Klarinet Archive - Posting 000968.txt from 2000/07

From: "Doug Sears" <dsears@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] Re:Learning practices (was Mozart's wife and Carl Maria We ber)
Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2000 17:04:02 -0400

>I will take this as a legitimate question and not merely an attempt to annoy
>me. I didn't mean to imply that Dvorak was in any way German by birth or
even
>in training. However, it is impossible to ignore, I hope, that his strongest
>musical influences, aside from the folk music of his homeland, were Brahms
>and Wagner. Brahms and Dvorak were friends, shared the same publisher, and
>thus Dvorak was asked to contribute a companion to Brahms's Hungarian
Dances.
>Thus came the Slavonic Dances, some of his very greatest work.

I don't know much about Dvorak's upbringing, but the influence of the German
language and of German-speaking culture was strong in Bohemia. In Dvorak's
time, and up to 1918, Bohemia was in the Austrian Empire (after 1867, in the
Austrian part of the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary), where the
administrative language was German. A significant fraction of the people in
Bohemia spoke German as their first language: the Sudeten Germans, and many
Jews (Kafka wrote in German).

--Doug
----------------------------
Doug Sears dsears@-----.org/~dsears

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