Overture: My Home, Op.62

When Dvorák first conducted his Symphony From the New World for the audience which knew him best - in Prague on 13 October, 1894 - he included the Overture My Home in the same concert. He had conducted My Home in America, too, and he was obviously very attached to it. Outside Dvorák’s native country, however, it has achieved nothing like the popularity or reptuation of his other overtures: perhaps because it is based on a melody which was later incorporated in the Czech national anthem, it has come to be considered as suitable for domestic consumption only.

But it is not that kind of work. It originated as the overture to a play about the adventurous life of Josef Kajetán Tyl, the Czech actor and playwright now best remembered for the song Where is my Home? (“Kde domov muj?”) for which he wrote the words and Frantisek Skroup the music. The song was popular in Dvorák’s lifetime but there was no way that he could have known in 1882, when he was writing the incidental music for Josef Kajetán Tyl, that Where is my Home? would be drafted into national service a generation later. He certainly doesn’t treat it like a national anthem.

The overture is actually based on two tunes, Skroup’s Where is my Home? and a Czech folksong, In the Farmyard. In the Andante maestoso introduction Dvorák alludes to various salient characteristics of the melodies - In the Farmyard first, then Where is my Home? on woodwind over pizzicato strings - without committing himself to a definitive version of either. Indeed, he devotes such skill and imagination to varying the thematic material that it would be impossible to say which, out of so many, is the definitive version. In the Farmyard sounds best, perhaps, disguised as a Slavonic dance when it so vigorously bounces in as the first subject of the Allegro vivace. Where is my Home? makes a delightfully happy entry as second subject, on clarinet urged on by the strings, and avoids all hint of solemnity throughout the development. Its future status is anticipated only in the briskly heroic treatment it receives in the coda.

Gerald Larner©