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 Weber are of Germany, or Chopin of Poland. To bring about this result we must trust to the ever-youthful enthusiasm and patriotism of this country. When it is accomplished, and when music has been established as one of the reigning arts of the land, another wreath of fame and glory will be added to the country which earned its name, the “Land of Freedom,” by unshackling her slaves at the price of her own blood.”

There is no doubt, this country which has such a poet like Walt Whitman will have great composers, too, when time will come.

Dvořák’s first composition on American soil was the Symphony in E Minor, opus 95, “From the New World,” the ninth and last of his symphonies, although it was numbered as the fifth. “Morning, December 19, 1892” is the date of the first sketch in Dvořák’s sketchbook for this symphony. Dvořák dated carefully all his sketches and compositions, and therefore we know perfectly when they were begun and finished. The Symphony in E Minor was a spontaneous outburst of Dvořák’s musical nature, inspired primarily by the intense first impressions in New York. Its four movements were written in New York between January 10th and May 24th, 1893. In the first (Adagio, Allegro molto) and especially in the fourth movement (Allegro con fuoco) we see how fascinating New York was to Dvořák with its crowded streets, docks, warehouses and its mixture of nationalities. Both of these movements with their violently changing moods have a fast rhythmic tempo, are crowded with joyous lively action, and the fourth movement rises to imposing heights of artistic creation. The celebrated second movement (Largo) is one of the most impelling in symphonic literature. Here and in the third movement (Scherzo) Dvořák was inspired in part by certain sections of Longfellow’s “Hiawatha.” A fine Czech translation of this poem was made by J. V. Sládek in the winter 1868–1869 on a farm at Caledonia, Wis., and published in Prague in 1872. Dvořák knew it, and therefore the story that traces of the “Funeral in the Forest” are to be found in the Largo and of the dance of Pau-Puk-Keewis at “Hiawatha’s Wedding-Feast” in the Scherzo does not sound apocryphally. But surely there are reminiscences