Antonin Dvorak

Antonin Leopold Dvorak was born on September 8, 1841, in Nelahozeves, a village on the Vltava river north of Prague, then part of the Kingdom of Bohemia within the Austrian Empire ^[1]. He was the eldest of many children born to Frantisek Dvorak, an innkeeper and butcher, and his wife Anna. The family expected the boy to follow his father into the butcher's trade, and music at first seemed only a sideline: his father played the zither, and village bands supplied dances and church festivals with fiddle tunes the young Antonin absorbed early ^[2].

He learned violin from the local schoolmaster and played well enough to perform at his father's inn. Around 1853 he was sent to Zlonice to live with an uncle, and there the organist and choirmaster Antonin Liehmann gave him lessons in keyboard, viola, organ, and the rudiments of harmony and figured bass ^[1]. Liehmann recognized a talent worth cultivating, and after a further year of German language study in Ceska Kamenice, the family agreed that the sixteen year old should train seriously.

In 1857 Dvorak entered the Prague Organ School, the city's principal training ground for church musicians. He graduated two years later, second in his class, equipped as an organist but unable to find a church post that paid a living wage ^[2]. Anyone asking who was Antonin Dvorak at that moment would have found an obscure young player scraping by on private pupils and orchestral work.

For roughly a decade Dvorak earned his keep as a jobbing violist. He joined the band of Karel Komzak, which was absorbed in 1862 into the orchestra of the Provisional Theatre, the first Czech language stage in Prague ^[1]. From 1866 the theatre's principal conductor was Bedrich Smetana, and playing under him placed Dvorak at the center of the movement to create a distinctly Czech musical culture. In these years he composed steadily and privately: symphonies, quartets, and songs, much of it later withdrawn or destroyed by the self critical composer ^[3].

He left the orchestra in 1871 to devote himself to composition, supporting himself with teaching. Recognition came slowly, then quickly. His patriotic cantata Hymnus, performed in 1873, won him his first real public success in Prague ^[2]. In 1874 he applied for the Austrian State Stipendium, a grant for poor young artists, and won it repeatedly over the following years. The jury in Vienna included the critic Eduard Hanslick and, crucially, Johannes Brahms ^[1].

Brahms was so struck by the submissions that he recommended Dvorak to his own publisher, Fritz Simrock of Berlin. Simrock issued the Moravian Duets and then commissioned a set of Slavonic Dances for piano duet in 1878. The dances sold rapidly across Europe, and within months the unknown Prague composer had an international audience ^[3]. The friendship with Brahms lasted until the older man's death and remained one of the decisive relationships in any Antonin Dvorak biography.

Dvorak's catalogue is large and unusually even in quality: nine symphonies, concertos for piano, violin, and cello, ten operas, sacred choral works, chamber music, and songs. Among Antonin Dvorak achievements, the Symphony No. 9 in E minor, From the New World, premiered by the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall on December 16, 1893, stands out for its immediate and lasting popularity ^[4]. Its slow movement, with a plaintive theme for cor anglais, was later fitted with words as the song Goin' Home and entered popular memory far beyond the concert hall.

England played a major part in his rise. After his Stabat Mater was performed in London in 1883, English choral societies embraced him, and he crossed the Channel nine times to conduct his own works ^[2]. The Birmingham, Leeds, and London festivals commissioned major scores from him, including the Requiem and the Symphony No. 7 in D minor, and Cambridge University awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1891 ^[1].

His chamber music won equal esteem: the American Quartet, the Dumky Piano Trio, and the String Quintet in E flat remain repertory staples. The Cello Concerto in B minor, completed in New York in 1895, is widely regarded as the finest concerto ever written for the instrument, and Brahms reportedly admired it intensely ^[3]. Late in life Dvorak turned to symphonic poems on Czech folk ballads and to opera; Rusalka, first staged in Prague in 1901, gave the soprano repertoire one of its best loved arias, the Song to the Moon ^[5].

