During the nineteenth century, the symphony carried many connotations – seen both as the pinnacle of achievement in instrumental music owing to its lingering Beethovenian prestige and as an increasingly outdated genre to be set aside in favor of the more progressive symphonic poem. The symphony also had uniquely German associations, making it a complicated vehicle for Czech composers at a time when the Czech nationalist project took on a new centrality.

This chapter investigates how these dichotomies – of traditional versus modern, abstract versus concrete, and Czech/Slavic versus Viennese/German – played out within a Czech context. Against the backdrop of these tensions, the chapter surveys the symphonic oeuvre of nineteenth-century Czech composers, focusing on Dvořák. In foregrounding the perspective of the Czechs, this study aims to complicate prevailing symphonic narratives and expose the many challenges and contradictions that Czech composers faced when pursuing this genre in the nineteenth century.

This chapter examines waltzes with programmatic battle sequences, focusing on specific examples by Stanislaus Ossowski, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, and Friedrich Starke. These waltzes represented a subgenre of Viennese social dance music that enjoyed brief popularity at the turn of the nineteenth century, and they belonged to a wider culture of commemorative battle music during the periods of the Austro-Turkish War (1788–91) and the Napoleonic Wars. The public ballroom was an especially appropriate setting for battle music, which often appealed to popular patriotism and emphasised communal celebration, and social dancing allowed the public to become active participants in the act of commemorating military victories. Battle waltzes also suggest that a variety of listening practices existed simultaneously in the ballroom setting, since programmatic music requires listeners to follow a narrative over time, a mode of listening associated more with concert audiences than with dancers.