This is one of those works that just makes you feel like it’s great to be alive.

Antonin Dvořák composed his Symphony No. 8 over two months, from the end of August to the beginning of November, in happy seclusion at his country home of Vysoká, in 1889. The symphony is his most bucolic, cheery, and lyrical, steeped in the Bohemian folk song he adored.

Dvořák himself conducted its first performance, at the National Theater in Prague, in 1890. He then took it to Frankfurt and Cambridge, where he was awarded an honorary doctorate. The symphony became a great favorite in England. In fact, it was published there, by the London firm of Novello, after the usual disagreements with Simrock, Dvořák’s regular publisher. Simrock preferred shorter, snappier works and insisted on marketing them in German. Dvořák, a proud Bohemian, found this increasingly annoying. Not incidentally, Simrock had also low-balled him on the price (offering one thousand marks, as opposed to the three thousand marks he had paid for the Symphony No. 7).

In 1893, Dvořák was in America, as director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York, when he brought his new symphony to the World’s Columbian Exposition. At the time, the symphony was promoted as his Fourth. It was only in the 1950s, with the publication of Dvořák’s earlier works in the form, that the symphonies were renumbered, which is why there are now nine Dvořák symphonies, as opposed to five. At the world’s fair, Dvořák conducted his Eighth with an expanded Chicago Symphony Orchestra. According to the Chicago Tribune, the performance was met with enthusiasm, marked by “tremendous outbursts of applause.”

The composer claimed that in its writing the melodies simply poured out of him. Here’s my favorite recording of the piece, made with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra, assembled specifically for the great Bruno Walter.

Všechno nejlepší k narozeninám! Happy birthday, Dvořák!

PHOTO: Composer and family, relaxing at Vysoká