As a Catholic composer, Antonin Dvořák could be surprisingly ambiguous. His patriotic and political allegiance to his Bohemian homeland sometimes seemed to outweigh ecclesiastical matters in his creative imagination.
The swift, raucously percussive opening of his dramatic <em>Te Deum</em> (1892/93) might have been intended to attract the attention of a drowsy deity. Other, more traditionally conceived works, such as his <em>Stabat Mater</em> (1877), <em>Mass in D Major</em> (1887) and <em>Requiem </em>(1890), still mix ardour with unusual intimacy.
Dvořák’s piety was never in doubt. In a coauthored article on Franz Schubert published in 1894 in <em>New York’s Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine</em>, Dvořák expressed admiration for Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, the Italian Renaissance church composer “in whom Roman Catholic music reaches its climax”.
Quoting an 1825 letter by Schubert to his parents about writing sacred music, Dvořák evidently approved of his predecessor’s quest for naturalness in religious sentiments. Schubert claimed that his entourage expressed surprise at his piety in a “hymn to the Holy Virgin”, adding:
“I never force myself into a devout attitude, and never compose such hymns or prayers unless I am involuntarily overcome by it; but in that case it usually happens to be the genuine spirit of devotion.”
The more-or-less involuntary nature of religious ardour did not prevent Dvořák from being punctilious at times about proper behaviour. When preparing his opera <em>Rusalka</em> (1901), Dvořák expressed concern to his librettist Jaroslav Kvapil that in the third act, a character goes insane and curses God. Kvapil reassured the composer that the malediction was aimed at a deity of the natural world, not of Christianity.
When Dvořák completed his <em>Mass in D major</em>, he wrote to a friend suggesting that it might be renamed “faith, hope and love for God Almighty, and an expression of thanks for this great gift, for having been given the opportunity successfully to complete a work in praise of the Highest, and in honour of our art”.
With Schubert-like modesty, Dvořák concluded: “Do not be surprised that I am so devout, but an artist who is not cannot achieve anything like this.”
This devotion was exemplified in his oratorio <em>Saint Ludmila</em> (1886), commissioned by the Leeds Festival. The festival committee repeatedly hinted to Dvořák that a biblical theme would doubtless be more accessible to a UK audience, but the composer was adamant about setting a monumental Czech religio-historical episode.
He eventually produced a work lasting 150 minutes for full orchestra, mixed choir and five soloists.
Like a true Victorian, Dvořák reacted to the effort required to create this massive result by developing a variety of nervous complaints. Capturing the travails of St Ludmila left him with, among other symptoms, fatigue, agitation, digestive woes and permanent fits of agoraphobia which manifested itself by an exaggerated fear of crossing the streets of Prague.
Comparably, when an American Lady Bountiful in New York demanded a new composition to celebrate the 400th anniversary in 1892 of the discovery of the New World, Dvořák responded with his <em>Te Deum</em>, suggested as an alternative to a more explicitly Yankee theme, given looming time constraints.
Possibly as a compromise, secular elements in the <em>Te Deum </em>include a third movement with a rhythmical theme that has been likened to Native American folk music. And Dvořák’s biographers assure us that in Prague in 1879, he did attend a performance by a touring group of Iroquois Indians.
Yet his diverse affinities to the Church and church music in all contexts, however unorthodox, were sometimes compromised by passionate patriotism. Perplexed musicologists have noted that in setting <em>Biblical Songs </em>(1894) from the Book of Psalms, rather than opting for the Vulgate, Dvořák used texts from the traditional Czech Protestant Bible of Kralice, published in 1613.
This product of Moravian diligence, still used today as a standard Czech translation, had a national impact that Dvořák must have found irresistible, even if Catholics might have preferred to hear the Psalms in Latin. Although trained in his youth as a church organist, Dvořák had a somewhat mixed rapport with the language of liturgy.
An anonymous critic in the July 1945 issue of Music & Letters scolded the composer’s Stabat Mater for “dreadful and dreadfully prominent false quantities – very odd slips for a Catholic who surely ought to have known his Latin”.
More generally, when Catholicism was identified with the crushing power of Austrian rule, Dvořák preferred to voice national pride. His feisty hymn <em>The Heirs of White Mountain </em>(1872) mourns the Catholic Hapsburg victory at the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620.
This significant clash in the early stages of the Thirty Years’ War led to the defeat of the Bohemian Revolt and ensured Habsburg control for the next 300 years. An army of Bohemians and mercenaries was defeated by the combined forces of Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor, at White Mountain (Bílá Hora) near Prague. Ferdinand sought to impose absolutist rule on Bohemia while encouraging conversion to the Catholic faith.
It was clear which side Dvořák favoured in this clash. Similarly, Dvořák’s <em>Hussite Overture </em>(1883) was originally intended as a part of a dramatic trilogy on the Bohemian religious leader Jan Hus, who was burned at the stake in 1415 for heresy against the teachings of the Catholic Church.
Reduced to a single composition, Hussite Overture remains fiery indeed, commemorating the 15th-century Hussite Crusades, during which Czech patriots fought attempts by German rulers of the Holy Roman Empire to restore Catholicism in parts of Bohemia that had adopted teachings of Jan Hus.
This militancy became emblematic of Dvořák’s nationalist identity. After he died, during a grandiose public funeral procession, a <em>Miserere</em> was sung, and when the procession reached the National Theatre, strains of Dvořák’s <em>Requiem</em> were heard from the theatre’s balcony, performed by the theatre orchestra and choir.
At a funeral Mass held in the Church of Our Lady before Týn, a Gothic church and dominant feature of the Old Town of Prague, National Theatre soloists, orchestra and choir performed Mozart’s <em>Requiem</em>.
Here a slight irony intruded. In his 1894 column in the <em>Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine</em>, Dvořák had expressed the expected admiration for Mozart, with the caveat that Wolfgang’s sacred compositions, although “very beautiful from a purely musical point of view, usually lack the true ecclesiastical atmosphere” and might seem to modern listeners “too genial and sentimental”.
But whether or not Dvořák might have preferred something by Palestrina to be played at his service, the genuine devotion surrounding the occasion was indisputable.
As part of the solemnities, the Warsaw Philharmonic changed the programme of a scheduled symphonic concert to include the <em>Hussite Overture</em>. Among the attendees of this memorial concert was his compatriot Leoš Janáček, who later informed a friend about the loss felt by all Czechs: “I stand unsteadily with the others in the crowded hall. Is it really true that he has died?”
Anyone hearing vivacious, inspired recordings of Dvořák’s works inspired by Catholicism, from the Requiem conducted by Karel Ančerl to the British baritone George Henschel in the Biblical Song “By the Waters of Babylon” may respond to Janáček’s wonderment by positing that Dvořák never really died, after all.
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