One of Antonín Dvořák’s great joys – when he wasn’t busy trainspotting, that is – was keeping pigeons.
At his summer home in Vysoká, he was pretty relaxed about providing free room and board to whatever winged companion would follow him home. And while he was away, he kept up a correspondence with a local miner to whom he entrusted care of the property. This included the house, the garden, and of course the pigeons. Dvořák’s letters were full of meticulous instructions as to how best to keep his little friends healthy and contented.
Word got out about Dvořák’s enthusiasm. At a concert in England, his wife was asked by a member of the royal family what types of things Dvořák really enjoyed. This resulted in the surprise delivery, back at home, of six braces of English pigeons!
In 1896, Dvořák wrote a series of symphonic poems inspired by the grim fairy tales of Karel Jaromir Erben. These include “The Water Goblin,” “The Noon Witch,” and “The Golden Spinning Wheel.” His opera, “Rusalka,” written a few years later, also bears Erben’s influence.
I imagine his fondness for Columbidae would have made it difficult to pass up “The Wood Dove” (also translated as “The Wild Dove”). The story, from Erben’s collection of poetic ballads, “Kytice,” tells of a woman who poisons her husband and marries another man. Day after day, a dove perches on the husband’s grave and sings a mournful song, until the wife, overcome with guilt, commits suicide by hurling herself into a river.
The premiere of Dvořák’s symphonic poem was given in Brno, on March 20, 1898, under the baton of Leoš Janáček.
Hard to believe that the composer of the Serenade for Strings and the sunny Symphony No. 8 could write these lurid potboilers after Czech fairy tales, and that he could find so much depth and melancholy in simple children’s stories.
Happy birthday, Antonín Dvořák!
Light Dvořák: Symphony No. 8
Dark Dvořák: “The Wood Dove”
