By the time Antonín Dvorák got to composing his Symphony No. 4 in D minor, Op. 13 between January and March of 1874, a handful of trying artistic crises—centering around the opera King and Collier, and the incomplete String Quartet in A minor, Op. 12—had forced Dvorák to consider abandoning his youthful allegiance to Wagnerian ideals and seek out new ways to orient himself as a composer. Classicism and nationalism, so often thought to be improper bedfellows, would eventually find union through Dvorák's pen, and in the Fourth Symphony we can hear Dvorák's footsteps—here uncertain, there sure-footed—starting to pound out that path. The piece is still considered an immature one (only with the Symphony No. 5 did he begin to really solve the symphonic puzzle), but it is one whose outlines draw far nearer to the Dvorák beloved of world audiences than do those of any of the three previous symphonies. On April 6, 1892, nearly 20 years after he first composed it, Dvorák conducted the first complete performance of the Symphony No. 4—revised somewhat during the 1880s—at one of Prague's so-called Slavonic Concerts.

After experimenting with a three-movement design in the Symphony No. 3 in E flat major, Op. 10 (at whose 1874 premiere the scherzo of the Symphony No. 4 was performed as a stand-alone piece), Dvorák returns to the four-movement plan that he would forevermore exercise in his work as a symphonist. The opening Allegro has a robust principal theme (marked grandioso) and a warm, passionate second theme (B flat major, molto espressivo). The Andante sostenuto e molto cantabile second movement is many things—rich, melodic, and possessed of brilliant scoring for winds and brass—but, with its colorful chromaticism and deliciously rambling tune, it is certainly not steeped in the same Classical tradition that informs the first movement. The large Scherzo (Allegro feroce, and Dvorák means it!) is quite effective, even out of its symphonic context, and there has always been some thought that it was originally a separate composition. In the Allegro con brio finale, Dvorák provides something in the manner of a peasant dance.

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