4. Leave Me Alone, or Dvořák’s Doctrine of One

This chapter uses the contested "Josefina story" behind Dvořák's Cello Concerto — the theory that its haunting coda encodes a lifelong, secret attachment to the composer's sister-in-law — as a case study in how we weigh evidence, testimony, and intention in musical interpretation. Framed by the author's own bruising public dispute with critic David Hurwitz over liner notes he co-wrote with cellist Jan Vogler, the chapter proposes a "historical algorithm" for thinking about arguments built from many partial certainties rather than a single decisive proof, and applies it to what is actually known about the Concerto: Dvořák's quotation of his song "Lasst mich allein" in the second movement and again, transformed, in a wholly rewritten coda; his uncharacteristic insistence that the ending be performed exactly as written; and violinist Josef Suk's much later, secondhand account tying the piece to Josefina — testimony that surfaced only after Dvořák's wife's death. Weighing what is documented against what is irrecoverably lost, the chapter argues that the absence of contemporary proof is not evidence of absence, particularly given how rarely composers who embed private meanings ever announce them.Situating the Concerto between two openly programmatic late works — the Hiawatha-inflected New World Symphony and the Erben-based tone poem The Water Goblin — the chapter contends that a hidden narrative in the Cello Concerto's coda is far from implausible, even if it can never be confirmed. Through close musical description of the coda's pastoral, funereal, and amorous topoi, and comparison with the death scenes of Rusalka, the author advances what he calls the "Doctrine of One": the idea that a work's meaning may have been intended for, and fully legible to, only a single listener — the composer himself — and that this possibility, far from voiding critical inquiry, offers a powerful model for how intensely personal our engagement with music always is.