1841–1904 · Romantic
Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904) was a Czech composer of the Romantic era, known for the Ninth Symphony 'From the New World', the opera 'Rusalka', his Cello Concerto and the 'Slavonic Dances'. Many of his works, from the Slavonic Dances to his songs, carry the rhythms and melodic shapes of Czech and other Slavic folk music.
Antonín Dvořák was born on 8 September 1841 in the village of Nelahozeves near Prague, the eldest child in the family. His father, František Dvořák, ran an inn, worked as a butcher and played the zither professionally. His parents noticed his musical gift early and tried to start his training as soon as they could. From the age of six the boy attended the village school; he was taught the violin by Josef Spitz. He began performing early, in the village band and in church.
In 1853, when Antonín was thirteen, his father sent him to the town of Zlonice to live with his uncle Antonín Zdeněk and learn German. There his teacher was Antonín Liehmann, who taught the boy organ and piano as well as music theory. Later Dvořák continued his organ and theory lessons in Česká Kamenice with Franz Hanke. At sixteen, urged on by Liehmann and his uncle, his father agreed to let his son become a musician, on condition that he train to be an organist.
In the autumn of 1857 Dvořák came to Prague and entered the Prague Organ School. In Prague his teachers were split by subject: Josef Zvonař taught him singing, František Blažek theory, and Josef Foerster the organ. At the same time he earned money playing violin and viola in various Prague orchestras, including that of the St Cecilia Society. He finished the school second in his class, but failed to get a post as organist at Prague's St Henry's Church — without giving up on a career in music.
In 1858 Dvořák became a violinist in Karel Komzák's orchestra, which played in Prague restaurants and at balls. The conductor Jan Nepomuk Maýr noticed how good the ensemble was and brought the whole orchestra into the Provisional Theatre orchestra. From 1862 Dvořák played viola there; in 1866 Bedřich Smetana became its conductor. In 1871 Dvořák left the orchestra to have more time for composing.
Around this time, while giving private piano lessons, Dvořák fell for his pupil Josefína Čermáková and dedicated his song cycle 'Cypresses' to her. Josefína did not return his feelings and married someone else. In 1873 Dvořák married her younger sister Anna. Of the nine children born to the couple, six lived to adulthood — Otýlie (1878–1905), Anna (1880–1923), Magdalena (1881–1952), Antonín (1883–1956), Otakar (1885–1961) and Aloisie (1888–1967) — while three others, also named Otakar (1874–1877), Josefa (1875) and Růžena (1876–1877), died as infants.
After his marriage Dvořák got a post as organist at St Adalbert's Church in Prague. He composed a great deal during these years, finishing his second string quintet in 1875. He first won the Austrian State Prize for composers in 1874; the critic Eduard Hanslick sat on its jury. When Dvořák won the prize a third time in 1877, Hanslick wrote to him that Johannes Brahms had also been on the jury, admired his work, and that the two musicians were offering their help.
Brahms recommended Dvořák to his own publisher, Fritz Simrock, who commissioned a set of dances from him — the result was the Slavonic Dances. Published in 1878, first for piano four hands and then in an orchestral version, they brought Dvořák wide recognition almost at once.
Dvořák's Stabat Mater was first performed in Prague in 1880. After it was performed to great success in London's Royal Albert Hall in March 1883, further performances followed in Britain, the United States and then Russia. Dvořák was invited to London and appeared there to great acclaim in 1884. He wrote his Seventh Symphony specially for London and conducted its premiere himself in 1885. He visited Britain many times in total, often conducting his own music there.
Impressed by the music of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Dvořák also travelled to Russia in 1890, conducting his works in Moscow and St Petersburg. In 1891 the University of Cambridge awarded him an honorary degree, and his Requiem was premiered that same year at a music festival in Birmingham.
In 1892 Dvořák took charge of New York's National Conservatory of Music, serving as its director. He was offered a salary far higher than at the Prague Conservatory, but after the 1893 crisis, in 1894, it was cut and paid irregularly. In New York he met Harry Burleigh, one of the first African-American composers, who introduced Dvořák to traditional spirituals.
In the winter and spring of 1893 Dvořák wrote his Ninth Symphony, From the New World. Its premiere with the New York Philharmonic under Anton Seidl was met with great enthusiasm. That same summer of 1893 Dvořák spent several months with his family in Spillville, Iowa, among Czech emigrants, and wrote several chamber works there, including a string quartet. In the winter of 1894–95 he worked on his Cello Concerto in B minor, finishing it in February 1895.
Financial uncertainty, his growing fame in Europe and homesickness led Dvořák to return to Bohemia.
Dvořák returned from the United States with his wife on 27 April 1895. He took up his professorship at the Prague Conservatory again that November. He devoted his final years mainly to opera and chamber music: in 1896 he completed a cycle of five symphonic poems, and after that wrote one opera after another — Jakobín, The Devil and Kate, Rusalka, and finally Armida. Staged in 1901, Rusalka received the warmest welcome of his ten operas and brought him recognition beyond Bohemia.
From November 1901 and for the rest of his life, Dvořák headed the Prague Conservatory, succeeding Antonín Bennewitz in the post. He was also a member of the Czech Academy of Sciences and Arts. His sixtieth birthday in 1901 was marked as a genuine national event.
On 25 March 1904 illness forced Dvořák to leave a rehearsal of his opera Armida. After five weeks of illness he died in Prague on 1 May 1904, aged sixty-two. He was buried on 5 May at Vyšehrad Cemetery.
Dvořák wrote in a wide variety of forms: nine symphonies, ten operas (Rusalka the best known among them), separate serenades for strings and for wind instruments, plenty of chamber music — quartets, quintets and other ensembles — plus piano pieces and vocal works. A good deal of what he wrote draws its rhythms and melodic shapes from Czech and other Slavic folk traditions. He turned to dance forms from across the Slavic world: Bohemian ones such as the skočná, furiant, sousedská and špacírka, but also the odzemek from Slovakia, a mazurka or polonaise with Polish roots, a Yugoslav kolo, and a dumka carried over from Ukraine. These forms appear in both sets of his Slavonic Dances, and it was the first set, Op. 46, that first made him widely known.
Among his most admired scores are the Cello Concerto in B minor — regarded by many as one of the finest ever written for the instrument — and his Twelfth String Quartet in F major, nicknamed the 'American', which stands as his best-loved chamber work. His operas are led by Rusalka, by far his most successful. Two shorter pieces keep turning up in performance lists too: his seventh Humoresque, and a song titled 'Songs My Mother Taught Me'.
By 1891 Dvořák had written eleven string quartets, yet only six of them had been performed by then — the rest waited years for their turn on stage, and the Third Quartet, written around 1869, did not get its premiere until 1969. In 1879 he wrote a string sextet — premiered that November by the violinist Joseph Joachim and colleagues — and a violin concerto, first performed in Prague in October 1883 by František Ondříček. Among Dvořák's unfinished works was another violin concerto, in A major.
Asked which composers of earlier generations he prized above others, Dvořák pointed to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. Wagner had won his admiration much earlier, from 1857 onward, and that early enthusiasm left its clearest mark on his operas.
The site currently offers a single Dvořák piece — the song 'Als die alte Mutter' (Op. 55) for voice and piano, marked at the advanced level. It belongs to his large body of songs, many of them shaped by Czech and other Slavic folk music. For now it is the only way into his music on the site: there are no pieces here for beginners.