Dvorak's 'The Water Goblin'

Synopsis

In the late 19th Century, there were two rival musical camps: one favored “absolute music” like the symphonies, concertos, and chamber music of Brahms; the other the “music of the future,” namely the operas of Wagner and the tone poems of Liszt, works that told dramatic stories in music.

Now, Dvořák’s mentor was Brahms, and Dvořák was famous for his symphonies, concertos and chamber music. But on today’s date in 1896, at a concert of the Prague Conservatory Orchestra, three tone poems by Dvořák premiered: The Water Goblin, The Noonday Witch, and The Golden Spinning Wheel, all three based on Czech folk legends — and rather lurid, even gruesome ones at that.

Not surprisingly, the “absolute music” camp was shocked. Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick lamented: “It is strange that Dvořák now indulges in ugly, unnatural, and ghastly stories which correspond so little to his amiable character and to the true musician that he is. In The Water Goblin we are treated to a fiend who cuts off his own child’s head!”

But another Czech composer, Leos Janacek, heard something quite different: “In all the orchestral tone poems that I have known, the ‘direct speech’ of the instruments, if I might describe it thus, has never sounded with such certainty, clarity and truthfulness within the wave of melodies, as it does in The Water Goblin.”

Music Played in Today's Program

Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904): The Water Goblin; Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra; Nikolaus Harnoncourt, conductor; Teldec 25254

On This Day

Births

• 1801 - Czech opera composer Franz (František) Škroup, in Osice. One of his songs was eventually used as the Czech national anthem.

• 1832 - French operetta composer Charles Lecocq, in Paris

Deaths

• 1875 - French composer Georges Bizet, 36, at Bougival (near Paris)

• 1899 - Austrian composer Johann Strauss, Jr., 73, in Vienna

• 1939 - Spanish composer and conductor Enrique Fernandez Arbos, in San Sebastian

Premieres

• 1896 - Saint-Saëns: Piano Concerto No. 5, in Paris, with the composer as soloist

• 1915 - Chadwick: symphonic ballad Tam O’Shanter at the Norfolk Festival

• 1922 - Stravinsky: opera Marva, at the Paris Opéra

• 1947 - Poulenc: opera Les Mamelles de Tirésias (The Breasts of Tiresias) in Paris at the Opéra-Comique

• 1964 - Menotti: Martin’s Lie, at Bristol Cathedral in Bath, England

• 1979 - Menotti: La Loca, in San Diego, California

• 1988 - Michael Torke: Copper for brass quintet and orchestra, at the Midland (Michigan) Festival, with the Empire Brass and the Detroit Symphony conducted by Stephen Stein

• 1999 - Tan Dun: Concerto for Water Percussion and Orchestra (In Memory of Toru Takemitsu), at Lincoln Center, with percussionist Christopher Lamb and the New York Philharmonic conducted by Kurt Masur.