Dvorak in America
Dvorak in America (Directed by Lucille Carra. 1999). This documentary film tells of the period in the 1890s when composer and conductor Anton Dvorak traveled to the United States. He taught at the National Conservatory of Music in New York City, founded by Jeanette Thurber, but also spent a very happy summer in Spillville, Iowa, a Czech colony that felt to him like his home in rural Bohemia. The film notes that Dvorak appreciated the beauty of Iowa’s hills and woods, but also recognized the hard lives of the Czechs who settled in this “huge, lonely land” with its harsh winters. Dvorak helped shape a distinctively American music, based on Negro spirituals and other indigenous musical forms. While in the United States, he wrote his “From the New World” symphony and conducted it at Carnegie Hall.]
Marty Knepper Morningside College knepper@morningside.edu & John Shelton Lawrence Morningside College j.shelton.1@gmail.com
