Antonin Dvorak 1841-1904
Dvorak was a composer of romantic music, who often incorporated the folk music of Moravia and his native Bohemia into his works. Dvorak’s father was a butcher and sometime player of the zither, who hoped that his son would follow his footsteps as a butcher, but Antonin had other ideas. Dvorak studied the organ and became an accomplished player of the violin and viola. He started playing professionally at the age of eighteen, and wrote his first string quartet when he was twenty. Dvorak played the viola in the Bohemian Provisional Theater Orchestra, which was conducted by Bedrich Smetana for some of the time Dvorak was there. There can be little doubt working with the father of the Czech style of music would have had a profound impact on Dvorak’s compositions. Johannes Brahms was an admirer of Dvorak’s work, and was also a tremendous influence on Dvorak, and the two composers became good friends. Dvorak spent a number of years working and teaching in New York. Some of Dvorak’s better known works include the New World Symphony, Slavonic Dances, American String Quartet, Cello Concerto in B Minor, and the choral work Stabat Mater.
The Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in A minor, was the second of the three concertos that Dvorak composed and orchestrated. Dvorak had met the great violinist Joseph Joachim in 1878 and decided to write a concerto for him. It was finished in 1879, but Joachim was skeptical of the way the work was constructed, and never played the piece that had been written for him. The concerto was premiered in 1883 in Prague by the violinist Frantisek Ondricek, who also gave its first performances in Vienna and London.
“Smetana was the one who founded Czech music, but Anton Dvorak was the one who popularized it.” (Schonberg)
