Symphony No. 7 in D minor, Opus 70

Composition and Premiere

Following a request from London’s Royal Philharmonic Society, Dvořák began to sketch the Symphony No. 7 on December 13, 1884, and completed the score on March 17, 1885. The composer conducted the premiere in St. James’s Hall, London, on April 22, 1885. He made a few further revisions in June of that year. William Gericke led the first BSO performances in October 1886. The first Tanglewood performance was by the Berkshire (Tanglewood) Music Center Orchestra under Leonard Bernstein in July 1955. The BSO first played it at Tanglewood under Stanislaw Skrowaczewski in July 1968. 

Five years elapsed between the composition of Dvořák’s Sixth and Seventh symphonies, but they were years of increasing fame and busy composition in other genres, including the brilliant Scherzo capriccioso, the dramatic Hussite Overture, and the closely argued F minor trio. His opera Dmitri (which, in terms of its plot, is a sequel to Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov) had been performed in Prague and the comic opera The Cunning Peasant in Hamburg. Most important for Dvořák’s international reputation, though, was the extraordinary popularity that he enjoyed in London after Joseph Barnby introduced his Stabat Mater in 1883. He himself conducted the Stabat Mater and other works, including the Sixth Symphony, during a London visit made in the spring of 1884 at the invitation of the Royal Philharmonic Society. Throughout his visit he was warmly fêted by the English. As he wrote to a friend, 

I am convinced that England offers me a new and certainly happier future, and one which I hope may benefit our entire Czech art. The English are a fine people, enthusiastic about music, and it is well known that they remain loyal to those whose art they have enjoyed. God grant that it may be so with me. 

Not long after his return home, Dvořák learned that the Philharmonic Society had elected him a member; at the same time, the society requested a new symphony. 

Though the commission was tendered in June, Dvořák did not rush into the work. In fact, he waited six months before starting to sketch, and even then the composition involved more than his usual amount of preliminary work and later rewriting. No doubt he was consciously aiming to do his best not only for the English orchestra that requested the work, but also for his mentor Johannes Brahms, whose Third Symphony, performed just a short time before, was both a challenge and an inspiration as Dvořák once again prepared to enter the lists of symphonic composition. Many writers consider the resulting symphony to be Dvořák’s greatest single achievement, a work of powerful and varied moods, a nationalistic symphony that offers more than quaint touristy views of peasant dances (a stereotype of the nationalistic schools), that offers, indeed, the highest degree of musical seriousness and refinement. 

The published score bore no dedication—not even to the Philharmonic Society. But Dvořák’s manuscript bears a private inscription. After he had heard a pair of stunning performances of the symphony given in Berlin under the direction of Hans von Bülow on October 27 and 28, 1889, the composer pasted a photograph of von Bülow to the title page of his score and added the words, “Hail! It was you who brought the work to life!” 

Dvořák’s enthusiasm for von Bülow’s performance was in part caused by the fact that this symphony had been received with scant success on the Continent at its first performance, in Vienna, under Hans Richter. Richter himself had written to the composer expressing his dismay with the reaction of the Viennese audience, then as now among the most conservative to be found in the world. “Our Philharmonic audiences,” wrote Richter, “are often—well, let us say, queer. I shan’t, however, let that put me off.” But Richter noted that the new symphony absolutely required “a dramatically trained conductor—a Wagnerian (Hans Bülow will forgive me!)” to do full justice to its range of mood. 

The symphony opens with a theme of deep Slavic foreboding, lyrical in character but built of motives that could serve as the germ for development. The first page of the final score contains a note in the composer’s hand that reveals, “The main theme occurred to me when the festival train from Pest arrived at the State station in 1884.” The theme certainly has little of “festival” character, but the train in question (Dvořák was noted for his fondness for locomotives and his familiarity with their schedules) brought dozens of anti-Hapsburg patriots to a National Theater Festival in Prague, so it is not unlikely that the Czech colorations in melody and harmony arose from his patriotic mood. Some of the transitional themes are related to ideas in the Hussite Overture, another recent patriotic score composed in memory of the 14th-century Czech religious reformer Jan Hus; these, too, no doubt arose from patriotic connections in Dvořák’s mind. These stern reflections usher in a rocking, sunny secondary theme that contrasts strikingly with the other material. The concentration of both development and recapitulation make this one of Dvořák’s densest symphonic movements in terms of sheer quality of incident. 

The Poco adagio begins with a square-cut melodic phrase that comes to its ordained end after eight measures, raising visions of possible theme-and-variations form with a series of starts and stops. But immediately after the statement of that theme, the musical thought opens out to become increasingly chromatic and expressive in a movement filled with wonderful touches of poignancy and colorful elaboration in the orchestral writing. 

The scherzo is written in 6/4 time, but from the beginning there is an exhilarating conflict between the two beats per measure of 6/4 (in the accompaniment) and the three beats per measure of 3/2 that the ear perceives in the melody. This is, in fact, a furiant, a characteristic Czech dance. Dvořák worked hard at the rhythmic lightness evident throughout this utterly delightful movement, so spontaneous in effect that it is difficult to realize the amount of sketching and rewriting that went into its bubbling effervescence. In stark contrast, the finale begins in a mood of tragedy—starting right from the intense opening phrase, the last three notes of which are repeated to begin a slow, hymnlike march—with vivid themes developed to a majestic close that only turns definitively to the major in the last bars. 

STEVEN LEDBETTER 

Steven Ledbetter, a freelance writer and lecturer on music, was program annotator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1979 to 1998.