The Golden Spinning Wheel, Op. 109
Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904)

Composed in 1896.
Premiered on May 8, 1897 in Brno,
conducted by the composer.

Among the most salient features of Dvořák’s creative personality was his ardent Czech nationalism. He was inspired
throughout his life by the country’s songs, history, legends and
poetry, and several times turned for subject matter to A Garland of Folk Tales, versifications of traditional stories and legends by Karel Jaromir Erben (1811-1870), originally a lawyer, then a museum administrator, and finally, for many years, archivist of the city of Prague. Dvořák had first set one of Erben’s poems, a ballad titled The Orphan, in 1871; his cantata on Erben’s The Specter’s Bride created a sensation at the 1885 Birmingham Festival. In 1896, after he had returned to Prague from his three year tenure as director of New York’s National Conservatory, Dvořák turned again to Erben’s Garland, this time as the catalyst for a series of four tone poems, his only examples of that programmatic genre: The Water Goblin, The Noon Witch, The Golden Spinning Wheel and The Wild Dove.

In his authoritative study of Dvořák’s orchestral works,
Otakar Sourek provided the following précis of Erben’s poetic
telling of the legend of The Golden Spinning Wheel, which is
carefully mirrored by the music of the tone poem: “The king, who has been out hunting [galloping motive in the low strings
supporting a horn-call theme], stops at a cottage at the edge of the forest to ask for a drink of water [three quick knocks on the door from second violins and violas]. In the cottage dwells a mother with her daughter and her step-daughter [a sweet, chordal phrase in the woodwinds], and it is the step-daughter who, sitting at a spinning wheel [circling triplet rhythms in the English horn], so fascinates the king with her beauty that he falls in love with her on the instant [a tender, arching theme begun by the solo violin] and asks for her hand [a passionate statement of the arching theme in the violins]. On his second visit [hunting theme, then a noble phrase from the oboe], he instructs the mother, an old hag [a brief, sneering motive in the clarinets, with a response from the bassoons that parodies the king’s hunting theme], to bring her step-daughter, Dornicka [the arching theme], to the castle. The mother and her daughter, however, kill Dornicka on the way through the forest [soft, ominous sustained notes in the low strings followed by scherzo-like music that is a sinister distortion
of the king’s hunting theme], take with them her eyes, feet and hands [an outburst of the scherzo combined with the king’s hunting theme, perhaps representing Dornicka’s last thought, and the circling spinning-wheel motive in the woodwinds], and make for the castle, where the mother passes off her own daughter as her step-daughter. The king, not seeing through the deception because of the girls’ close resemblance, welcomes his bride with delight [a majestic strain for full orchestra] and celebrates the wedding [a sprightly, dancing melody begun by the woodwinds followed by the ardent music of the bridal chamber]. Soon after,
however, he must go to the wars [fanfares in horns and trumpets]. Dornicka’s body has in the meantime been found in the forest by a mysterious old man [a solemn variant of the king’s hunting theme for brass choir], who thrice sends a youth to the castle, first to ask for the feet in return for a golden spinning wheel, then for the hands in exchange for a golden distaff, and finally for the eyes as the price of a golden spindle. [A sequence of brass chorale, a theme of wide downward leaps accompanied by the circling spinning-wheel motive, and the piccolo’s suggestion of the lad’s questions — ‘Buy, my lady, dear it’s not, only two feet is all it costs’ — is given three times.] The young queen, coveting the possession of these remarkable objects, successively gives in exchange for them the parts of Dornicka’s body, with which the old man in the forest is then able by means of living water to bring the dead girl back to life [the tender, arching theme in the solo violin]. The king returns victorious from the wars [a martial
version of the hunting music], and his wife in welcome sits down at the golden spinning wheel [the circling theme in an eerie, music-box transformation], which creaks out a song that betrays the crime that she and her mother committed in the forest [fragments of the sinister scherzo]. The king then fi nds Dornicka in the forest alive and well [reprise of the bridal chamber episode, now intensifi ed and combined with the violin’s arching theme], takes her to the castle as his true wife [a triumphant version of the hunting theme], and throws the murderesses to the wolves.”

Notes by Dr. Richard E. Rodda