Following the success of Antonín Dvořák’s first visit to London in 1884, the London Philharmonic Society asked him to return the following year and to compose a new symphony for the occasion. It was an honourable request – after all, the London Philharmonic Society had commissioned Beethoven's Ninth Symphony six decades earlier! When Dvořák began sketching out the symphony on December 13, 1884, he was well aware of the high expectations involved – both his own and those of others. Most music critics and Dvořák biographers, however, have struggled with the interpretation of this exceptional piece. For example, it has been interpreted "politically" against the background of the growing German-Czech tensions of those years. But the existential power of the D minor Symphony – its anger, its expansive pessimism, i.e. its confessional character – may also derive from the biography and personality of its composer, which were probably far more complex, painful and problematic than any "Bohemian idyll" we might assume. Even in Dvořák's Eighth Symphony, which is considered to be more cheerful, and in his last symphony, "From the New World", one can still detect a more or less latent tendency towards tragic longing. The world premiere of the Seventh Symphony took place on April 22, 1885 in London, with the composer conducting. It became one of Dvořák's greatest successes.
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