The Noon Witch, B.196, Op. 108

The piece plays as one continuous span of about fifteen minutes, telling its story in music rather than in labeled sections. It opens with a gentle, rocking theme in the woodwinds that sketches a mother at home with a fussy child, an ordinary domestic scene rendered in warm, lyrical lines. As the child's crying grows more insistent, the mother's threats to summon the noon witch if he does not settle down are answered by a sudden change in the orchestra's color: sharp, dry chords and a stalking figure in the low strings and bassoon announce that the witch has actually appeared at the stroke of noon. A tense, almost stumbling dance rhythm takes over as she chases the mother and child around the room, the music built from short, repeating motifs that ratchet up in volume and dissonance rather than developing in a traditional symphonic way. The chase reaches a violent climax with crashing chords and a sudden silence. What follows is quieter and more ambiguous, a hushed return of the opening lullaby music now colored differently, since the father comes home to find the child dead in the mother's arms, the witch having vanished with the stroke of the church bell. The final bars fade without resolving the tension, leaving the listener with the unsettling image rather than a triumphant ending.

Dvořák wrote The Noon Witch in early 1896, one of four tone poems he composed that year based on grisly folk ballads collected by the Czech poet Karel Jaromír Erben in his book Kytice. The story tells of a mother who threatens her unruly child with a visit from Polednice, a noon-day demon of Slavic folklore, only to have the threat come true with fatal consequences. The work had its first performance in London in November 1896, conducted by Henry Wood, at a time when Dvořák was already internationally known through his symphonies and had recently returned from his years in the United States. Unlike his numbered symphonies, these late tone poems were considered unusual for their storytelling directness and their willingness to end in darkness rather than triumph. The Noon Witch has remained the most frequently performed of the four Erben-based works, valued by orchestras for its concision and its unusually literal orchestral storytelling.