Violin Concerto in a Minor, Op. 53

Antonin Dvorak is regarded as the greatest composer of the nationalist movement in what was to become Czechoslovakia. Throughout his childhood, Dvorak displayed an interest only in music. He left home at the age of 16 to study composition at the Prague Organ School. Although Dvorak is best known for his orchestral and chamber music, from the late 1860s he was constantly engaged in an operatic project. Richard Wagner's musical style highly influenced Dvorak's operas.

Hymnus for Mixed Chorus and Orchestra (1873) attracted wide attention and marks the beginning of Dvorak's international fame and influence. In 1875 he was awarded the Austrian State Prize for Symphony in E Flat. In 1884 he was invited to conduct his Stabat Mater in London. He accepted an invitation to head the National Conservatory in New York in 1892. In America, Dvorak wrote his celebrated work, his symphony \ From the New World (1893). His peripatetic career (he traveled extensively) and the honors bestowed on him by numerous nations are paralleled in his compositions by their cosmopolitan use of national and folk melodies and the free-flowing new melodies he composed. Dvorak later returned to Prague and was appointed director of the Prague Conservatory.

020