Thoughts arising from a programme note for the Dante Quartet

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

20 November

I have not found a source, which means that I cannot put these words in context, but Dvorak (the accent on the ‘r’ will not reproduce, so I have also left that on the ‘a’) is often quoted as having written (and seemingly in English, as the form of the words does not differ):

To have a fine idea is nothing special. The idea comes of itself, and if it is fine and great, then that is not because of the person who has it. But to develop the idea well and make something great of it, that is the hardest part – that is art!


Well, obviously, for all the apparent modesty of saying that there is no merit in having ‘a fine idea’, there is an immense amount of self-congratulation in being able to employ ‘art’ in order ‘to develop the idea well’. (Besides which, Dvorak envisages the idea being ‘fine and great’ without that conferring any merit on the recipient, but then envisages, of the already great idea, ‘mak[ing] something great of it’, by ‘develop[ing it] well’: so is the idea great already, or is something great made of it?)

Dvorak seems also to miss out some other points in his enthusiasm for this argument that stresses art, i.e. his art as a composer:

1. Ideas may – indeed, I would say, are more likely to – come more often, or more easily, to someone who is or has become receptive to them. And if, which he must, as he is talking as a composer, he means musical material, then the notion of everyone being an equal participant in ‘hav[ing] a fine idea’ just does not stand up to inspection. I wager that it is not that members of the public in general are regularly having musical themes come to them, but simply then do not have the art to develop them and make them great – no, they do not think compositionally at all, and do not have such ideas.

2. If I am right, then having an idea is, after all, something to do with the person who has it. Whatever that receptivity may be, or consist in, it is not that people as a whole are having fine ideas all the time, but that they will probably come more often to those who make use of them – and whether they have made use of them well or ill may fall to be judged by someone else, even in Dvorak’s case.

3. In the case of the Diabelli Variations (or, properly, 33 Variations on a waltz by Anton Diabelli, Op. 120), I cannot believe that anyone will seriously contend that what Beethoven did with what Diabelli composed did not transcend the original so as to make it inconceivable that its origins could have been so slight. Likewise, there are (not that the only great works are in variation form!) parts of the Goldberg Variations (BWV 988, published as ‘an aria with diverse variations’) in which Bach transforms the source material, as if alchemically (Arnold Schering’s thesis that the aria is not the composer’s own theme appears discredited). Certainly support for the notion that ideas might come to those not best placed to develop them, but lesser musicians than Beethoven and Bach might still record them in cases where, if fine ideas came to all and sundry, they might be more likely, if we conceive of ideas in general, to die stillborn.


Dvorak is also recorded writing the following, in which I see scope for, if not necessarily antithesis, then synthesis:

As for my new Symphony, the F major String Quartet and the Quintet (composed here in Spillville – I should never have written these works ‘just so’ if I hadn’t seen America.


If there is something antithetical, it is in acknowledging that experience – here, having visited America, and, in particular, this enclave of immigrants from Czechoslovakia – has shaped the reception of ideas (unless Dvorak just means that his art of developing them was what was influenced), which appears at odds with saying that ‘To have a fine idea is nothing special’, and, I would say, supports arguing that receptivity may vary immensely, and also may well be capable of being cultivated.

There may be a capacity to have a fine idea, there may be a capacity to do something great with it – whether those capacities, on all occasions, are the same person’s may depend, but, almost certainly, it will be the judgement of others that may determine whether something great has been achieved, and will be a significant (but not the only) influence on its survival for other generations to value in their turn. (I am thinking, as I do so often, of Mendelssohn’s important championing, in his time, of works of Bach’s such as the Mass in B Minor (BWV 232), which, along with others that were rediscovered, we would now take for granted as being great, if not necessarily to our taste.)


If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here