Antonín Dvořák

Antonín Dvořák was a Czech composer, born in Nelahozeves near Prague, who drew on the rhythms and other features of the folk music of Moravia and Bohemia, following the nationalist example of Bedřich Smetana. Recommended by Johannes Brahms to the publisher Simrock, he won international success with the Slavonic Dances, Op. 46, and his Stabat Mater was widely performed after a London performance in 1883. From 1892 he directed the National Conservatory of Music of America in New York, where he wrote the Symphony From the New World and his Cello Concerto, before returning to Bohemia in 1895. Of his ten operas, most with Czech librettos, the most successful is Rusalka (1901).