A New World Symphony

There are only about a dozen pieces of music—well, two or three dozen at most—that can bring tears to my eyes. One of them is Antonín Dvořák’s New World Symphony. It is considered by some to be the perfect expression of Americana. The composer, however, considered it to be Czech, just like himself, and he called it “From the New World” because he happened to be visiting America when he wrote it. It sounds like a little country village of the nineteenth century. Hannibal, Missouri, during Mark Twain’s boyhood. In fact, Dvořák was living in New York City when he wrote it.

It brings tears to my eyes not because it evokes scenes of America, and only partly because of its supernal melodies. I cry because this music creates, in the minds of many listeners, a vision of what a world could be like, how fair the world could be, if it only were not for our religiously-inspired and profit-fortified arrogance and hatred. It is the symphony of a new world, one that will be forever beyond our reach. It would not be heaven, filled with cotton-candy airy sweetness. There is dissonance, but it is meaningful dissonance. The New World Symphony has melodies of heartbreaking sadness. These sadnesses are, however, resolved and made meaningful by the roles they play in the glorious climax.

I have little faith that such a world—in which we still have challenges and pain, but in which we ultimately prevail against them, the kind of world the Biblical prophets promised—will ever exist. But, for brief moments, when I listen to such pieces of music as the New World Symphony, I can fantasize about such a world.