Studies in Modern Music, Second Series Frederick Chopin, Antonin Dvořák, Johannes Brahms by W. H. (William Henry) Hadow

Author:W. H. (William Henry) Hadow [Hadow, W. H. (William Henry)]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-12-18T02:00:00+00:00

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ANTONIN DVOŘÁK.

Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille, Sich ein Character in dem Strom der Welt.

Goethe.

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I

DAYS OF PREPARATION

The village of Nelahozeves lies on the Moldau, about a mile to the north of Kralup. The clean, well-kept cottages sun themselves upon a slope of the low hills, or nestle among the trees by the river bank; a tiny street comes trickling along the shallow dale like a tributary; at its mouth a great square castle rises on a spur of jutting sandstone and seems to dominate the very landscape by feudal right. Behind are uplands of corn and pasture and orchard, where you may idle for half a summer's afternoon, watching the play of light tremulous among the leaves, the smoke curling lazily from the cluster of red roofs, and below them the brown turbid river and the long timber-rafts floating down to the Elbe.

It is one of the quietest of places: hardly a sound, hardly an animal, hardly a sign of life. There are a few geese meditating undisturbed in the roadway, there is a knot of children busy with some inexplicable game in a corner of waste ground; now and again a couple of gossips come to fill their shapely wooden cans at the village well, or a slow, patient ox-cart bears down its fragrant load from the hay-field. For the rest, everything is fast asleep, secure in a bounteous land that asks but little labour for the satisfaction of daily needs, and secure, too, under the government of Prince Lobkowitz, who owns the castle and the village and half the country-side, and who, though he never comes to live among his own people, has always administered his territory with justice and beneficence.

At the bottom of the street a lane turns across toward the church, passing on its way a homestead which could take rank with an English farm-house of moderate pretension. An arched gateway gives access to a long, narrow court-yard, flanked on the one side by a solid, two-storey building, white-walled and red-roofed like its neighbours; on the other by a lower range of offices and storehouses; while at the back, behind the stable, runs a rough wall, surmounted by a statue of St Florian; and, carrying the eye upward, through a strip of coarse paddock, to the hedgerows and cornfields of the higher slope. A sign over the entrance announces that the place is still the village inn, as it was half a century ago, when Pán František Dvořák held it in tenancy and served his customers in the little taproom by the door.

Among the villagers Pàn Dvořák was a person of some consequence. For one thing, he belonged to a family old and respected—a peasant stock that had grown and flourished from the earliest times that memory could record; for another, he had married the daughter of one of the Prince's bailiffs, and so caught a faint reflection from the remote and inaccessible glories of the castle. Again, he was

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