Ten Biblical Songs, Op.99

Clouds and darkness are round about him (Psalm 97)

Thou art my defence and shield (Psalm 119)

Hear my prayer, O God (Psalm 55)

The Lord is my shepherd (Psalm 23)

I will sing a new song (Psalms 144 & 145)

Hear my crying, O God (Psalm 61 & 63)

By the waters of Babylon (Psalm 137)

Turn thee unto me (Psalm 25)

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills (Psalm 121)

O sing unto the Lord a new song (Psalm 96 & 98)

The inspiration of Dvorák’s Ten Biblical Songs, Op.99, was much the same as that of the Cello Concerto, Op.104 - the loneliness of the Czech composer in America, far away from home, family and friends. Significantly, though a Catholic he turned for his texts to the traditional Czech Protestant version of the Psalms in the Bible of Kralice. Perhaps that is why, like th echoes of Czech folksong in the New World Symphony, conventional church harmonies mingle in these settings with occasional hints of the spiritual or American-Indian dance music.

In most of the Biblical Songs the weight of expressions is carried not so much by the vocal line as by the harmonies. In the first of them, Clouds are round about him, the G major tonality is deliberately obscured until the climactic outcry of the last line. Thou art my defence and shield twice echoes the chromatic unease of its predecessor but the main emotional interest here is the sustained vacillation between major and minor. Hear my prayer contrasts a hard A flat minor introduction with, on the entry of the voice, a soft B flat major entreaty. Not surprisingly, the pastoral imagery of The Lord is my shepherd inspired in Dvorák the most characteristic music in the set. It slips into the relative minor in the “the valley of the shadow of death,” but for the most part it is in a sweet B major with some familiar rustic phrases in the woodwind. In I will sing a new song the psalmist’s ten-stringed lute in the introduction and between the lines is harmonically more adventurous than his song, which departs from its ebullient A flat major only to return to it on an emphatic proclamation of “thy greatness.”

Dvorák orchestrated the first five of his Biblical Songs in January, 1895, nine months after he had completed the whole set in the original version ofor voice and piano. Jarmil Burghauser and Jan Hanus have scored the last five songs very adequately but it is a pity that the composer himself did not complete the project - not so much for the sake of Hear my crying, O God, which is a simple celebration of D major, as for the sake of By the waters of Babylon, which is much the most interesting work in the set. It would have been interesting to see how Dvorák would have matched his orchestral colours to his expressive modulations here. Turn thee unto me is similarly interesting from the harmonic point of view and it corresponds quite closely in its pattern of modulations with the next song, I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, which was obviously intended as a pair to it.

Churchy harmonic associations are finally swept away in O sing unto the Lord a new song, which is a pentatonic dance refreshingly New World in style and as simple in harmony as it is uncomplicated in spirit.

Gerald Larner©