Montie Meyer
Czech composer Antonin Dvořák arrived in New York City in 1892 to lead the recently formed National Conservatory of Music, expressly with a mandate to create a national music for the United States. As a beer-drinking, uncaged bird-owning son of a butcher and part of a minority population (Bohemian) under the Habsburg empire, Dvořák perhaps experienced a natural affinity with the disenfranchised in America. He wrote in the New York Herald: "It is to the poor that I turn for musical greatness. The poor work hard; they study seriously.... If in my own career I have achieved a measure of success and reward it is to some extent due to the fact I was the son of poor parents and was reared in an atmosphere of struggle and endeavor".
In this context, Dvořák met Harry Burleigh, a 26-year-old African-American singer from Erie, Pennsylvania, who had recently enrolled at the Conservatory in the fall of 1892. Already a skilled baritone, Burleigh had learned many old plantation songs from his maternal grandfather, Hamilton Waters, who in 1832 bought his freedom from slavery on a Maryland plantation. Waters, known for possessing a beautiful voice, taught Burleigh traditional spirituals and slave songs, while Burleigh accompanied him on his route as town crier and lamplighter. Burleigh came to NYC already a skilled baritone, but his scholarship wasn't enough to cover the cost of living in the city, so he supported himself doing maintenance work. His singing while cleaning the conservatory's halls caught the attention of Dvořák, who asked Burleigh to sing for him in the evenings. Dvořák immersed himself in the spirit of these refrains, which served as inspiration for ongoing compositions. Burleigh later wrote, "I gave him what I knew of Negro songs - no one called them spirituals then - and he wrote some of my tunes (my people's music) into the New World Symphony." In fact, the second theme of the symphony’s first movement, presented initially by the flute, is derived from the spiritual "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot." In 1895, Dvořák wrote “a while ago I suggested that inspiration for truly national music might be derived from the Negro melodies or [Native American] chants…undoubtedly the germs for the best in music lie hidden among all the races that are commingled in this great country. The music of the people is like a rare and lovely flower growing amidst encroaching weeds.”
Burleigh became Dvořák’s personal assistant—as well as the librarian and copyist, and occasional double bass player, in the conservatory orchestra Dvořák conducted. Noting his eye for musical detail, Dvořák recommended Burleigh to his publisher, Ricordi of Milan, as an editor. For many years Burleigh served in this role, editing among other works a collection of études written for his primary instrument the double bass, and arranging/composing over 450 songs for publication.
During the summer of 1893, while Dvořák was in the Czech immigrant community of Stillville, Iowa, writing the famous “American” string quartet, Burleigh successfully completed an audition (behind a screen) to become the first Black soloist at an all-white congregation at St. George’s Church in NYC, where he sang for over 50 years. In the fall of 1893, Dvořák successfully petitioned the National Conservatory’s leadership to offer full scholarships to Black students. Soon, well over 150 African-Americans were among the 600+ students enrolled at the Conservatory. In January 1894, Burleigh was a soloist and many of the other Black students sang in the chorus for Dvořák’s arrangement of “Old Folks at Home,” presented in New York’s Madison Square Garden.
Burleigh played a lesser-known role in activism during his student years, participating with several other Black men in sit-in’s at over twenty dining saloons to test NYC’s 1895 civil rights bill promising equal accommodation. “Only at the Continental Hotel was there any unpleasantness and there a party of six withdrew in high dudgeon,” reported the New York Tribune.
In 1895, Dvořák returned to Prague due to funding problems at the Conservatory. Burleigh graduated and embarked on a long, distinguished career as singer and composer. His spiritual arrangements brought the “sorrow songs” (as termed by W.E.B. Du Bois) out of their earlier plantation and minstrel settings and onto the classical stage. Without his work, the spirituals might have been lost in light of many Black Americans wanting to forget the grim conditions in which they arose. Later in life, Burleigh was wary of the rise of jazz forms as an expression of Black musicality, calling out jazz’s “perverting” of melodies/rhythms as a misappropriation of spirituals.
For Prophecy, Cecilia will present works of Dvořák and Burleigh. "Napadly písně" ("(Melodies fell into my soul") and "Dnes do skolu a do písničky" ("Come, let us dance and sing together") are songs from Dvořák’s 1882 choral cycle V Přírodě; In Nature’s Realm -- secular Czech texts focusing on different idyllic scenes in nature, a frequent inspiration for Dvořák. Burleigh’s setting of “My Lord, What a Morning”, originally composed by free Black people in the early 1800s, features biblical imagery of the second coming of Jesus. Several older editions substitute “mourning” for morning. Hence, the refrain incorporates a bit of double entendre: resurrection day may simultaneously be a “morning” in which hope dawns on the horizon, and a “mourning” in which the world collapses and ceases to exist. Dvořák’s and Burleigh’s lives and musical works are remarkable in how they capture such forward motion, spirit and growth arising from toil.