Dvořák, Antonín, << DVAWR zhahk, AN TAW nyeen >> (1841-1904), was a Czech composer. He and Bedřich Smetana are considered the founders of the Czech national school of music. Dvořák composed in a variety of musical forms, including songs, chamber music (compositions played by small groups), choral works, operas, symphonies, and dances. He is best known for his symphony From the New World (1893). This work was his ninth and last symphony. However, it is also known as his fifth symphony because Dvořák started numbering his symphonies only after 1880. This symphony is a good example of the non-Germanic Romanticism of the late 1800’s.
Loading the player...Symphony No. 9 (From the New World)
The folk music of the Czechs and other Slavic peoples was the main source of Dvořák’s music. Dvořák’s songs have passages of powerful dramatic expression and skillful use of melody. His best-known songs include Moravian Duos (1876), Gypsy Melodies (1880), and Biblical Songs (1894). His most famous chamber work is the piano trio Dumky (1891). The music in his chamber works, as well as in such orchestral works as the Carnival overture (1892), is lyrical and powerful. Dvořák’s major choral works include the famous Stabat Mater (1876), composed after the death of two of his children; and the oratorio St. Ludmila (1886). Rusalka (The Water-Nymph, 1900) is considered the best of his several operas.
Loading the player...Rusalka
Dvořák was born on Sept. 8, 1841, in Nelahozeves, a small village near Prague. At the age of 16, he went to Prague to study music. The Czech National Theater was founded in 1862, and Dvořák became a viola player in its orchestra. Dvořák began composing at about the same time. He was his own greatest critic, and, in 1873, he burned the scores of most of the works he had composed.
A performance of the cantata Hymnus in 1873 marked the first public performance of a Dvořák work. The composition received great acclaim. Dvořák soon applied for a stipend (grant) offered to musicians by the government. He submitted the score of a symphony to support his application. The judges, including Johannes Brahms, were so impressed by the power of Dvořák’s music that they granted him a three-year stipend. This occasion also began a lifelong friendship between Brahms and Dvořák. Brahms used his influence to help get Dvořák’s compositions published.
In 1878, Dvořák composed the first set of his well-known Slavonic Dances. A performance of it in 1879 in London made Dvořák known in England. Beginning in 1884, Dvořák visited England many times to conduct performances of his orchestral and his choral works.
In 1891, Dvořák became professor of musical composition at the Prague Conservatory. His growing fame and the success of his works in the United States brought him an offer to serve as director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York City. Dvořák held this position from 1892 to 1895. At the same time, he conducted, and he visited Czech and other Slavic settlements in the Midwest.
Dvořák composed From the New World while living in the United States. Its popular second movement uses the theme of the Black American spiritual, “Goin’ Home.” Dvořák died on May 1, 1904.
