From a butcher's family to the world's great concert halls
Antonín Dvořák is the most performed Czech composer in the world — and one of the few composers ever to become famous on three continents in his own lifetime. The son of a village innkeeper and butcher from Nelahozeves near Prague, he trained as an organist and spent years playing the viola in Prague theatre orchestras while composing tirelessly. His breakthrough came when Johannes Brahms, sitting on the jury of an Austrian state grant, was so taken by his music that he recommended Dvořák to his own publisher. The Slavonic Dances (1878) then swept across Europe almost overnight — music genuinely Czech in spirit, yet masterful in classical form.
America and the New World Symphony
In 1892 New York's National Conservatory lured Dvořák to America as its director — at a salary twenty-five times what he earned in Prague — hoping he would help Americans find their own musical voice. There he composed his most celebrated works, including the Symphony No. 9 "From the New World" and the Cello Concerto in B minor, which made his friend Brahms exclaim: "Why on earth didn't I know that one could write a cello concerto like this?" After three years, homesickness won out. Dvořák returned to Prague and devoted his final decade to fairy-tale tone poems and operas — above all Rusalka, whose "Song to the Moon" remains one of the most beloved arias ever written.
Dvořák and Prague
Dvořák studied, taught and died in Prague. In 1896 he conducted the very first concert of the Czech Philharmonic in the Rudolfinum, whose main hall now bears his name, and his grave lies in the Vyšehrad cemetery overlooking the Vltava. His Slavonic Dances, Humoresque and Songs My Mother Taught Me appear on Prague concert programmes virtually every week — hear them in the city where his story began.