Antonín Dvořák, a composer, was born on 8 September 1841 in Nelahozeves; the biography of the Antonín Dvořák Museum describes his childhood, musical education and first years in Prague.
Antonín Dvořák was born on 8 September 1841 in Nelahozeves and was the eldest of nine children. The National Museum, of which the Antonín Dvořák Museum is a part, gives a short biography of the composer on its website, and the following overview of his childhood and beginnings is based on it.[1]
Childhood in Nelahozeves
Dvořák's family was widely branched in the region and included small farmers and tradesmen. His father had a butcher's shop and an inn in the village but struggled with livelihood problems. He loved music, played as an amateur, and held a licence for the zither and the accordion in the inn. He sometimes had to help his son with the trade after school, but did not force him into it. According to the museum, the widespread claim that Dvořák trained as a butcher was refuted by the exposure of a forged apprenticeship certificate of the butchers' guild.[1]
After he started school, he was guided in music by the local teacher Josef Spitz. The boy soon sang and played the violin in the Nelahozeves choir loft and occasionally helped at services in neighbouring villages. The museum also relates an anecdote of how the young violinist astonished the guests of his father's inn during a performance by the house band.[1]
Zlonice, Česká Kamenice and Prague
When he finished the elementary school in Nelahozeves in 1853, the twelve-year-old Dvořák was sent to relatives in Zlonice, to improve his music under the musician Antonín Liehmann. Liehmann taught him the basics of figured bass, harmony and improvisation. Besides the organ and piano, Dvořák learned to play the violin and viola, and also played in Liehmann's band. A short stay in Česká Kamenice, where he improved his German, followed, and then his departure for Prague to the organ school.[1]
He studied at the organ school from 1857 to 1859. Teaching was in German only, and Dvořák learned practical organ playing, that is improvisation and the study of organ compositions. At the graduation performance in July 1859 he played works by J. S. Bach and two of his own; with his fellow student Sigmund Glanz he also played a four-hand arrangement of one of Bach's fugues.[1]
Musician in Prague
An application for an organist's post at St Henry's in Prague was unsuccessful, so he went on working as a violist in the band of Karel Komzák, which he probably joined in September after finishing his studies. He also played in the Prague orchestra of the Cecilská jednota. Komzák's band performed at dances, in restaurants and on promenades. When the Czech Provisional Theatre opened in 1862, its members became the theatre orchestra, and Dvořák remained in it for almost nine years, until 1871.[1]
It was at that time that he began to compose; some of his first works he later destroyed himself. The earliest work with an opus number, the String Quintet in A minor of 1861, he wrote at almost twenty years of age.[1]