Carnival, Op. 92

Carnival is a single continuous piece, but it falls clearly into three stretches.

The opening is a rush: strings spinning a fast figure, tambourine and triangle glinting, and the whole orchestra shouting the same bright tune together. Dvořák keeps the pulse hammering, with cymbal crashes landing on the strong beats, so the impression is of being carried along in a crowd rather than watching one. A broader, warmer second melody arrives in the strings, more song than dance, but the festival keeps interrupting it.

Then everything drains away. The middle section is one of the most striking things Dvořák wrote: a quiet, slow episode with a solo English horn (a low, reedy oboe) singing over murmuring muted strings, with a solo violin and flute curling around it. A clarinet answers. This is the same gentle wandering theme that links all three of the overtures in the set, and it turns the noise of the previous minutes into distance, as if the fair were now several streets away.

The dance creeps back in fragments, low and quiet, then reassembles at full strength. The closing pages pile up speed, the opening tune returns in the brass, and the piece finishes with a headlong sprint and a hard, flat final chord.

Dvořák wrote Carnival in 1891 as the middle panel of a set of three linked overtures, originally conceived as one work under the title Nature, Life and Love and later published separately as In Nature's Realm, Carnival, and Othello. A single wandering melody, heard in each of the three, ties them together; in Carnival it surfaces in the hushed middle section. He conducted the premiere of all three in Prague on 28 April 1892, at a farewell concert given before he left for New York to head the National Conservatory of Music. He took the set with him and conducted it again in New York that October. Of the three, Carnival quickly became the favorite, and it has stayed in the repertoire ever since as a curtain-raiser: loud, fast, immediately gripping, and short enough to open almost any program. Its companions are heard far less often.