In the 1860s Dvorak taught piano to the daughters of a Prague goldsmith, Josefina Cermakova, an actress with whom he fell in love, and her younger sister Anna. Josefina did not return his feelings, and in November 1873 he married Anna Cermakova ^[2]. The marriage proved steady and affectionate. The couple had nine children; the first three died in infancy within a short span in the mid 1870s, a loss that moved Dvorak to complete his Stabat Mater, a setting of the medieval hymn on Mary's grief ^[1].

Away from his desk Dvorak was a man of plain habits and strong enthusiasms. He was a devout Catholic who often headed his scores with thanks to God. He loved locomotives and knew the Prague train schedules in detail, and in America he added ocean liners and pigeon keeping to his list of passions ^[3]. From 1884 the family spent summers at Vysoka, a country property in the mining district south of Prague, where he composed in the mornings and tended his pigeons and garden.

Josefina's death in May 1895, shortly after his return from America, touched him deeply. He revised the ending of the Cello Concerto to quote a song she had loved, a private memorial folded into a public masterpiece ^[4].

In 1891 the philanthropist Jeannette Thurber invited Dvorak to become director of the National Conservatory of Music of America in New York at a salary many times what he earned in Prague. He took up the post in the autumn of 1892 and held it, with one long summer break, until 1895 ^[4]. Thurber wanted a figure of international standing to help American music find its own voice, and Dvorak took the mission seriously.

He studied the melodies shown to him by his student Harry T. Burleigh, an African American baritone who sang spirituals for him, and in newspaper interviews he argued that the future of American music should rest on African American and Native American melodies ^[5]. The claim was controversial in the 1890s and influential long afterward. His own American works, including the New World Symphony, the American Quartet, and the Cello Concerto, absorbed the spirit of what he heard without quoting actual tunes, filtered through his own Czech idiom.

The summer of 1893 he spent in Spillville, Iowa, a Czech speaking farming community where he could hear his own language, play the church organ, and walk by the Turkey River ^[4]. Homesickness, financial troubles at the Conservatory following the economic panic of 1893, and family ties eventually pulled him back, and he sailed for Europe for good in April 1895.

Back in Bohemia, Dvorak returned to teaching at the Prague Conservatory, where he had first been appointed professor of composition in 1891. His pupils included Josef Suk, who married Dvorak's daughter Otilie, and Vitezslav Novak, both central figures of the next Czech generation ^[2]. In 1901 he became the Conservatory's director, and in the same year the Emperor appointed him to the Austrian House of Lords, an honor rarely given to a musician ^[1].

His final decade was devoted almost entirely to the stage and to program music. The four symphonic poems of 1896 on grisly ballads from Karel Jaromir Erben's collection Kytice, among them The Water Goblin and The Noon Witch, showed a new vein of vivid orchestral storytelling ^[3]. The fairy tale opera Rusalka triumphed in 1901, though his last opera, Armida, staged in March 1904, was coolly received.

Dvorak died suddenly in Prague on May 1, 1904, at the age of sixty two, after several weeks of ill health ^[1]. His funeral on May 5 became a national event, and he was buried in the Vysehrad cemetery, the resting place of Czech cultural heroes, near Smetana.

Few nineteenth century composers hold a firmer place in the modern repertory. The New World Symphony, the Cello Concerto, the Slavonic Dances, and the American Quartet are performed constantly worldwide, and Rusalka has moved from Czech houses into the international opera circuit ^[5]. Among basic Antonin Dvorak facts, his gift for melody is the one critics and audiences have always agreed upon; Brahms is said to have envied the ease with which themes came to him ^[3].

His American episode left a long shadow. The argument he made in New York, that a national school should grow from the music of ordinary people, was taken up in different ways by later American composers, and his encouragement of Burleigh helped bring the spiritual into the concert tradition ^[5]. In the Czech lands he is a founding father: his birthplace in Nelahozeves is preserved as a memorial, Prague maintains the Dvorak Museum in the baroque Villa Amerika, and the Dvorak Prague festival honors him each September ^[2].

Scholars rank him with Smetana and Janacek as the core of Czech music, yet his reach was never merely national. He wrote absolute music in the classical forms Brahms defended, colored it with the rhythms of the furiant and the melancholy of the dumka, and made both worlds sound inevitable together ^[1].