparison of the published scores illustrates the enormous improvements in musical publishing that have been made in the intervening 130 years. This new edition provides both a study score and a set of parts that will be appreciated by scholars and performers alike for many years to come.
