About this edition
The Noon Witch (Polednice), Op. 108, is among the most concentrated and unsettling of Dvořák's late symphonic poems — a fourteen-minute domestic tragedy drawn from Karel Jaromír Erben's ballad collection Kytice, in which a mother's threat to summon the witch to quiet her crying child is answered when the pale figure actually appears at midday. What makes the score remarkable is Dvořák's method: he shapes his principal themes directly from the natural rhythm and inflection of Erben's Czech verse, a "speech-melody" approach that deeply impressed the young Janáček. The result moves from a tender domestic scene through a stroke-by-stroke noontime climax to one of the quietest, most devastating final pages in the orchestral literature.
This volume reproduces the first edition published by N. Simrock in Berlin in 1896 (plate number 10726), issued under the German title Die Mittagshexe. Simrock had been Dvořák's principal publisher since Brahms recommended the composer to the firm in the late 1870s, and this score appeared under Dvořák's supervision within months of the work's world premiere, given in London on 21 November 1896 under Henry Wood. As the earliest complete engraving of the full orchestra, it remains the foundational source text from which later editions of the poem descend.
About this edition:
- Complete full orchestral score (conductor's score), not a study reduction
- Page size 8.5 x 11 inches
- Reproduced from the Simrock first edition of 1896, plate 10726
- Carefully prepared from a public domain source
- Published by Purple 4R Publishing
This edition brings a historical public domain score back into affordable print, making a classic of the Czech orchestral repertoire readily available to conductors, players, students, and scholars. We hope it serves you well on the podium, at the stand, and at the desk.
