AntonínDvořák

In the village band at Nelahozeves, north of Prague, the musicians collected their money by stopping a couple halfway through a dance and asking them to pay. Young Antonín Dvořák handed his share straight to his father, the village butcher and innkeeper. “I belonged to ours as soon as I could fiddle a little,” he told the London Sunday Times on 10 May 1885. He was born in Nelahozeves on 8 September 1841.

At Zlonice, the schoolteacher Antonín Liehmann taught him harmony and several instruments. Dvořák remembered bringing home a polka for the band to try. The opening chord came out all right except for the cornet, whose part he had written in the wrong key. In 1857 he went to the Prague Organ School, graduating two years later. He played viola in a dance band which became the nucleus of the Provisional Theatre orchestra in 1862. For nine years he sat in the pit, often under Smetana, playing operas while writing his own music at home.

Scores were expensive. His friend Karel Bendl lent him what he needed, including Beethoven’s Septet, and chamber music and symphonies accumulated in his rented rooms. Wagner came to Prague in 1863, and Dvořák remembered following him through the streets to see his face again. “I was perfectly crazy about him,” he told the same Sunday Times interviewer. The theatre’s singers could not manage his opera King and Collier at rehearsal. Dvořák later set the whole libretto again from the beginning.

1873–⁠78Simrock and the Slavonic Dances

He left the orchestra in 1871 to make more time for composition. In 1873 he married Anna Čermáková, a former piano pupil and a good singer; teaching, her church engagements and his organist’s post at St Adalbert’s kept the household going. An Austrian state grant of 400 gulden arrived in January 1875. Brahms, who later joined the award’s jury, took an interest in his scores and recommended the Moravian Duets to Fritz Simrock in Berlin.

Simrock published them in 1878 and asked for a set of dances for piano duet. He had already done well with Brahms’s Hungarian Dances. Dvořák supplied eight Slavonic Dances, writing his own melodies and beginning the orchestration while the piano set was still in progress. The first is a furiant in C major, with accents that divide the beat into competing groups. By the end of the year the dances had reached orchestras in London, New York and cities across Europe. Simrock wanted more of these small pieces because they were profitable, although Dvořák wanted to write symphonies.

1876–⁠85Stabat Mater and the Seventh Symphony

English invitations followed, including a commission from the Philharmonic Society for the Seventh Symphony. Dvořák conducted its première at St James’s Hall on 22 April 1885. The first theme begins quietly above a held D and rises to a diminished-seventh chord; the finale reaches D major only after a long struggle. After the première he cut forty bars from the slow movement. Simrock offered him 3,000 marks for the symphony and tried to persuade him to return to dances. They quarrelled over the fee, and then over the publisher’s German spelling of his name.

1887–⁠91At home in Vysoká

The family spent summers at Vysoká, where Dvořák had bought a house and garden from his brother-in-law. Six more children were born between 1878 and 1888, and all survived to adulthood. Much of the A major Piano Quintet was written there in 1887. The cello begins with a broad tune over the piano, and the viola has the second subject. Two years later came the Eighth Symphony, whose G minor opening is answered by a flute in G major. In the Dumky Trio of 1890–⁠91, the six movements alternate between slow lament and quick dance. Dvořák played the piano in its first performance.

1892–⁠95America

Jeannette Thurber brought him to New York in 1892 to direct the National Conservatory. Her school admitted women and Black students. One of them, the baritone Harry T. Burleigh, sang him the spirituals he had learnt from his mother and grandfather. Dvořák urged American composers to take this music seriously. “These are the folk songs of America and your composers must turn to them,” he told the New York Herald on 21 May 1893. In January 1894 he conducted a benefit concert with Burleigh, the soprano Sissieretta Jones and an all-Black choir at Madison Square Garden’s concert hall.

Dvořák wrote the Cello Concerto during his last American winter, in 1894–⁠95. News that his sister-in-law Josefina was ill reached him while he was composing it. In the slow movement he quoted Leave Me Alone, a song she loved. After he returned to Bohemia and she died, he enlarged the quiet closing passage of the finale, bringing the song back on a solo violin. The cellist Hanuš Wihan proposed a virtuoso cadenza. Dvořák refused. He required the cello to fall quiet and the orchestra to close the work.

1896–⁠1904Erben ballads and Rusalka

Back in Prague, he taught pupils including Josef Suk and Vítězslav Novák. In 1896 he turned to four of Karel Jaromír Erben’s ballads: The Water Goblin, The Noon Witch, The Golden Spinning Wheel and The Wild Dove. Their murders and revenants unsettled admirers of the symphonies. Dvořák followed the poems closely and fitted musical phrases to the rhythm of their words. The goblin’s sewing song returns when he threatens the mother of his child.