Antonín Dvořák

• 1. Introduction

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  Antonín Dvořák composed the String Quartet in F major in just three days during a summer holiday in Spillville, Iowa, in 1893. Three days. That single fact captures something essential about the man: a prodigious outpouring of music rooted in an almost physical need for a particular kind of earth beneath his feet. Dvořák was born on the 8th of September 1841 in Nelahozeves, a village near Prague, the eldest son of an innkeeper and zither player who would eventually give up the trade to live by music alone. He died on the 1st of May 1904, leaving the world a body of work that stretches across symphonies, operas, chamber pieces, choral settings, and songs, touching nearly every form available to a composer of his era. The questions worth sitting with are these: how did a butcher's son from a Bohemian village become the director of a major American conservatory and one of the most celebrated composers of his age? And what drove him, at the height of that celebrity, to leave it all behind and go home?

• 2. The Bohemian Roots

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  Nelahozeves got its railway station during Dvořák's childhood, and the boy developed a lifelong passion for trains that stayed with him long after he had outgrown the village. His father František worked variously as an innkeeper, a butcher, and a professional zither player, and when his son showed musical gifts, he arranged for the thirteen-year-old Antonín to be sent to the nearby town of Zlonice in 1853 to live with his uncle and learn German. There, a teacher named Liehmann gave him organ, piano, violin, and music theory lessons, despite a violent temper that Dvořák somehow overlooked, as he held Liehmann in much regard. A calmer influence came from Franz Hanke at Česká Kamenice, who encouraged the boy's talents with more sympathy. By the age of sixteen, with Liehmann and his uncle pressing the case, František allowed his son to pursue music professionally, on the condition that he work toward a career as an organist. Dvořák left for Prague in September 1857 and entered the city's Organ School, studying singing, theory, and organ, graduating in 1859 while ranking second in his class. His first composition of note, the "Forget-Me-Not Polka" in C, was written possibly as early as 1855. A decade later he was still earning roughly seven dollars and fifty cents a month playing viola in the orchestra of the Provisional Theatre, supplementing that slim income by giving piano lessons.

• 3. Brahms and the Path to Fame

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  Johannes Brahms first encountered Dvořák's work through a jury submission to the Austrian State Competition in 1874. The submission was by any measure enormous: fifteen works including two symphonies, several overtures, and a song cycle from a composer Brahms had never met. According to the music critic Eduard Hanslick, Brahms was "visibly overcome" by the mastery and talent on display. The official report described the applicant as a relatively impoverished music teacher who had not yet owned a piano. Dvořák won the prize. He won it again in 1876, and again in 1877, when he submitted his Moravian Duets alongside other works. It was in December 1877 that Dvořák finally learned, through a personal letter from Hanslick, that both Brahms and Hanslick had been on the jury throughout. That letter also carried an offer of friendly assistance in making Dvořák's music known beyond Bohemia. Within that same month, Dvořák wrote his String Quartet No. 9 in D minor and dedicated it to Brahms. Brahms then recommended the Moravian Duets to his own publisher, Simrock, who commissioned Dvořák to write something in the spirit of the Hungarian Dances. The resulting Slavonic Dances, Op. 46, submitted in 1878, were an immediate and great success. Louis Ehlert's review in the Berlin Nationalzeitung on the 15th of December 1878 declared the dances would make their way "round the world", and there was, as Ehlert reported, "a run on the German music shops" for the dances and duets of this hitherto unknown composer. By 1879 the dances were being performed in France, England, and the United States.

• 4. A Triumph in Britain

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  Dvořák's sacred choral setting of the Stabat Mater was premiered in Prague in 1880 to modest attention. The turning point came on the 10th of March 1883, when it was performed at the Royal Albert Hall in London, conducted by Joseph Barnby, and its success there sparked a whole series of performances in England and the United States a year ahead of comparable appreciation in Germany and Austria. Dvořák was invited to Britain and appeared there in 1884 to great acclaim. The London Philharmonic Society commissioned him to write and conduct, and the result was Symphony No. 7. He conducted its premiere at St James's Hall on the 22nd of April 1885. Later that same year, on the 27th of August, he presented his cantata The Spectre's Bride, having arrived a week early to conduct rehearsals of a chorus of five hundred voices and an orchestra of one hundred and fifty. According to later accounts, the performance was "a greater triumph than any" Dvořák had experienced up to that point in his life, and choral societies across the English-speaking world rushed to prepare the new work. He visited Britain at least eight times in total. When Hans Richter conducted the Symphonic Variations in London in 1887, the conductor wrote to Dvořák that "at the hundreds of concerts I have conducted during my life, no new work has been as successful as yours."

