Antonin Dvorak
Antonin Dvorak was a Czech composer and a representative of Romanticism. He was born on September 8, 1841, in Nelahozeves, near Prague, and died in Prague on May 1, 1904, after a heart attack. His music often draws on folk melodies and rhythms from Bohemia and Moravia.
Dvorak began attending a village music school at the age of six. He later studied music theory, viola, piano, and organ in Zlonice, then trained at the Prague Organ School, where he developed into a skilled violinist and violist. During the 1860s he played viola in the orchestra of the Czech Provisional Theatre, which Bedrich Smetana began directing in 1866. Dvorak left the orchestra in 1871 to focus on composing. He also worked as an organist at St. Adalbert’s Church in Prague.
His compositions gained recognition in the 1870s. Johannes Brahms took an interest in his work and helped connect him with the publisher Fritz Simrock, who commissioned the first collection of Slavonic Dances. Published in 1878, it quickly became popular. Dvorak’s Stabat Mater was his first work performed abroad. After its success with British audiences, he visited London in 1884 and later wrote his Seventh Symphony for the city, where it premiered in 1885. He visited Britain nine times and often conducted performances of his music. In 1890, he toured Moscow and St. Petersburg, conducting orchestras there.
From 1892 to 1895, Dvorak directed the National Conservatory of Music in New York. There he met the African American composer Harry Burleigh, who introduced him to spirituals. Dvorak composed his Ninth Symphony, From the New World, in New York in 1893. During a summer visit to the Czech community in Spillville, Iowa, he wrote two string quartets and a sonatina for violin and piano. He composed his Cello Concerto in B minor in 1894–95, before returning to Bohemia, in part because he missed home.
In his later years, Dvorak concentrated on opera and chamber music. His opera Rusalka, completed in 1900, became one of his best-known works. His output also includes nine symphonies, concertos, symphonic poems, choral works such as the Requiem and Stabat Mater, and chamber pieces including the American String Quartet. He combined elements of Viennese classicism and Romanticism with Czech folk music, and his work helped establish the Czech national school of music alongside Smetana. Dvorak directed the Prague Conservatory until his death and received an honorary distinction from the University of Cambridge in 1891.