Antonin Dvořák is both a very popular and highly esteemed composer. However, among his many works are some which rarely appear on concert programs and which many people once used to regard as less accomplished. The Piano Concerto Op. 33, Dvořák's only concerto for this instrument, and the symphonic poem The Golden Spinning-Wheel both belong to this group. And both were performed - if at all - in arrangements made by others, who saw themselves as ardent champions of the composer's music. They were determined to "save" the controversial works which they considered as fundamentally brilliant but imperfectly executed.
In the piano concerto, one can already feel Brahams's aura in the triplet passage of the orchestral introduction, which is reprised in the coda of the first movement Dvořák wrote the concerto in 1876, at around the time when he was becoming internationally recognized. Unlike nearly every other composer of piano concertos in the 19th-century - the only exception worth mentioning is Tchaikovsky, whose concertos were also subjected to arrangements - Dvořák was not a concert pianist. He only played the piano in public in performances of chamber works; indeed, he wrote tne piano part of his concerto as if it actually were chamber music and did not have to struggle to make itself heard over a full orchestra. Just as in Brahms's Opus 15, the piano is "symphonically" integrated into the activity, even if Dvořák gives nis soloist a cadenza, in contrast to his later concertos for violin and violoncello. In the finale, Dvořák introduces a passionate secondary theme, but then refuses to "pump it up" into an apotheosis à la Grieg and Tchaikovsky at the end of the movement.
Long after Dvořák's death, the pianist Vilém Kurz (1872-1945), who taught at the Prague Conservatory, decided to thoroughly revise tne solo part of the concerto. His student Rudolf Firkušný (1912-1994), who was the standard-setting interpreter of the Dvořák concerto for many years, later made more changes of his own. Kurz and Firkušný gave the piano part not only a more effective form, but also revised it in such a way that the parts emerged more clearly. They did not change one note in the orcnestral part. The arrangement is no longer in use today, but not because it is weak - solely because it is not authentic Sviatoslav Richter seems to have been the first great pianist to champion a return to the original. Even Firkušný started playing the original version in his later years, albeit without absolute consistency.
Owing to his friendship with Brahms, Dvořák was considered as belonging to his "party," meaning that he was an unconditional supporter of absolute instrumental music. As a one-time Wagnerian, however, Dvořák did not feel comfortable being pegged as a "little Slavonic Brahms," even though this epithet was applied less by Brahms himself than by the master's disciples, such as Eduard Hanslick. Dvořák tried to break out of this categorization, particularly through his sojourn in the United States between 1892 and 1895. For Hanslick, it was nothing less than a catastrophe when Dvořák returned from New York with a new self-awareness, said goodbye to the symphony and the string quartet, and devoted himself to the symphonic poem. But at the latest since Dvořák's Overture to Othello Op. 93 (1892), Hanslick should have known that Dvořák had no cornpunctions about casting extra-Musical contents - in this case, Shakespeare`s eponymous drarna - into a purely orchestral musical form, even though the composer had still shied from using the genre designation "symphonic poem" back then. Conversely, although the "progressive party" of the "New Germans," which passionately advocated program music, had been founded by Franz Liszt (who always considered himself Hungarian and not German), it began at the time of Richard Strauss to yield to a musical chauvinisrn that even prevented it from taking non-German music seriously. Consequently, Dvořák fell between two stools with his four symphonic poems on ballads from the collection Kytice (Bouquet) by the Czech poet Karel Jaromír Erben (The Water Goblin, The Noon Witch, The Golden Spinning.Wheel and The Wild Dove). Only among his fellow countrymen did he find approval. They also had no objections against the literary sources which were decried as too bloodthirsty abroad - perhaps not entirely without reason.
Erben's ballad The Golden Spinning-Wheel (Zlatý kolovrat in Czech) relates the following story in 63 five-line stanzas: a king loses his way in the woods and meets a lovely maiden named Dornička whom he wishes to take as his wife. Dornička's stepmother and stepsister sever \he girl's arms and legs and put out her eyes. They then store away the eyes and limbs. The king falls for the trick and marries Dornička's stepsister. Then he goes off to war. During his absence, the false wife acquires a golden spinning-wheel from a misterious dealer for the price of the arms, legs and eyes of Dornička. Upon his triumphal return, the king asks for the spinning-wheel to be shown to him. But just like the flute in Gustav Mahler's Das klagende Lied, the spinning-wheel unexpextedly begins to sing about the murder. In the meantime, the wizard has put together the eyes, arms and legs of Dornička's mutilated body and awakened her to new life. The king rushes into the woods and finds Dornička unscathed. The proper wedding is now celebrated, and the stepmother and sister are killed the same way that they once killed Dornička. Compared with the other three Erben ballads used as a literary source by Dvořák, The Golden Spinning-Wheel is exceptional in that the evil deed is reversed by a miracle.
A peculiarity of Dvořák's symphonic poems is the way in which the literary source is transposed into music. In The Golden Spinning-Wheel, for example, we find many passages where the text could be underlaid word for word. The horn theme at the beginning not only suggests the approach of the king on his horse, but it also reproduces the rhythm of the first two lines of the ballad: "Okolo lesa pole lán / hoj jede, jede z lesa pán" ("Near the woods is a large field / hey! from the woods a lord comes riding"). Dvořák subjects the themes and motifs derived in this manner to a multiplicity of transformations after the fashion of Liszt. But while in the other symphonic poems based on Erben's ballads he sought to bring the episodes into conformity with traditional musical forms (sonata iform and rondo), in The Golden Spinning-Wheel he chooses the literary source as his one and only guideline. With respect to its formal shape, the result is one of the most radical symphonic poems ever written. And in their assumption that the linguistic character of the source must inevitably find its adequate expression in the music through such a direct transposition, Czech authors then and now have praised Dvořák's symphonic poems for their unparalleled "Czechness."
Experiments, of course, stimulate protest, and even advocates of program music have repeatedly voiced their perplexity with this work. It has been said, for example, that the passages which can be regarded as instrumentally transposed dialogues could only have a meaning if the text were actually made audible. The same applies to several repeats. Dvořák's son-in-law, the composer Josef Suk (1874-1935), thus made a great number of cuts in The Golden Spinning-Wheel. It was the only work by his father-in-law which he submitted to such a treatment.