Dvořák's appointment as professor of composition and artistic director of New York's National Conservatory of Music in 1891 is one that he owed, above all,to his international reputation as a nationalist composer whose musical language was steeped in the folk music of his native Bohemia. The National Conservatory of Music was a prestigious institution run by Jeannette M. Thurber who had often expressed the wish to bring into being a national American school of composition, and Dvořák, who taught here from September 1892 to April 1895, was fully aware of the hopes bound up with his appointment. And he took them very seriously: "The Americans are expecting great things of me. Above all, I'm supposed to show them the way to the promised land, the land of a new and autonomous art, in short, I'm to create a national American music! [...] There's no doubt that it is a great and awesome challenge for me, but I hope that, with God's help, I'll succeed." Encouraged by the work of his pupils (including Rubin Goldmark, who was later to number Aaron Copland and George Gershwin among his students), Dvořák began to take a more active interest in the music of the American blacks and North American Indians. In the course of his studies he came to believe that their highly expressive folk music should be "the real foundation of any serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States". In its pentatonic melodies,flattened leading note, pronounced use of syncopation (notably in the form of the "Scotch snap", a rhythmic figuration in which a dotted note is preceded by a note of shorter value), rhythmic ostinatos and a harmonic language centred upon the dominant minor, sustained notes, drone bass and pedal points, this folk music offered enough specific features to be used by composers seeking to create a distinctive American idiom of their own. As though in passing, Dvořák noted that, in his recently completed new symphony, he had attempted "to portray characteristics, such as are distinctly American".
Titled Z nového svĕta (From the New World), this new symphony was in E minor and was composed between 10 January and 24 May 1893. As such, it was the first of his works to be started and finished in America. Almost all its themes reveal one or more of the attributes that Dvořák saw as distinctively American, and they do so, moreover, in a way that suggests something in the nature of a demonstration of a compositional principle. It is an impression confirmed by Dvořák’s earliest sketches, in which the opening Allegro’s first subject still lacks its distinctive Scotch snap and the Largo's initial theme is still missing its characteristic pentatonic colouring. As Dvořák continued to work on the piece - and, at the same time, to reflect increasingly on exactly what the American idiom involved and how it could best be achieved - so he deepened the folkloristic aspect of his themes and, with it, the American local colour that he was seeking to conjure up. That he chose to realise this aim in a symphony - the most highly regarded and, at the same time, the most demanding instrumental genre since Beethoven - attests to the lofty artistic ambitions on the part of a composer determined to fulfil the expectations that had been placed in him. Such ambitions are clear not only from his elaborate reworking of his themes, his expressive use of harmony and great range of musical expression but also from the way in which the opening bars of the Scherzo consciously recall the second movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. No less original is the manner in which the traditional tendency to link the movements together to form a self-contained cycle is now intensifed, with the opening of the first movements main theme quoted towards the end of the second movement, while the head motifs of the main themes of the first two movements are contrapuntally combined in the coda of the Scherzo. Towards the end of the Allegro con fuoco, finally, the opening sections of the main themes from the first three movements, together with the introductory chords from the Largo, are heard first in succession and then superimposed on each other, thereby creating the impression of a climactic summation of the symphony as a whole. Hailed as a "manual for American composers", the work received its first performance in New York on 16 December 1893 and immediately "set the whole ofAmerica talking".

Many of Dvořák's contemporaries found it difficult to understand that following his return to Europe he wrote no more symphonies but suddenly turned instead to symphonic poems and, hence, to programme music. Yet his artistic volte-face was not as surprising as it may appear at first sight. In 1889, in the context of his Poetic Tone Pictures op. 85 for piano solo, he had already stressed that here he was "not only an absolute musician, but also a poet". Three more works that reveal the musical poet in him are the three overtures opp. 91, 92 and 93 from 1891 and 1892. Each of them has a title - V přírodĕ (In Nature's Realm), Carnival and Othello - that nails its programmatical colours firmly to the mast, while, taken together, they form a musical cycle to which Dvořák gave the general title "Nature, Life and Love". Moreover, the sketches of the second movement of his Ninth Symphony (a movement so eloquent in its musical expressivity and pictoriality) are headed "Legenda" (Narrative). And a symphonic draft in his American sketchbooks bears the title "Neptune", with its second, third
and fourth movements all having programmatical headings: "Dance and Celebration on Board Ship", "Chorale" and "Tempest and Calm and Safe Return to Land". In other words, there is a long-standing association in Dvořák's works between the actual music and its inspiration and authentification by a poetical and programmatical subject: from this point of view, Dvořák's move from what Liszt termed "a speciht composer of symphonies to a poetic symphonist" seems entirely logical, not to say indispensably necessary.
Dvořák's first four symphonic poems were all based on ballads by the Czech folksong collector and folk poet Karel Jaromír Erben, whose works were well known in Bohemia. His frst contribution to the new genre was Vodník (The Water Goblin) op. 107, which he wrote between 6 January and 11 February 1896. Although he used tone-painterly effects to conjure up the sound of evening bells and the goblin's knocking at the door, he was not interested in recreating his poetic source on a word-for-word, line-by-line basis. Rather, he set out with the intention of "extrapolating the various principal figures and capturing their characters and poetic moods in music". The images that he conjures up are those of the smirking goblin, the naïvely disobedient girl, the admonitory figure of her mother, the world of the water goblin, the sadness of the girl as she sings a lullaby to her child, her plea to visit her mother and her fear at the water goblin's rage. Cast in the form of a rondo, the work relies for its sense of cohesion on the goblin's distinctive motif, while the dramatic argument is carried forward by means of Dvořák's ability to contrast, superimpose and juxtapose the goblin's motif and those of the daughter and mothen. In devising these motifs, Dvořák often allowed himself to be guided by the declamatory rhythms of Erben's poem, with the rhythm of the girl's motif, for example, reflecting the metrical structure of the Czech line “Ráno, raníčko panna vstala" (Early in the morning the girl arose), while the goblin's words following the girls lullaby, “Co to zpívaš, ženo má? Nechci toho zpĕvu!" (What are you singing there, my good woman? I don't like this song!), are clearly the source of the aggressively dotted rhythm on the bassoon followed by six vigorous semiquavers on the horn. By adopting this subtle approach to the programme's musical potential and embedding it in a colourful musical language whose harmonies and instrumentation often sound positively impressionistic, Dvořák laid the foundations for a procedure that was to be taken up decades later by Janáček in the form of what he termed “speech melody" and turned into an important principle of melodic invention in 20th-century music.