Antonín Dvořák

Eduard Hanslick wrote of Antonín Dvořák: “Among the scholarship applications that arrive at the Ministry each year, weighed down with scores, most tend to come from composers who meet only two of the three statutory requirements, youth and poverty, while dispensing with the third, talent. It was therefore a most pleasant surprise when a petitioner from Prague, Antonín Dvořák, submitted samples of an intense, albeit still unripe, compositional gift.”

Hanslick served, together with Johann Ritter von Herbeck and Johannes Brahms, on the commission established in 1863 by the Vienna Ministry of Education and Culture to award scholarships to emerging Czech artists. His assessment referred to Dvořák’s Symphony in E flat major, composed in 1873. Dvořák submitted the work for evaluation in 1875, around the same time that his cantata Hymnus brought him the long awaited breakthrough as a composer. He received a prize of 400 gulden, the highest fee he had been awarded up to that point.

With his livelihood at least temporarily secured, Dvořák’s productivity flourished as never before. The mid 1870s marked a period of searching and self discovery. After a phase in which Wagner had been his sole model, he now returned to the classical examples of Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann. For him, this was less a regression than a turning inward, a return to his own voice. Bedřich Smetana likely played a role as well. His more Mozartian comic opera The Two Widows, premiered in 1874, seems to have convinced Dvořák that a distinctive Czech music could be found neither through imitation of Wagnerian music drama nor through mere potpourris of Czech folk songs, but only through genuinely new creative invention.