Antonin Dvorak discovered America, not just in New York but in a small hamlet in Iowa over a century ago. Specifically, he became a living legend in Spillville, Iowa, only minutes from Decorah where I went to college. Almost everyone in our community was aware that when Dvorak made a four-year visit to the United States during “the gay nineties”, he spent an extended summer holiday in Spillville. It was “little Bohemia”, a special enclave of immigrants from his home country. When tourists from far and near later would come to see the fabulous collection of hand-carved Bily Brothers clocks in Spillville, they would also hear a lot about the most famous guest the town ever had -- the great composer, Antonin Dvorak. He lived that summer of 1893 on the second floor of the clock-carving workshop and museum.

     As an addicted listener to classical music on radio day and night, I have concluded that the music of this Slavic 19th Century composer is more popular now than it has ever been. Decades ago it seemed we heard his work performed only now and then. Today I hear it surprisingly often. (Even as I write this, his Scherzo Capriccioso, Op. 66, is on the air!) I have been wondering if this is an authentic cultural phenomenon or that I am being particularly receptive to it because of some association. I do have a special association with Dvorak and his works. I don’t necessarily include his music as among my top favorites, even though I delight in it, but it is hard to overshadow Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart or Fauré.

     Dvorak’s sounds reflect the brisk, upbeat character of Czech and Slovak peoples and their dances and deeper emotions of religion and national fervor. He was influenced by the German, Italian, Austrian and Russian creative musical giants who preceded him. But he moved on to honor mostly in his work the melodic ambience of Bohemia, his native land.

     In 1892, the National Conservatory of Music in New York City had enticed him to become its director with a handsome salary, much beyond the paltry sum he was earning as head of the Prague Conservatory. He relished the new assignment, which also allowed him to compose as well as teach and mentor a new generation of musicians. One of his students was Henry T. Burleigh, a talented black man who had already gained some public attention because of his strong baritone voice. He learned arranging skills from Dvorak and, in exchange, introduced the visiting maestro to American Negro spirituals. It was love at first hearing. He was intrigued by this authentic original folk form in America and felt a similar attachment to it as to the folk melodies back home. But he didn’t want just to copy the music into his work; instead he wanted to capture the spirit of this new form he had discovered. He wrote:

     In the Negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music. These beautiful and varied themes are the product of the soil. They are American. They are the folk songs of America, and your composers must turn to them. (Quoted by Joseph Machlis in “The Enjoyment of Music”.)

     He fell in love with America and showed it in the works he created in his American years. But he loved his Bohemian land even more, and certainly his large family back there. After a year in New York he became homesick. A friend and helper of his, Joseph Kovarik, whom he had first encountered in Prague and who knew both countries, had a suggestion: Spend the summer in Spillville. Have your family come over and join you. There you will be among your people, they will talk your language, and they will provide you generous hospitality. So he summoned his family and they came, ten of them, by ship in May 1893 and almost right away he had them with him on the train for Iowa.

     He found the setting there ideal for realizing the music his brain was already rehearsing. He began work in Iowa on a new symphony. He gave it the title Symphony from the New World. He completed it on his return to the East Coast and it was premiered in New York on December 16th that same year of 1893. In Iowa he also wrote the American String Quartet (#12) in F major and began a cantata, American Flag. He was prolific in his output that summer – and throughout his American experience – and some of his new works were performed the following winter in Manhattan.

     I didn’t know all of this when I became connected to the Dvorak legend. I was a student at Luther College in Decorah and one day in the summer of 1941 at the radio station where I was announcing and singing religious songs each morning, I had an intriguing phone call. The priest from the Roman Catholic parish in nearby Spillville was calling. He had been hearing my program, he said, and had an invitation for me. He was in charge of major weekend celebration of the centennial of Dvorak’s birth on September 8, 1841. They were having a major outdoor concert in Spillville on that exact date now, 100 years later. He was importing a full professional orchestra from Minneapolis to play –what else? – the Symphony From the New World. I’d like to hear that, I told him, and I would love to come. No, he explained. I want you to sing! That was exciting to hear, but what would I sing? He was ready with his requests. The familiar, Songs My Mother Taught Me (I knew that) and one of Dvorak’s Biblical Songs (which I had never heard of). I told him I already had the orchestra score and parts for the first and he told me he would provide the music for Biblical Songs and would recommend number eight, “Turn Thee to Me”. I decided that offered me a special challenge and so I was bold enough to arrange it for orchestra myself (of course I had never done such a thing before) and, with a very brief rehearsal with the orchestra, it worked!

     These days when I hear Dvorak frequently on classical music stations, I still feel a special kinship with this Bohemian composer who spent the summer in our greater Upper Iowa region, who often played the new pipe organ in St. Wenceslaus Church. Perhaps his being with home folks in that community made him even more homesick for the sights and familiar sounds of Bohemia, for he returned with his family to Prague in 1895. But first he returned to Spillville for two weeks in the summer of 1894.

     He left with us and with the world some lovely American-flavored music. It seems appropriate to me that this homesick composer would create a spiritual-like theme in his 9th (From the New World) symphony that was soon to find a worthy text. We have all heard it:

     Goin’ home, goin’ home, I’m a goin’ home!

     The author is a retired communication executive for U.S. Lutheran churches.