Images usually associated with death with their usual, reverent treatment in religious funerals are presented to contrast with death during wartime. The low-value war sets on human life is exemplified by the opening reference to those “who die as cattle,” akin to animals in a slaughterhouse.
The Largo creates a virtual world within itself through its formal structures, expressing feelings associated with nostalgia, homesickness, death, and a yearning for the afterlife and, perhaps, better times. According to Anton Seidl, conductor of the NY Philharmonic Society orchestra for the 1893 world premiere of the work at Carnegie Hall, “it is not a good name, New World Symphony — it is homesickness, home longing (Biancolli 1947, 240).”