The Wild Dove, Op. 110

Program notes

About the Work

In the last years of his life, having conquered the symphony and the concerto, Dvořák turned to the symphonic poem, orchestral storytelling, with a series of vivid works based on the gruesome folk ballads of the Czech poet Karel Jaromír Erben. The Wild Dove (Holoubek, sometimes called The Wood Dove), composed in 1896, is the finest of them. Erben’s ballad is a grim morality tale, and Dvořák follows it closely in four connected scenes.

The story: a young widow weeps as she follows her husband’s coffin to the grave, but her grief is a sham, for she has poisoned him. On the way home she meets a handsome young man, and within weeks they are married, celebrating with a noisy village wedding. But on the dead man’s grave an oak grows, and in it a wild dove perches and sings, day after day, a song of unbearable sorrow. The sound gnaws at the murderess’s conscience until, driven mad by guilt, she throws herself into a river and drowns.

Dvořák’s score paints all of this with extraordinary vividness: the funeral march, the seductive meeting, the boisterous wedding, and above all the dove’s haunting, obsessive cooing that brings retribution. The work was premiered in Brno on 20 March 1898 under a young Leoš Janáček, and Gustav Mahler thought highly enough of it to conduct it in Vienna the following year. It shows the old master as a born dramatist, his melodic gift now in the service of dark and gripping narrative.

What to Listen For

Follow the story through the music’s four scenes. It opens with a heavy funeral march, slow and grief-laden, but listen for the hollowness beneath the mourning, for the widow’s tears are false. The music then brightens and warms as she meets the young man: a tender, almost amorous episode.

Next comes the wedding: a boisterous, whirling village celebration full of dance rhythms and rustic colour, the music at its most extrovert. But listen for how the festivity is increasingly shadowed. Then the crucial sound: the wild dove’s song, an obsessive, mournful cooing figure (woodwinds and high strings) that returns again and again, growing more insistent, the voice of conscience that will not be silenced. The music darkens toward the widow’s madness and her plunge into the river. Listen then for the quiet, transfigured ending, where Dvořák, departing from Erben’s bleakness, seems to offer a glimmer of peace or absolution after the tragedy.