"The exuberant zest for life and the tremendous vitality that overwhelmed the audience in the very first bars of the Slovak odzemok, which was played with such-blooded ardour, proved in fact to be deceptive," we read in one of the reviewa of the Graz Styriarte concert that forms the basis of the present live recording with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. "Whit the second of the eight Slavonic Dances op. 72, a paraphrase of a Ukrainian dumka, the key of E minor brought with the mood of melancholy that was to grow increasingly sombre as the evening progressed. The result was an interpretation not satisfied with folklike charm but keen to explore the anbiguities of this music and, as such, able to move to and fro beetween these different levels of expression with admirable flexibility."
Nikolaus Harnoncourt's decision to begin performing Dvořák works in 1998 marked a foray into an area of the repertory with which few people would have associated him until then. By this date in his career, he had, it is true, already delved deep into the 19th-century symphonic repertory and taken a keen interest in Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms and even Bruckner, but his fascination with Dvořák came as something of a surprise - perhaps even to Harnoncourt himself.
Yet Harnoncourt himself has referred to his "underground links" with Slav music, links that he owes to personal experiences and influences and that turn out to be powerful intellectual amd emotional forces. It was with almost instinctive assurance that he gained access, effortlessly and convincingly, to this highly specific musical language, a language that sometimes seems deceptively simple and that all too readily misleads its exponents into relying entirely on rousing effects. Even in Dvořák's most popular works, he succeeded in going beyond the familiar clichés and rediscovering the great composer who was able to invest his thrilling wealth of ideas with a strict sense of form, making transparently clear the imposing symphonic structures that sustain these intensely colorful and rhythmically vibrant works. Harnoncourt's ability to achieve all this disturbed only a handful of Viennese critics who missed the usual barn-storming, attention-grabbing approach to the Slavonic Dances and once again felt obliged to demand more "charm".
For all its analytical precision, Harnoncourt's approach Dvořák is by no means lacking in the necessary warmth and vitality. Rather, the basic tone that characterises these dances, alternating between exultation and meòancholia - Harnoncourt refers to it as a "heavy Slav tear" - comes across in an entirely organic manner, with no false pathos. This is undoubtedly due, not least, to the fact that during his years as cellist with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Harnoncourt was able to assimilate a tradition that now seems to have been virtually lost.
"When I joined the Vienna orchestra in the fifties, "Harnoncourt recalls," the mother tongue of sixty per cent of the musicians was Czech. When we travelled to Czechoslovakia with the orchestra, Czech was spoken in the orchestra from the moment that we crossed the border. And when we played Smetana's Má vlast, halft the orchestra was in tears. It was incredibly moving - all these men with tears streaming down their faces- I, too, feel something of this emotion - I don't want to call it sentimentality. I played this music lot at that time, and I always enjoyed it. I also remember a remark by Wolfgang Sawallisch, who said that he should really have become a cellist, simply because of the Dvořák Cello Concerto. For such a successful conductor to say that impressed me a lot."
For the young cellist Nikolaus Harnoncourt, this concerto was a source of good luck as it helped him win the place he coveted in the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra's artistic director was then none other than Herbert von Karajan, and Harnoncourt impressed him so much at his audition that, out of a total of forty candicates, it was he who was immediately taken on.
In Harnoncourt's view, it is the Austro-Hungarian Empire's legendary cultural world that forms the background against which national musical developments evolved in Bohemia and Hungary. "For me, it's all Austrian music," he says, preferring in this context to quote the Bible's miraculous "speaking in tongues", rather than its famous "Babel of languages": "What happened on the day of Pentecost is something miraculous, something unfathomable, with everyone speaking in different languages and yet still being able to understand each other. This has quite a lot in commen with art."
Against this background, the works by Beethoven and Schubert that Harnoncourt performs in the concert hall alongside pieces by Dvořák acquire an extra dimension. The fact that folk music can inspire art music has been a long-standing Austrian tradition since Haydn's day. Smetana and Dvořák were the first composers to bring out the Slav element as an independent idiom, and something that still seemed a circumscribed national concern soon acquired an international resonance and an international following.
This development is particularly clear from the genesis of the Slavonic Dances. It was in December 1877 that Johannes Brahms, in a letter to the Berlin publisher Fritz Simrock, first drew attention to the talents and financial hardship of the as yet unknown Dvořák, encouraging Simrock to commission the Slavonic Dances op. 46. Their publication the following year gave rise to what one contemporary critic described as a "veritable run on musi shops", with performances of them taking place in Dresden, Hamburg, Berlin, Nice, London and New York within a matter of months. By the time that Dvořák had completed the second set in 1886 - they were published by Simrock and performed for the first time in Prague in 1877 - he was already an internationally acclaimed composer.
Dvořák's Slavonic Dances do not, of course, contain in any original folk tunes of the kind found in Brahms's Hungarian Dances. As Harnoncourt stresses, Dvořák used only their rhythms. "He was not short of inspiration of his own: for him, folk music was very important, of course, and he was fully conversant with it, but it was no more than a basis for his own invention." Harnoncourt is equally keen to stress that these are not Bohemian Dances, but Slavonic Dances, even if the op. 46, in particular, is dominated by Bohemian dance forms such as the furiant, polka, sousedská and Skočná: Dvořák deliberately took in a wider geographical area and included not only the Ukranian dumka, which is represented in both sets of pieces, but also the Slovak odzemok mentioned at the beginning, together with the Serbian kolo and polonaise. (These last three types appear only in the op. 72 set.)
It was in 1999 and 2000 that Harnoncourt first tackled the two sets of Slavonic Dances. In doing so, he approached them in the thoughrful way that characterises all his work, thereby avoiding the beaten track that so many others have followed. It was with the rarely played Seventh Symphony - Dvořák's symphonic masterpieces - that he gained access to the composer's world, before deepening his knowledge by exploring the unjustly neglected symphonic poems in which Dvořák used the Czech folk taled of The Wild Dove, The Water Goblin, The Noon Witch and The Golden Spinning-Wheel, turning them into programme music in the very best sense of the term. These symphonic poems represent the culmination of Dvořák's later period and are perfectly capable of standing comparison with Richard Strauss's contemporary tone poems.
Only then was the time right for Harnoncourt to tackle the popular Eight Symphony and the Ninth, the latter a piece that has almost been played to death. In this way, Harnoncourt was able to invest both these works with a new symphonic dignity. "Rarely", wrote one critic of Harnoncourt's recording of the Ninth, "have I heard this colossus - invariably watered down programmatically by other conductors - performed with such symphonic rigour and architectural unity. Rarely has it seemed so significant a piece and so free from the senseless clichés of folk music. Here we see with total clarity the great influence of Beethoven as a symphonist."
But Harnoncourt has not completed his reconnaissance mission in Bohemia's woods and fields: in the autumn of 2001 he espoused the cause of an almost forgotte early work by Dvořák, the G mino Piano Concerto of 1876. It is to be hoped that this fascination will now lead him into the world of Dvořák's operas.