Going Home Antonin Dvorak BYU Choir

William Arms Fisher, a pupil of the Czech composer Antonin Dvorak, wrote the lyrics and adapted the music to the theme of 2nd Movement of Dvorak’s New World Symphony. “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.