Event

Dvorak Love Songs Project CD and Video Release Concert!

Id like to tell you a story

Around the year 1865 a young Anton Dvorak was playing piano for The Provisional Theater and became enamored with a young actress, Josefina ermáková. She was the beautiful and charming daughter of a goldsmith. She became renowned for her portrayals of the young naive love interests in French Comedies. Dvorak befriended the family and began giving Josefina piano lessons, but she ultimately rejected him. In his devastation he locked himself in his room for seventeen days and wrote his first songs setting poetry by Gustav Pfleger Moravský titled The Cypresses (July 1865). The cycle was so deeply personal that Dvorak never published it in its original version.

In 1877, Josefina's acting career ended abruptly with her marriage to Count Václav Kounic. Dvorak ultimately married Josefinas younger sister, Anna, but remained close with Josefina and her new husband. He even regarded their estate in the countryside as his second home.

The Cypresses haunted Dvorak for the rest of his life. He edited the cycle many times, republished new editions of selected songs and used melodies from each of the eighteen songs in many of his other compositions. Echoes of the cycle can be found in his most famous opera, Rusalka.

Most remarkably, twenty-three years after initially writing the cycle, he chose eight of the eighteen songs, edited them, reset the order, and published them as The Love Songs.

Here sparks the question -Why?