Liszt required of a concerto that it be “clear in sense, brilliant in expression, and grand in style.” In other words, it had to be a knockout. While it was inevitable that the E-flat Concerto would have a high degree of finger-churning display, it was not automatic that it should also be of fine musical quality — but it is. Liszt undertook an interesting structural experiment in the Concerto by fusing the substance of the concerto form with the architecture of the symphony. (“Music is never stationary,” he once pronounced. “Successive forms and styles can only be like so many resting places — like tents pitched and taken down again on the road to the Ideal.”) Though the work is played continuously, four distinct sections may be discerned within its span: an opening Allegro, built largely from the bold theme presented immediately at the outset; an Adagio that grows from a lyrical, arched melody initiated by the cellos and basses; a vivacious, scherzo-like section enlivened by the glistening tintinnabulations of the solo triangle; and a closing Allegro marziale that gathers together the motives of the preceding sections into a rousing conclusion. Of the finale, Liszt wrote, “It is only an urgent recapitulation of the earlier subject matter with quickened, livelier rhythm, and contains no new motive…. This kind of binding together and rounding off of a whole piece at its close is somewhat my own, but it is quite maintained and justified from the standpoint of musical form.” Béla Bartók judged this Concerto, because of its grandiose recall and interpenetration of themes in the finale, to be “the first perfect realization of cyclical sonata form.” It was this formal concept — a single-movement work in several sections utilizing just one or two themes — that Liszt was also to use in his tone poems of the following two decades and in the Second Piano Concerto.

Liszt’s First Concerto drew much criticism when it was new: not for its novel formal construction — but for its innovative use of the triangle. When the piece was first performed in Vienna in 1857, the powerful critic and redoubtable Wagner-Bruckner-Liszt hater, Eduard Hanslick, called it, disparagingly, the “Triangle Concerto.” Liszt rushed to the defense: “As regards the triangle I do not deny that it may give offense, especially if struck too strong or not precisely. A preconceived disinclination and objection to instruments of percussion prevails, somewhat justified by the frequent misuse of them…. In the face of the most wise proscription of the learned critics I shall, however, continue to employ instruments of percussion, and think I shall yet win for them some effects little known.”

On November 16, 1879 Dvorák was in Vienna for a performance by the Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor Hans Richter of his Slavonic Rhapsody No. 3, “which was very well received,” he reported. “I was called before the audience. I was sitting beside Brahms at the organ and Richter pulled me forward. I had to come out. I must tell you that I won the sympathy of the whole orchestra at a stroke and that, of all the new pieces they had tried, and Richter told me that there had been sixty, my Rhapsody was liked the best. Richter actually embraced me on the spot and was very happy, as he said, to know me, and promised that the Rhapsody would be repeated at a special concert at the Opera House. I had to assure the Philharmonic that I would send them a symphony for the next season. The day after the concert, Richter gave a banquet at his house, to which he invited all the Czech members of the orchestra. It was a grand evening which I shall not easily forget for as long as I live.”

By 1880 Dvorák had already completed five symphonies — all unpublished — but did not feel them representative of his best achievements, so he chose to write a new work for Vienna. He could not take up the score until the following August, but once begun he progressed rapidly on it: the sketch was completed in just three weeks and the orchestration in another three (on October 15, 1880), though the composer’s student and biographer Karel Hoffmeister noted that the music “had been slowly maturing in Dvorák’s mind.” Dvorák took the score at once to Vienna to play at the piano for Richter, who, the composer wrote to his friend Alois Goebl, “liked it very much indeed, so that after every movement he embraced me.” The premiere, by Richter and the Philharmonic, was set for December 26th.

Shortly before the scheduled premiere date, Richter informed Dvorák that the performance would have to be postponed because there was no time to rehearse and perform the music in the Philharmonic’s busy schedule. (The Philharmonic was, and is, a self-governing orchestra whose members are mainly employed as the ensemble of the Vienna Opera. Their heavy commitments allow them to give only a limited number of concerts every season.) The premiere was put off until March, Richter counseling that introducing such a grand and worthy new work during the frivolous carnival season of January and February was inappropriate. Pleading personal and family problems, however, Richter once again canceled the first performance, and Dvorák started to ask some questions of his Viennese friends. It seemed that there was sufficient anti-Czech feeling in those politically volatile days of the Dual Monarchy to cause local resentment against a young Czech composer who would have two important premieres in successive years. Dvorák, who had no taste for such quintessentially Viennese political machinations, gave the honor of the Symphony’s premiere to the Prague Philharmonic and conductor Adolf Čech, with whom he had played in the viola section of the orchestra of the National Provisional Theater in Prague earlier in his career. The work was first heard on March 25, 1881, in Prague. Despite his difficulties in getting the Symphony produced, Richter remained its ardent champion. Dvorák inscribed the score with a dedication to the conductor, and had Simrock send him one of the first copies. “On my return from London I find your splendid work awaiting me, whose dedication makes me truly proud,” Richter wrote to Dvorák in January 1882. “Words do not suffice to express my thanks; a performance worthy of this noble work must prove to you how highly I value it and the honor of the dedication.” Richter finally conducted the Symphony on May 15, 1882, in London.

Following soon after the appearance of the widely popular Slavonic Dances, Dvorák’s Sixth Symphony scored another immediate success. “No sooner was it published,” wrote Karel Hoffmeister, “than it made its way abroad to Leipzig, Rostock, Graz, Cologne, Frankfurt, New York [in 1883; Dvorák conducted it there in 1892, during the first year of his American sojourn] and Boston, finally attracting even the reserved public of England.” Though Dvorák had written five (then unpublished) symphonies before this one, the score was issued as “Symphony No. 1,” a situation arousing some surprise among audiences at the music’s maturity and accomplishment. “The Symphony showed itself to be a ripe work by an experienced composer whose artistic development had led him to his own individual form of expression,” wrote Frantisek Bartos. “With its maturity, individuality, sure touch and masterly construction of symphonic form, the composition proved itself to be the work of a master.”

The Symphony No. 6 splendidly combines elements of the symphonic tradition as transmitted by Brahms with what Otakar Šourek called Dvorák’s “process of idealization” of Czech folk music. This characteristic style of Dvorák, uniting two great streams of concert and vernacular music, richly illumines the Symphony’s opening movement. The influence of Brahms (particularly of his Second Symphony of 1878) is clear in the music’s sylvan sonorities, motivic development and careful control of the ebb and flow of the lines of tension, while the folk quality is heard in the tunefulness of the themes and the many harmonic plangencies. Music so rich in reference is bound to excite the imagination of certain commentators, and Šourek heard in this movement “the humor and pride, the optimism and passion of the Czech people come to life, and in it breathes the sweet fragrance and unspoiled beauty of Czech woods and meadows.” Following the first movement are a lovely Adagio (Tovey claimed to “know of few pieces that improve more on acquaintance”) and a fiery Furiant, filled with the same powerful shifting accents borrowed from Bohemian dance that enliven so many of the Slavonic Dances. The bracing last movement, according to Hans-Hubert Schönzeler, “is the most convincing finale Dvorák ever wrote.”

In his book on Music in the Romantic Era, the famous critic and scholar Alfred Einstein wrote admiringly of Dvorák’s style: “Dvorák took over the heritage of absolute music quite naively, and filled its forms with an elemental kind of music of the freshest invention, the liveliest rhythm, the finest sense of sonority — it is the most full-bodied, direct music conceivable, without its becoming vulgar. He always drew from the sources of Slavic folk dance and folksong, much as Brahms had drawn from German…. Everything is childlike and fresh.”