PT Journal
AU Cerny, KM
TI THE PROBLEM OF SEMANTIC INTERPRETATION OF THE EARLY WORKS BY ANTONIN DVORAK
SO Musicologica Olomucensia
PY 2007
BP 51
EP 62
VL 9
IS 1
AB For a long time, A. Dvorak used to be described as a spontaneous musician. That was the way the Viennese circles (primarily E. Hanslick) had seen him, and Dvorak himself supported this opinion by a number of statements where he described himself as a naive and provincial musician. Thus, there is a question, whether we may read his composition semantically - and talk about its non-musical content. This issue was raised half a century ago by A. Sychra. He analyzed the material of Dvorak's late symphonies and described Dvorak as a systematic, thoughtful and reflective composer. The analysis of the first five symphonies as well as that of the early string quartets had shown that since the first string quartet we may see to weaken the once typical sonata thematic contrast, mainly due to: a) the disproportion of the primary and secondary thematic structures; b) the exposition of the secondary theme in non-tonal mediant keys; c) the contrapuntal attachment of the main theme to the secondary theme directly in the first exposition. These three trends can be understood as basic determinations of the "after-Beethoven" musical development and are thus not very important from the semantic point of view. However, there are some particular structures, which can be understood as semantically interpretable - as the article describes.
ER