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 of Dvořák’s native land in both these middle movements. The original title of the symphony was simply “Symphony E Minor No. 8.” In the middle of November, when Dvořák gave the score to Kovařík to take it to the conductor Seidel, he wrote on the title page “From the New World.” And Kovařík declares that Dvořák meant by this title “Impressions and greetings from the New World.”

The Symphony E Minor was played for the first time at Carnegie Hall in New York by the Philharmonic Society orchestra conducted by Anton Seidel on Saturday, December 16, 1893 (the public rehearsal took place on December 15). The large audience called for the composer at the end of each movement and Seidel, together with the orchestra, joined in the ovation. It was a great musical sensation, and the American public has remained loyal to the composition to the present day. The Philharmonic orchestra alone played it during the concert seasons 1893–1929, that is in 37 years, 155 times.

The American public was won by this music, not only because it was filled with the strength of genius and a fresh musical inspiration, but also because it showed evidences of American influence upon Dvořák. This influence, as Otakar Šourek says, was especially noticeable in a series of intonations which in the symphony and later compositions remind one of the characteristic tunes of the American Negro and Indian. Some even said that Dvořák had resorted to copying certain American tunes. This assumption is fundamentally wrong and many competent connoisseurs of music as well as Dvořák himself have repeatedly corrected it. Dvořák in a letter to conductor Nedbal wrote eight years later: “I send you Kretzschmar’s analysis of the symphony, but omit that nonsense about my having made use of “Indian” and “Negro” themes—that is a lie. I tried only to write in the spirit of those American folk melodies.” This misconception regarding Dvořák’s compositions, however, still appears occasionally. In Dvořák’s American compositions there are only certain melodic, rhythmic and harmonic evidences of those Negro or Indian melodies which color the musical material of his creations and endow them with their charac-