Dvorak - The Great Composers Series Author:Alec Robertson, Eric Blom, J. A. Westrup Although there was Bohemian music before Dvorak, says Alec Robertson in this informative study, there was no truly national Czech music. In the 1700's, Gluck, a native Bohemian, had declared himself against "the idiotic distinction between the music of one nation and another." By the next century, however, Smetana began, in Prague, to work the r... more »ich mine of Bohemian music. Then a violist in his orchestra, Antonin Dvorak, turned his attention to the question and created a body of Czech music that became world-famous. How he accomplished it is told here, from the lean days when he had to burn manuscripts to keep warm, through the period of his friendship with Brahms and the opposition of the Wagnerians, to his triumphant tour of the United States and the honors given him in his native land.
Mr Robertson examines Dvorak's too-long-neglected works as well as celebrated ones as the New World Symphony, the Slavonic Dances and the most famous of all cello concertos (which Dvorak wrote after declaring that the cello was not a solo instrument). The appendix includes a chronology, a bibliography and a complete catalogue of Dvoraks's works