‘It seemed like the Mount Everest of the repertoire’ - Nicolas Altstaedt on Dvořák's ‘Dumky’ trio

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Dvořák’s Piano Trio no.4 ‘Dumky’ is a piece that’s been with me for years, but I always avoided playing it until recently. It’s always stood out to me as a watershed in Dvořák’s output: my favourite work of his used to be the op.65 Piano Trio, with its incredible complexity, rich modulations, daring harmonies and echoes of Brahms. Then suddenly in 1891 he wrote ‘Dumky’, a piece that’s so minimalist and harmonically reduced that it feels like the purest music ever written. Many people have told me they don’t get it because it’s so simple; I say the miracle is its simplicity.

It was during the first Covid lockdown in March 2020 that I finally began studying ‘Dumky’ seriously. Until then it had seemed like the Mount Everest of the repertoire, and it meant a lot of reading around the piece to find out what had changed so much in Dvořák’s life. For me it embodies a tremendous sense of tragedy and sadness, and it’s always puzzled me that audiences will smile as they’re listening to it! A ‘dumka’ was, in fact, a genre of sad, melancholic folk song, generally sung by blind beggars whose only method of survival was to sing, accompanying themselves on a kind of lute called a kobza…