Symphony No. 6 in D major, Op. 60

Program notes

About the Work

Dvořák’s Sixth Symphony is the work in which a regional Bohemian talent stepped onto the international stage. By 1880 Dvořák was no longer the obscure Prague violist of a decade earlier: championed by Brahms, taken up by the influential critic Eduard Hanslick, and published by Brahms’s own house of Simrock, he had begun to attract attention across the German-speaking world. The Slavonic Dances had made his name; what he lacked was a major symphony to confirm it.

The opportunity came from Vienna. The conductor Hans Richter, chief of the Vienna Philharmonic and one of the most powerful figures in European musical life, had conducted Dvořák’s Third Slavonic Rhapsody in 1879 and embraced the composer warmly; Dvořák recalled that Richter ‘kissed me on the spot’. Richter invited a new symphony for his Vienna orchestra, and Dvořák, elated, composed the Sixth in 1880, dedicating it to Richter. It was, in effect, his bid for the central European symphonic tradition.

That ambition is written into the music’s very design. The Sixth is openly modelled on Brahms’s Second Symphony, completed only three years earlier: both are in the warm, pastoral key of D major, both share a comparable scale and a similar emotional climate of lyrical expansiveness, and Dvořák’s finale in particular echoes the shape and surge of Brahms’s. Far from concealing the debt, Dvořák wore it proudly. This was homage to the older master who had done so much for him, an announcement that he could write within the great Viennese line.

Yet the symphony is unmistakably his own, and unmistakably Czech. Vienna, as it turned out, did not give the premiere. The Vienna performance was repeatedly postponed, officially because of Richter’s illness but very probably also because of anti-Czech feeling in the city, and the first performance was finally given in Prague on 25 March 1881 by Adolf Čech. Richter conducted it in London the following year, and it was the first of Dvořák’s symphonies to be published, originally as his ‘No. 1’.

What to Listen For

The first movement (Allegro non tanto) unfolds with a sunlit, songful breadth that immediately recalls the Brahms Second. Listen for the gently rocking main theme in the strings and the way the whole movement seems to breathe rather than drive. Its closing pages build to a broad, glowing climax of real grandeur.

The slow movement (Adagio) is the symphony’s lyrical heart: a long, tender meditation in B-flat major, rich in woodwind solos and the kind of warm, vocal melody Dvořák wrote better than almost anyone. Let it spread out; the rewards are in its patience.

The third movement is the symphony’s most famous stroke: not a conventional scherzo but a Furiant, a fiery Bohemian folk dance built on the clash of duple and triple rhythms. This is where Dvořák plants his national flag, the music stamping and whirling with peasant energy before a calmer, pastoral Trio (featuring the piccolo) offers a moment of breath. The finale (Allegro con spirito) returns to the Brahmsian model, opening quietly and gathering momentum through a sequence of ever-broadening themes until it arrives at a jubilant, blazing D-major coda: the sound of a composer who knows he has arrived.