Alfred - Antonín Dvořák / piano score

26. říjen 2015

The collaboration between the Czech Radio Publishing House and the Department of Music History in preparing the sheet music resulted in the release of this piano reduction, which was produced for the purposes of staging the opera in 2012 by the composer Otomar Kvěch. Revision of the piano part according to Dvořák’s autograph score and in line with the newly prepared orchestral score was carried out by Markéta Kratochvílová. The editorial treatment of the German text of the opera and the staging stage notes was undertaken by Jarmila Gabrielová.

Opera occupies an important and somewhat singular position in the remarkably rich compositional legacy of Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904). It was a genre that Dvořák devoted himself to from the start of his career to almost the final days of his life. Opera became the focal point of his artistic endeavors in the last third of the 19th century against the backdrop of the emergence of Czech national music and culture. With regard to the compositional circumstances of Dvořák’s first opera Alfred, we can, according to dates recorded in the autograph, reliably say only that the score of the opera probably originated sometime during 1870. The poet Karl Theodor Körner (1791–1813), whose 1812 German-language libretto Alfred der Große (Alfred the Great) Dvořák chose, had been a celebrity not only in his own time but had remained so after his death.

Nothing is known as to whether the composer himself strove to have Alfred performed on the stage of the Provisional or National Theaters in Prague during his lifetime, on some of the German stages in the Bohemian Lands, or perhaps elsewhere. Dvořák, however, never included Alfred in any list of his compositions,nor did he ever write of it in his correspondence or otherwise mention this piece.

On September 17, 2014 the Rudolfinum resounded with the strains of the opera Alfred in a production by the Czech Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Czech Philharmonic Choir of Brno under the baton of Heiko
Mathias Förster.

Other compositions by Antonín Dvořák published in Czech Radio:
Humoresque op. 101, No. 7
Moravian duets
Prague Waltzes
Tragic Overture

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