Composer
Antonín Dvořák
A Czech nationalist voice who found fresh inspiration during three years in America.
Antonín Dvořák built much of his early reputation on distinctly Czech and Slavic musical material - folk-influenced melody and dance rhythms - part of the broader wave of musical nationalism running through the Romantic era. That reputation eventually brought him to the United States, where he spent three years directing a conservatory in New York.
Life in brief
Dvořák was born in 1841 in Nelahozeves, a village north of Prague, where his father kept an inn and worked as a butcher. He learned the violin from the village schoolmaster, then trained at the organ school in Prague. For about nine years he played viola in a Prague theater orchestra, at times under the composer Bedřich Smetana, while composing in his spare time.
His breakthrough came through an Austrian state grant for young composers. Johannes Brahms, who sat on the jury, was so impressed that he recommended Dvořák to his own publisher, and the Slavonic Dances (1878) made him famous almost overnight. He became especially popular in England, which he visited many times to conduct.
In 1892 he moved to New York to direct the National Conservatory of Music, staying until 1895, and spent a happy summer in 1893 among Czech immigrants in Spillville, Iowa. Back in Prague, he turned largely to opera, and became director of the Prague Conservatory. A great lover of trains, he reportedly knew the locomotives on the line out of Prague by heart. He died in 1904.
Music and style
Dvořák's music overflows with melody - warm, open, and often tinged with folk-like inflections and dance rhythms such as the Czech furiant and the melancholy dumka. He combined that natural lyricism with a firm grasp of the Classical forms he learned from Beethoven and Brahms.
It was during his American period that he wrote his best-known work, Symphony No. 9, subtitled "From the New World." Dvořák drew on melodic ideas inspired by African American spirituals, introduced to him by his student Harry Burleigh, along with secondhand, Europeanized impressions of Native American music - scholars now doubt he had much direct exposure to it
- filtered through his own Czech-Romantic sensibility. The result became one of the most performed and recorded symphonies ever written, and its slow movement's main theme is now widely known as a standalone melody in its own right - later turned into the song "Goin' Home" by one of his students.
Key works
- Symphony No. 9, "From the New World" (1893).
- Symphony No. 8 (1889) - sunny, pastoral, and full of birdsong.
- Cello Concerto in B minor (1895) - often called the greatest cello concerto ever written. See cello.
- Slavonic Dances (1878, 1886) - originally for piano duet.
- String Quartet No. 12, "American" (1893) - written in Iowa.
- Rusalka (1901) - an opera about a water nymph, with the famous "Song to the Moon."
- Humoresque No. 7 - a charming little piano piece known around the world.
Legacy
Dvořák also encouraged American composers to look to their own folk and popular traditions for inspiration rather than simply imitating European models - advice Copland and others would take seriously a generation later. In the Czech Republic he is a national hero, and his symphonies, concertos, and chamber music have never left the repertoire.
Where to start listening: the second movement ("Largo") of Symphony No. 9 contains its most famous melody; the finale shows the symphony's full dramatic sweep. For his chamber music, start with the "American" Quartet.