Songs My Mother Taught Me
The life of Antonín Dvořák · 1841–1904
He was the eldest son of a butcher who kept the inn below the castle at Nelahozeves, and at twenty-four he was playing viola in the pit on the first night of The Bartered Bride. In 1874 a Prague clerk certified that he was married, had one child and no property; in 1893 he finished a symphony in a flat on East Seventeenth Street in New York and spent the summer in a Czech village in Iowa.
This is that life told as the record tells it: the inn and the organ school, nearly nine years in a theatre orchestra, the grants from Vienna and the children who died, the dances that sold in Berlin, the choirs in England, the house at Vysoká, America, and Rusalka. Most of what he and his friends wrote was in Czech, and the book quotes it in translation. Where nobody wrote something down, the book says so rather than guess. Written to be read straight through, or a chapter at a time.
