New Worlds of Dvorak: Searching in America for the Composers Inner Life FROM THE PUBLISHER
A forceful reinterpretation of the composer's personality and work.
Focusing on Dvorák's three-year stay in the United States, this book explores the world behind the public legend, concluding that the composer suffered from a debilitating and previously unexplored anxiety disorder. Readers of this book will gain a rich view of Dvorák that will deepen their understanding of his works, especially his Symphony From the New World. Audio compact disc included; 16 pages of b/w illustrations.
Author Biography: Michael B. Beckerman is professor of music at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He lives in San Francisco.
SYNOPSIS
Beckerman (music, New York U., New York City) has written a knowledgeable and engaging account of Dvorák's intellectual and musical activity during the years 1892-1895, when he was in the US (when he composed the New World Symphony). The influences of American ideas, melodies, and images on Dvorák's music are the book's main themes as Beckerman describes the people whose activities effected Dvorák's work, including the philanthropist Jeannette Thurber, music critic James Huneker, and African-American singer and composer Henry Thacker Burleigh. Annotation ©2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
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.) Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.
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