RO NOW: Dvořák's Symphony No. 5

What are you going to listen to?

During the winter months, Gustav Mahler led the busy life of an opera director, but in the summer he withdrew from the hustle and bustle of the city. High up in the solitude of the pine forests near Maiernigg, in the summer of 1901, he composed *Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft* and *Um Mitternacht* —or so Gustav Mahler told Ernst Decsey, a music critic from Graz, who managed to speak with him a few more times during the last Last years of his life. Mahler wrote *Liebst du um Schönheit* exactly one year later. Even before the turn of the century, the powerful opera director had acquired a plot of land on Lake Wörthersee, where Brahms also loved to spend time. There, he could now compose in peace and quiet during the summer, free from the stress of the big city. After the folk-song-like poetry from the collection *Des Knaben Wunderhorn*, the texts of the German Romantic poet Friedrich Rückert (1788–1866) began to appeal to him more and more. Rückert’s romantic yet somber themes must have particularly resonated with him, even though everything seemed to be going his way. Not only professionally and artistically, but also in his personal life: in March 1902, he married the most beautiful girl in Vienna, Alma Schindler. He had met her for the first time in the fall of 1901, after that lonely summer among the fir trees. It had sealed his “return to the world” and his busy social life. It was not until a few years later, in 1905, that Mahler himself conducted the premiere of these songs in an orchestral setting. 

Growing up in the Bohemian village of Nelahozeves, a hamlet that had fewer than fifty houses in a landscape of vast fields, farmlands and gently rolling hills, Antonin Dvořák came into contact with music at an early age. His father ran a butcher shop and an inn but also played the zither excellently. From him, little Dvořák received his first music lessons, which were later continued at the village school. Making music was in the villagers' blood anyway, as Dvořák aptly described in an interview with the British Sunday Times in 1885: "All Slavs love music. They can work all day in the fields, but they are always singing, and the true musical spirit burns ardently in them. And how they also love to dance! On Sunday, when church is out, they start making music and dancing, often until early the next morning. Every village has an orchestra of about eight or ten musicians - I belonged to ours as soon as I could fiddle a little." Folk music was instilled in Dvořák with the mother's milk. Not surprisingly, as a composer he combined his expressive lyricism and powerful rhythms with elements of Slavic folk music. This style revealed itself particularly from the Fifth Symphony, which Dvořák put to paper in just five weeks in 1875. A symphony very different from the previous one, in which Wagner's influence is still very evident with lots of brooding drama, grand percussion and downright Wagner quotations. In the Fifth, Dvořák's Bohemian-expressive style breaks through: more relaxed, more fluid, more rural with delightful bird and hunting sounds and, of course, some Bohemian dances. That the pastoral symphony was created in the midst of nature may be audible.