It took Antonín Dvorák many years to get his feet firmly planted as a composer, and during his journeyman years we very often find him not quite sure what to do with pieces that seemed to be failures but which he was loath to simply destroy (in the end, he did destroy most of his early music). Sometimes, as with both the famous Romance for violin, Op. 11 and the Nocturne in B major for string orchestra, Op. 40, Dvorák managed to salvage something of real value from a piece that he had previously counted as a total failure. In the case of the Nocturne, the cast-away piece upon which Dvorák drew was the String Quartet in E minor of late 1870, B. 19; the quartet, which is in one extended movement, did not meet Dvorák's expectations, but the Andante religioso middle section was too good to bury. It was so dear to the composer, in fact, that he resurrected it three times: once for the Nocturne for strings, another time for a separate version of the same piece, for solo violin with piano or strings (published with the string version as Op. 40), and a third time (actually the earliest of the three, chronologically speaking) for the original slow movement, eventually replaced, of the G major String Quintet, Op. 77 of 1875. The Op. 40 string-orchestra Nocturne was given a final touch-up by Dvorák just before its publication in 1883. The following year he conducted the work in London, at a Crystal Palace concert that did much to broaden his international reputation. It remains a lovely concert interlude for an orchestra's string section.

The Nocturne is a slow movement, Molto adagio, in 12/8 time. The wonderful arch-shaped melody, begun by the cellos and basses in unaccompanied, pianissimo octaves has a peculiar cross-rhythm in its second bar. When the first violins take this theme over four bars later, the second violins and violas jump in with sumptuous parallel thirds. The entire first half of the piece is played over a dominant pedal; when finally resolution is made to B, Dvorák provides music that is rich and flows elegantly to its serene final cadence. Here, as in nearly every one of his chamber works, Dvorák proves that he has few peers as a master of the slow movement.

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