GOING HOME
Hanns F Skoutajan
“Homesickness” can be a devastating emotional experience. I have never been stricken by this malady but I have observed my mother suffering from this “illness.” I was only a child when my parents and I were separated from our Czech homeland just before the outbreak of war. Perhaps she was not so much missing the land in which she had been born and raised as pining for her family, her mother, sister and brother whom she had left behind.
Our homeland is a beautiful country. At a recent performance of Dvorak’s New World Symphony by the National Arts Centre Orchestra of Ottawa, I was made aware of the nostalgic beauty of Bohemia, also Dvorak’s homeland.
The New World Symphony was composed by the preeminent Czech composer during his visit to America in 1892. Undoubtedly this visit made a tremendous impact on him. He wrote several other compositions , The American Quartet, Opus 96; a String Quartet, Opus 97 and The American Flag - a rather nationalistic, musical evocation.
There is some controversy about the New World Symphony, how much of it was really written in the new world. People like myself who have Czech blood in their veins, recognize some Czech folk melodies embedded in the score while others recall that Dvorak was deeply inspired by the poem Hiawatha by Longfellow, and particularly
by the scene of Minnehaha’s funeral in the forest. Dvorak had read the poem in it’s Czech translation before coming to North America.
There is very little similarity between North America and the Czech countryside. Otakar Sourek has written much about Dvorak and his art and describes Bohemia as a land “of deep sighing pine forests... and the broad, fragrant fields.” I can well appreciate that Dvorak experienced a sense of homesickness. The rough farmland of northern Saskatchewan where we were settled and expected to survive had no similarity to the hills, rivers and the city that we had left behind.
A strange thing happened to me on my first return visit to Czechoslovakia in 1968. I spent a day in the city where I was born, walking and visiting places familiar to me, that I had left behind 30 years earlier. In the centre of the city is located a beautiful baroque opera house which had been spared the allied bombing where I had often attended concerts and operas with my parents. In front of the opera house and in many other places around the city, I saw large posters advertising the next concert : Ma Vlast, the beautiful and well-known tone poem by Smetana. The Czech words mean “my fatherland.” And so it seemed that I was constantly reminded that I was indeed in my fatherland, as I walked the streets, to my school, the house where I had lived for the first 9 years of my life and also the birthing centre where in 1929 I first opened my eyes to the world. No wonder I have a feeling of nostalgia when I hear music that evokes such memories.
No, I have never suffered from homesickness as I observed in my mother, but I have a deep appreciation of the land of my birth. Although I cannot speak Czech the very sound of that language like the music of its composers makes a significant impact on my emotions.
In the repeated Largo of Dvorak’s symphony which contains one of the most famous themes in all classical music, is the well known song “Going Home.” Does it refer to a negro spiritual or to his own nostalgia, perhaps both? When choosing music for my father’s funeral I prevailed on my organist and choir to perform the choral rendition of “Going Home.” I am afraid I was not being very gentle on mother’s emotions in the process.
It is a universal theme for we are all on a homeward journey. I am now past my 85th birthday and also aware that I am coping with a terminal illness. I am getting closer to home, I am reminded, as I read the daily death notices in the newspapers noting the passing of contemporaries.
I have not, nor do I believe that there is any empirical evidence of what transpires beyond that last frontier. I simply prefer to believe that I am going home. That conviction animates what I do en route.
SPIRIT QUEST 08/06/2014
