For many years, Antonin Dvorak’s String Quartet in F, Op 96, nicknamed the “American “ Quartet, was believed to be inspired by nature, and particularly the birds of Spillville, Iowa. The story was told that Antonín Dvořák was inspired by nature towards the creation of his String Quartet in F, Op. 96, nicknamed the “American” Quartet. There is considerable scholarship that agrees about the birds. It was Dvořák himself who talked about a bird that inspired this movement. But which bird? In the 1950s, a Dvořák scholar from Great Britain, using only a visual description, decided it was a scarlet tanager...even though he had never actually heard a Scarlet Tanager…and this became the accepted truth, remaining unchallenged and repeated ad-nauseum until 2016 when an Iowa based bird expert named Floyd wrote to the magazine Iowa Bird Life saying it was in fact a Red-eyed Vireo!
Mark McKone, Carleton University’s Towsley Professor of Biology and an amateur musician, took note of this. After field research in Spillville, and looking at the original correspondence between Dvořák’s secretary Kovarík (who first suggested Dvořák visit Spillville, IA) stored in the Dvořák Rudolfinum in Prague, McKone published a paper entitled “The Iowa Bird That Inspired Antonín Dvořák’s American String Quartet in 1893: Controversy over the Species’ Identity and Why It Matters,”. This paper presents compelling evidence into both the music history and ecology of Spillville, and argues that the birdsong inspiration for the third movement of Dvořák’s “American” String Quartet in F major was not the Scarlet Tanager as had long been believed, but our other winged friend, the Red-eyed Vireo.
But both the Scarlet Tanager and the Red-eyed Vireo are present in Iowa - how do we know which bird it really was? McKone writes “Well, Vireos are the second or third most common bird. We hear them every year, at multiple stops. They’re not rare. I was so aware that those Vireos just call and call and call, and that you never see them. In all those years, I’ve rarely seen one. They’re small, and drab, and fly at the very tippy top of the trees. Scarlet tanagers, on the other hand, are like fire. They show up in a flash, and they’re beautiful. We’ve heard them a few times, but mostly we see them. To me, that just made it so obvious what really happened to Dvořák. He was hearing that bird, and following, following. And then this brilliant, bright red bird goes by, and this is why he says, “it was a red bird! I saw it!” Well, he saw a red bird, but that wasn’t the bird that was singing.” If you listen closely and compare the bird songs of both species, it is undeniable - the musical mimicry used by Dvořák is much more similar to that of the Red-eyed Vireo. And now, dear reader, you know the truth of the inspiration of this movement, and we all are richer for this lovely music.
This performance was recorded in the Czech Republic on May 24, 2024, and features Dave Camwell and Kateřina Pavlíková, as well as our friends Magdalena Probstová and Anna Kurzová.
27 июн 2024