• 5. America and the New World

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  Jeannette Thurber, the wealthy and philanthropic president of the National Conservatory of Music of America, offered Dvořák an annual salary of $15,000 to serve as director in New York City. That figure was twenty-five times what he earned at the Prague Conservatory, and Dvořák accepted. He arrived in 1892 and the Conservatory, which Thurber had made open to women and Black students as well as white men, became his base for three years. Shortly after arriving, he published newspaper articles arguing that African-American and Native American music should serve as the foundation for a distinctly American musical style. It was in New York that he met Harry Burleigh, who would become one of the earliest African-American composers, and who introduced Dvořák to traditional African-American spirituals. In the winter and spring of 1893, Dvořák was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic to write Symphony No. 9, From the New World. Its premiere under Anton Seidl drew tumultuous applause, and one biographer later wrote that it was "without question one of the greatest triumphs, and very possibly the greatest triumph of all" that Dvořák ever experienced. When the symphony was published, conductors and orchestras across the world seized upon it. The summer of 1893 brought a trip to Spillville, Iowa, where a member of his household had family and where Dvořák found a Czech-speaking community that felt like a fragment of home. He called it his "summer Vysoká". There, beside writing the American Quartet in three days, he also composed the String Quintet in E major. The Panic of 1893 depleted Thurber's assets, and by 1894 Dvořák's salary had been cut to $8,000 per year, paid only irregularly. Homesickness and increasing recognition in Europe compelled him to return to Bohemia in 1895. His New York home, at 327 East Seventeenth Street, where both the Cello Concerto and the New World Symphony were written, was demolished in 1991 to make way for a medical residence.

• 6. The Cello Concerto

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  For years Dvořák resisted the idea of writing a cello concerto, telling friends that the cello was a fine orchestral instrument but completely insufficient for a solo part. What changed his mind was attending at least two performances of the Second Cello Concerto by Victor Herbert, who was also teaching at the National Conservatory in 1894. Dvořák wrote his own Cello Concerto in B minor, Op. 104, over the winter of 1894-95, completing it in February 1895. His friend and cellist Hanuš Wihan had been requesting the piece for some time, but the premiere in London on the 16th of March 1896 was given by the English cellist Leo Stern to an enthusiastic reception. Brahms, on reading through the score, said: "Had I known that one could write a cello concerto like this, I would have written one long ago." Critics and cellists have since placed it among the greatest concertos ever written for the instrument. The work carries one more private dimension: in May 1895, shortly after Dvořák returned to Europe, his first love Josefina Kaunitzová, who had married another man while he had settled for her younger sister Anna, died. Dvořák revised the coda of the Cello Concerto in her memory.

• 7. A National Voice

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  Dvořák drew on an unusually wide range of Slavic folk forms throughout his career. His Slavonic Dances alone incorporate the Czech skočná, furiant, sousedská, and špacirka; the Slovak odzemek; the Polish mazurka and polonaise; the Yugoslav kolo; and the Ukrainian dumka. He did not quote actual folk tunes but invented his own themes in the style and rhythms of those traditions. His nine symphonies follow classical models broadly, but musicologist Taruskin has noted Dvořák's use of cyclic form, occasionally recycling themes across movements in a way that gave his works what Taruskin called a "tinge of secret programmaticism". Of the ten operas he wrote, nine carry librettos in Czech, and all were intended to express the Czech national spirit. Of those ten, only Rusalka, premiered in 1901 and containing the soprano aria known as "Song to the Moon", is regularly staged outside the Czech Republic today. His five symphonic poems, all written in 1896, draw on ballads from the collection Kytice by the Czech folklorist Karel Jaromír Erben, while the fifth, A Hero's Song, is believed to be autobiographical. His late professorship at the Prague Conservatory and his directorship of that institution from November 1901 until his death made his influence on the next generation direct and lasting; Josef Suk, who had been among his most promising students, married Dvořák's daughter Otýlie in 1898. When Dvořák's 60th birthday was celebrated as a national event in November 1901, towns across Bohemia and Moravia joined in the observance.

• 8. The Final Years

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  On the 25th of March 1904, Dvořák had to leave a rehearsal of his opera Armida because of illness. The first Czech Musical Festival, held in April 1904, built its programme almost entirely from his music: seventy-six choral associations from across Bohemia gathered in Prague, and sixteen thousand singers performed his oratorio Saint Ludmila. Dvořák was too ill to attend. He had an attack of influenza on the 18th of April and died on the 1st of May 1904, at the age of 62, from an undiagnosed cause following five weeks of illness. His funeral was held on the 5th of May, and his remains were buried in Vyšehrad Cemetery beneath a bust by the Czech sculptor Ladislav Šaloun. The Dvořák Prague International Music Festival continues to be held annually in his honour. Neil Armstrong carried a recording of the New World Symphony to the Moon during the Apollo 11 mission in 1969.