Sissel - Going Home by Antonin Dvorak ("Largo" theme from Symphony No. 9, Op. 95) - 2007

Sissel Kyrkjebø performing "Going Home" in a TV-concert from Røros Church, Norway in 2007. Click on CC for subtitles. The song is based on the Czech composer Antonin Dvorak's famous "Largo" theme from his Symphony No. 9 (From the New World), Op. 95. His symphony was composed while he was in America and was first performed by the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall on December 16, 1893. It has been said that Dvorak's themes in his symphony were inspired by American folk melodies, especially Afro-American or American Indian. The lyrics for "Going Home" was written by one of Dvorak's pupils, William Arms Fisher (1861-1948), who adapted and arranged the Largo theme and added his own words in "the form of a Negro spiritual." This song especially became known as a spiritual after the death of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940s.

This is part of what Fisher wrote in the published sheet music of his song, "Going Home" (Oliver Ditson Company):

"The Largo, with its haunting English horn solo, is the outpouring of Dvorak's own home-longing, with something of the loneliness of far-off prairie horizons, the faint memory of the red-man's bygone days, and a sense of the tragedy of the black-man as it sings in his "spirituals." Deeper still it is a moving expression of that nostalgia of the soul all human beings feel. That the lyric opening theme of the Largo should spontaneously suggest the words 'Goin' home, goin' home' is natural enough, and that the lines that follow the melody should take the form of a negro spiritual accords with the genesis of the symphony."

-- William Arms Fisher, Boston, July 21, 1922.

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