Dvořák

A butcher's son who spent his early career as a viola player in Prague. He was in his thirties when an Austrian state stipend brought him to Brahms's attention; Brahms passed him to his own publisher, and the Slavonic Dances made him an international name almost overnight.

From 1892 to 1895 he directed the National Conservatory in New York, where he wrote the New World Symphony and the Cello Concerto. He argued publicly that American composers should find their language in spirituals and Native American music — an extraordinary position to take in the United States in 1893. In his own music the Bohemian melodic material and the German-Austrian structure are joined without a visible seam, and that is the part nobody has successfully imitated.