Sorry, I have been absent from this blog for a long time now. I was on a long trip out of the country so naturally my travel blog was getting all the attention (see the link on the left side of the page).
Anyway, I recently pulled out and listened to a CD of an early work which belies its author's immaturity as a musician, sounding both assured and experienced.
The opening is a brief fortissimo fanfare for trombones in slow common time. It begins with a drop of a minor third and return to the original note. This motif will colour almost all of the succeeding movement. As soon as the fanfare ends (a mere matter of a few seconds) the strings and winds set up a motoric pulse in 6/8 time, unusually sounding on the beats 2, 3, 5, and 6 of the bar. Over this begins a rising and falling scale figure which gradually gains power and intensity as the movement builds up to its full head of steam. Along with it comes a restless ostinato which is built on that falling and rising minor third. All these ingredients share one dominant quality: they are huge generators of energy, and this music is full of tension, power, and an almost irresistible driving force.
This breathtaking opening, impossible to erase from your mind once you've heard it, marks the beginning of the symphonic career of Antonin Dvořák. He composed it in 1865 when he was just 24 years of age, and it was perhaps his first really large-scale composition. Compare that with Brahms whose first symphony was not completed until he was 33 years old and had many more compositions, including numerous major works with orchestra, behind him.
Dvořák composed the first symphony to enter into a competition in Germany. He did not win, and the score was not returned to him. Later in life, he made a catalogue of his own works and in it he mentioned the symphony with the subtitle "The Bells of Zlonice", a reference to the village where he was living and working at the time. Since the music has no apparent programmatic content whatsoever, certainly containing no overt bell figures or sounds, this title may as well be discarded. He also stated incorrectly that he had destroyed the manuscript. However, it reappeared in an auction sale in Leipzig in the 1930s and was subsequently published and performed.
I have to admit that the rest of the symphony is not terribly interesting. Even the first movement contains severe structural weaknesses, but the restless energy and forward drive of the music (for me) overcomes all problems, and makes it a memorable listening experience.
I previously described the opening bars, a minute or so of music already full of materials promising for good symphonic development. In fact, the exposition section of the movement lasts for six full minutes and is (in my recording) repeated in full, thereby accounting for 12 of the 18 minutes which the movement lasts. The development section is severely compressed, taking only a few minutes, but managing to work some of the figures around very creatively in that time. During the course of the movement, the energetic ostinato of 5 notes only slackens once or twice, replaced by smiling major-key melodic material which might be called the "second subject", but these respites last mere moments before the darker minor of the powerful, driving main tempo resumes.
As the movement rolls forward towards its climax, the opening fanfare is heard again on the trombones several times, while the ostinato (another form of the same melody) is tossed around to virtually every main instrument in the orchestra, even appearing for a time on the timpani. The final build-up is a virtuoso reworking of all the main materials, and at the very climax the trombones re-enter fortissimo with the rising and falling scale from the opening, a hair-raising culmination which leads shortly to the emphatic final cadence -- and the movement stops abruptly (but punctually) on a series of slamming staccato chords.
I can think of few examples in all of music of a piece which keeps on rolling forwards so relentlessly, a musical juggernaut in effect, for such a prolonged time. This overpowering energy might indeed be judged a fault by some, but to me it's the feature which totally justifies this movement as being worthy of preservation. What is even more remarkable is the fact that, unlike all his other symphonic works, Dvořák never had the opportunity to revise this one. His first thoughts in this opening movement are remarkably strong and clear, and I love listening to it.
As an interesting footnote: even though he had not seen the score for almost 30 years, it seems possible that he may have remembered this symphony well enough that he was consciously quoting it in his Requiem, Op. 89 of 1891 ( A Beautiful Choral Rarity ). The Dies Irae movement uses the same restless ostinato figure as this symphonic movement, but played much faster and translated into common time.
