Symphony no. 9 "From the New World" in E minor, op. 95, B. 178

Dvořák began his Ninth Symphony in January 1893, three months after arriving in the United States. It was first published as his Fifth Symphony, which explains the double numbering still encountered in older references. In a letter to Dr Emil Kozánek, Dvořák wrote that he was completing a new symphony in E minor and that anyone with perception would feel the influence of America in it. The score thus emerged not as a postcard from a new country, but as the response of a European composer discovering another musical landscape. The New York Philharmonic commissioned the symphony and gave the first performance in Carnegie Hall on 16 December 1893 under Anton Seidl. In an article printed in the New York Herald the day before, Dvořák stated that he had used no actual Indian melody but had written themes of his own carrying the characteristics of that music, and described the second movement as a study towards a cantata or opera on Longfellow's Hiawatha, a work he never wrote. At the National Conservatory the African-American student Harry Burleigh sang spirituals to him.