New York Philharmonic Premieres Work Composed by Department of Music’s Beckerman

By James Devitt

The New York Philharmonic premiered “Hiawatha Melodrama,” created by Michael Beckerman, chair of NYU’s Department of Music, as part of its multi-media series, “Inside the Music,” earlier this month. The performance centers on the influences that inspired Antonín Dvorák to write his famous Symphony No. 9, “From the New World,” which received its world premiere by the New York Philharmonic in 1893. “Inside the Music” is narrated by Emmy award-winning actor and Tisch Dean’s Council co-chair Alec Baldwin (Tisch ’94).
    Dvorák’s “From the New World” is one of the most popular pieces of symphonic music. Written in the United States in 1892-3, while the composer was acting as director of the National Conservatory in New York, the work provoked debate even as it was regarded as a masterpiece. Dvorák had claimed that the symphony was based on African American melodies, yet it also incorporated images from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1855 poem “Song of Hiawatha.”
    Beckerman, an expert in Czech and Eastern European music, examined several aspects of the symphony in tracing the steps Dvorák took in creating it.
    “Dvorák had read the poem in the 1870s and spoke of the connections between Longfellow’s ‘The Song of Hiawatha’ and his symphony, but was not very specific,” said Beckerman. “I have been able to show that his reliance on the poem is far greater than had previously been thought, and that in some ways the piece is a kind of ‘Hiawatha Symphony,’ or, perhaps more accurately, that it is the subject of the symphony’s epic character.
    “When I lectured about the piece I would often play Dvorák’s music and speak the lines from Longfellow’s poem over it. I focused first on the Scherzo—the piece’s rapid, dance-like movement—where Dvorák clearly relied very closely on the poem and showed that the whole movement derives from images in it.”
    Beckerman noted that the technique of combining music and spoken text—i.e., melodrama—was popular in the Czech musical world during the late 19th century, adding that Dvorák subsequently composed a symphonic work based on some famous Czech fairy tales.
    “In his first sketches, he wrote the text in under the music, so I didn’t feel that my practice was completely out of step with the composer’s ideas,” Beckerman said.