New worlds of Dvořák Searching in America for the composer's inner life

Die-hard Dvorak fans will adore this arcane but vividly written musicological study of the composer's sojourn in America. Dvorak was director of the National Conservatory in New York from 1892-95, and during this time he wrote his famous "New World" Symphony as well as a number of lesser works. Beckerman, a New York University music professor, explores the literary, political and personal influences that helped shape this creative outpouring. His detailed analysis ascribes much of the "New World" to a programmatic setting of Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha, a precursor to a planned opera that never materialized. Beckerman also provides a fascinating account of the ideology of musical nationalism in which Dvorak was steeped. Dvorak, he says, aspired to be the "Slavic Wagner" and was an exponent of a self-consciously "Czech" musical style. In America, egged on by journalist-provocateurs and influenced by black musicians at the National Conservatory, Dvorak became a champion of an "American" national music to be based on African American spirituals and Indian folk tunes. Although an agnostic on the subject of musical nationalism (he feels that Dvorak's music was traditional German-style classical music with Czech and American gestures) Beckerman is a sympathetic and insightful guide to the controversies of an era when music was taken very seriously indeed. His contention that Dvorak suffered from agoraphobia and an accompanying panic disorder brought on in part by tremendous stress, and that the composer drank as self-medication, is interesting but not as compelling as the rest of this committed investigation. An accompanying CD, keyed to the text, illustrates Beckerman's arguments through the music itself. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved