Antonín Dvořák

Antonín Leopold Dvořák ( listen ) (September 8, 1841 – May 1, 1904) was a Czech composer of romantic music.

Dvořák was born in Nelahozeves near Prague (today the Czech Republic) where he spent m

Antonín Leopold Dvořák ( listen ) (September 8, 1841 – May 1, 1904) was a Czech composer of romantic music.

Dvořák was born in Nelahozeves near Prague (today the Czech Republic) where he spent most of his life. He studied music in Prague's only Organ School at the end of the 1850s, and slowly developed himself as an accomplished violinist and violist. Throughout the 1860s he played viola in the Bohemian Provisional Theater Orchestra, which was from 1866 conducted by Bedřich Smetana. The need to supplement his income by teaching left Dvorák with limited free time, and in 1871 he gave up the orchestra in order to compose. He fell in love with one of his pupils and wrote a song cycle, Cypress Trees, expressing his anguish at her marriage to another man. However, he soon overcame his despondency and in 1873 married her sister, Anna Cermakova.