From the included liner notes by Andrew Huth:

Dvorák returned to Bohemia from his last American visit in April 1895 and for the rest of his life divided his time between Prague and his small property at Vysoká, making occasional trips abroad to conduct or attend performances of his music. Aged at this time fifty-three, he was internationally famous and in a position to write more or less what he wanted. Between the spring of 1893 and the end of 1895 he had completed some of his finest instrumental works – the Ninth Symphony (‘From the New World’), the Cello Concerto and three string quartets – but he now seems to have made a conscious decision to turn away from ‘pure’ instrumental music. An intensely patriotic man, he was always anxious to be appreciated as a Czech artist, and in the last decade of his life concentrated on giving musical expression to subjects that were both national and dramatic. His real ambition was to write a successful national opera to stand alongside the works of Smetana: Rusalka, composed in 1900, broadly realised this aim.

Fidelio may seem like an isolated phenomenon in a career overwhelmingly dominated by instrumental music. But Beethoven’s letters reveal that from his early years in Vienna he was anxious to try his hand at opera. In 1803 he got as far as composing several numbers for a grand opera, Vestas Feuer, to a libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder, Mozart’s collaborator on Die Zauberflöte. But the project foundered on the incongruity between the ancient Roman setting and what Beethoven called “language and verses that could only have come out of the mouths of our Viennese apple-women.” He continued to cast around for suitable librettos until near the end of his life, even making sketches for operas on Macbeth – a tantalising prospect – and Bacchus.

These orchestral ballads, directly programmatic and inspired by verbal rather than purely musical stimuli, represent something of a change of direction for Dvořák, away from the Viennese classicism of his idol Brahms and his circle towards a freer, more operatically influenced orchestral style closer to that of Liszt and Smetana. This was deplored by many of Dvořák’s more classically inclined admirers such as Eduard Hanslick, who wrote that ‘with this detailed programmatic music Dvořák has stepped on a slippery slope’. More significant, though, was the positive influence these works were to exert on such younger Czech composers as Suk, Novák, Foerster and above all Janácˇek, whose music often reflects the rhythms and intonation of the Czech language, continuing Dvořák’s pioneering practice in The Golden Spinning-Wheel.

The German Requiem is Brahms’ largest single composition and a pivotal work in his own creative life. It bears little relation to the Messa da Requiem of Catholic liturgy. Less a requiem for the dead, it is more an act of consolation for the bereaved. Brahms told Karl Reinthaler, the choirmaster (and trained theologian) who helped prepare the work’s premiere in Bremen in 1868: ‘I could easily dispense with the word “German” and replace it with “Human”.’ Like Heinrich Schütz in his 1636 burial mass, Musikalische Exequien, Brahms sets German- language texts drawn from the Bible. Many are familiar from Protestant funeral rites used in Germany and elsewhere; the emphasis, however, is very much Brahms’s own.