Every composer who enters a competition hopes to get a letter like this one, which showed up in the Boston mailbox of George Whitefield Chadwick in 1894:

“I take pleasure in announcing that your symphony offered for the second annual competition of the National Conservatory of Music has obtained the prize. In view of your desire to produce it without delay, we have decided to waive our right [to the symphony’s first performance].” Signed: Antonin Dvorak, Director.

And so it was the Boston Symphony, not the Conservatory’s orchestra or the New York Philharmonic, who gave the premiere performance of Chadwick’s prize-winning Symphony No. 3 on today’s date in 1894.

Chadwick dedicated his symphony to Theodore Thomas, the preeminent American conductor and new music advocate of his day. In a letter to Thomas, Chadwick commented: “My symphony was very well received here, and condemned by some of the newspaper men as a ‘dry and uninspired work’—by which you may guess that it had some features which were not altogether trivial!”

In the decades that followed his death in 1931, Chadwick’s unashamedly Romantic scores fell out of favor and were rarely heard. Some dismissed these as pale imitations of Brahms and Wagner, forgetting that same criticism could have been applied as well to many prominent European composers in the 1890s. In the context of an American musical scene dominated by German music and musicians, Chadwick himself would probably have taken such comparisons as a compliment.