Antonín Dvořák
1841 – 1904 · Czechia
Known for: Czech composer of the Symphony From the New World and the Slavonic Dances
“The music of Bohemia, given to the whole world.”
Biography
Antonín Dvořák was born on 8 September 1841 in Nelahozeves, a village on the Vltava north of Prague, the eldest of fourteen children of an innkeeper who also played the zither for money. He learned the violin from the village schoolmaster and played in church and in a local band. At thirteen he was sent to Zlonice, where Antonín Liehmann taught him organ, piano and theory; at sixteen his father let him become a musician, on condition that he train as an organist. He left the Prague Organ School in 1859 as second in his class and then spent a decade as a working violist, from 1862 in the orchestra of the Provisional Theatre, where Bedřich Smetana became conductor in 1866. Those were lean years, filled with piano lessons taken on to make the rent, while he composed privately.
Recognition came late and then quickly. His music reached the Prague public with real success in 1873, and the following year he won a prize in the Austrian State Competition, on whose jury sat Johannes Brahms. After a third success in 1877 Brahms commended him to the publisher Simrock, who commissioned the Slavonic Dances, Op. 46; the printed music sold in quantity and carried his name across Europe within months. He set the rhythms and turns of phrase of Bohemian and Moravian folk music inside the symphonic tradition rather than beside it. England took to him after a London performance of the Stabat Mater in 1883 and commissioned the Seventh Symphony in 1885. In 1892 he crossed the Atlantic to direct the National Conservatory of Music of America in New York, where he wrote the Symphony From the New World, the Cello Concerto and, in a summer among Czech settlers at Spillville, Iowa, the String Quartet in F major known as the American.
Pay cuts and plain homesickness brought Dvořák back to Bohemia in 1895, and his last years belonged to Prague, to the Conservatory he came to head, and to the stage; the most enduring of his ten operas, Rusalka, reached it in 1901. He died in Prague on 1 May 1904 and was buried at Vyšehrad, among the writers and composers of his country. What remained is played everywhere: nine symphonies, the concertos, the chamber music, the seventh Humoresque and the song known in English as Songs My Mother Taught Me. The Dvořák Prague festival gathers each year around that music, and what he settled by example, that a national voice and the European tradition need not be at odds, has held since.