Selections from Moravian Duets (orch. Tibor Gátay)

Program notes

About the Work

The Moravian Duets are among the works that changed Dvořák’s life. In the mid-1870s he was a struggling, little-known Prague musician, earning extra money as a piano teacher to the family of a wholesale merchant, Jan Neff. It was Neff who encouraged him to arrange Moravian and Slavic folk songs for the family to sing, and out of this grew a cycle of duets for two voices and piano, settings of Moravian folk poetry composed between 1875 and 1881. Rather than simply harmonising existing tunes, Dvořák composed his own fresh, characterful music to the folk texts.

Their importance was enormous: when Dvořák submitted them for an Austrian state stipend, the adjudicating panel included Johannes Brahms, who was so taken with the duets that he recommended them to his own powerful publisher, Simrock. Simrock published them, then commissioned the Slavonic Dances, and Dvořák’s international career was launched. Tonight a selection is heard in an orchestrated version (by Tibor Gátay) and sung by two voices, soprano and mezzo-soprano, bringing out the warmth, charm and folk freshness that first enchanted Brahms.

What to Listen For

These are miniatures, short and songful settings of folk verses about love, nature and village life, so listen for the intertwining of the two voices, soprano and mezzo, weaving together in close harmony, by turns playful, tender and melancholy. Even orchestrated, the music keeps the intimacy of its origins as domestic music-making.

Listen for the unmistakable Dvořákian fingerprints that so charmed Brahms: the natural, song-like melodies with their folk lilt, the gently swaying dance rhythms, and the bittersweet shifts between major and minor that give even the happiest songs a touch of wistfulness. Each duet is a little scene; let the voices and the orchestral colours paint them, and enjoy this glimpse of the unaffected, melodious art with which the young Dvořák first won the wider world.