Going Home, Largo from the “New World” Symphony (0184 of 1000)

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Antonin Dvorak was an active proponent of national music, of his own heritage, which would be called today, Czech. From 1892 to 1895 he assumed a position in America; he engaged in a practical, active esthetic ethnography, rather than an abstract, academic form. His New World Symphony consciously used African-American and Native American musical influences, in what is popularly regarded as one of his greatest works.

One of Dvorak’s students, William Arms Fisher, applied lyrics in 1922, to an adapted form of the Largo movement of the New World Symphony. The original lyrics stem closely from the “Black Face”, Minstrel tradition, which is offensive to people of African-American heritage. The lyrics adapted here are the result of an attempt to refine out that unfortunate legacy, while trying to retain the natural feeling that this, once, very popular piece evoked in singers and listeners.

The orchestral music is from music originally in a more-nearly difficult key, Db. Intermediate pianists can manage to use that key, but there is the additional challenge that the music is framed by harmonically challenging chords. For the purpose of facilitating home musicians in their quest for an authentic, self-determined cultural experience, the compiler found it expeditious to transpose this rendering into the relatively less-challenging key D natural.

(Use of a chord Bb with chord spelling Bb-F-D, on the word “I’m” in the third measure, harmonically distant from the base key D, is intended to avoid an additional level of complexity, use of double-sharps.)

The song received most recent attention in the 1948 film “The Snake Pit” starring Olivia de Haviland. (Numerous film extras were actual, mental institution patients, as were numerous institutional residents in the 1963 film A Child is Waiting with Bert Lancaster and Judy Garland.) The music rendered in “The Snake Pit” film, below, is in the even “easier” key of C natural.

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The piece is erroneously identified in numerous video excerpts as originating from the “Adagio” movement of Dvorak’s New World Symphony, but a closer look at the original source materials reveals that it is from the “Largo” movement. https://imslp.org/wiki/Symphony_No.9,_Op.95_(Dvo%C5%99%C3%A1k,_Anton%C3%ADn)

Operatic baritone Lawrence Tibbett (1896-1960) sang the piece with the minstrel-tradition lyrics from the original 1922 song rendering. (An example of minstrel-dialect language updated in this adaptation: In the first verse, the bridge, where we have “Work all done, cares laid by, going to fear no more…”, the original, 1922 lyrics use, for “going“, “gwine“, clearly offensive to African-Americans.)