• Paperback
• 224 pages
• ISBN: 978-1-84379-116-4
• Publication date: March 2008
• Free access to a dedicated website with hours of extra music and other bonus material

Dvořák is one of the giants of nineteenth-century music. His ‘New World’ Symphony is among the best loved works in the classical repertoire, and his inexhaustibly rich and varied output remains a staple of concerts and recordings across the globe. Catapulted to international fame by the runaway success of his Slavonic Dances, Dvořák was, by the end of his life, one of the world’s most celebrated composers. Yet his proudest boast was that he remained at heart ‘a simple Czech musician’, as inspired by the folk traditions of his native land as by the masterworks of Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner. This book traces the course of an extraordinary creative career that embraced the peasant music-making of rural Bohemia, the grand receptions of Victorian England and the dynamism of fin-de-siècle New York to shape the most versatile, and perhaps the most human, genius in the annals of late Romanticism.

About the Author

Neil Wenborn graduated from Magdalene College, Cambridge, and worked at the Bodleian Library in Oxford before pursuing a career in publishing, becoming Editorial Director of one of the UK’s leading independent publishers. Since 1989 he has been a freelance writer and publishing consultant and his work has appeared widely both in Britain and in the United States. His previous publications include biographies of Mozart (in Pavilion’s ‘Compact Companions’ series, of which he was also series editor), Haydn and Stravinsky. He is co-editor of the highly respected History Today Companion to British History (Collins & Brown) and A Dictionary of Jewish-Christian Relations (Cambridge University Press). Neil Wenborn is also the author of Mendelssohn: His Life and Music published by Naxos Books.