My favorite piece of music– of any kind– is Dvorák’s New World Symphony. So I was a delighted to discover this in my WPReader just now. The Internet lives up to its promise, sometimes.

“Fleeing the congestion and mayhem of New York City in the early summer of 1893, Antonin Dvorák, along with his wife and six children, alighted from a train in the little Bohemian settlement of Spillville, Iowa. Perhaps by then his worldwide fame had spread even there, but this quiet town in the middle of nowhere was hardly preoccupied with celebrities.

“Early in the morning of his first full day in Spillville, Dvorák visited the local Catholic church as parishioners gathered for morning Mass. He sat at the organ and played “O Lord before Thy Majesty,” a hymn well known to the Bohemian settlers who quickly joined in. Thereafter, he was a fixture, playing for the service at daily Mass throughout  the two summers he was to spend vacationing from his temporary post as head  of the new National Conservatory of Music in New York. He had found a home in America.

“Antonin Dvorák was born in 1841 and grew up in a provincial village called Nelahozeves, the Czech equivalent of Spillville, Iowa. He was a peasant, the son of an innkeeper and butcher. He apprenticed as a butcher himself. His early music education came from the lively folk music of his village and simple church tunes. The school master taught him the violin and singing. Though he was to go on to study in Prague, he learned his real lessons elsewhere. In language that might make a sophisticate gag, this pious man explained that he “studied with the birds, flowers, trees, God, and myself.” This kind of simplicity, Dvorák responded as fully to the tragedies in his life as to directness, and naturalness marked the man and his music.”

Read the Whole (short) Thing.

Stream New World Symphony. About on hour. You will not regret it.