The greatest Bohemian and one of the ablest musicians of the 19th century, is Antonin Dvorak (pronounced Dvorjak) (1843–1904), a peasant and son of an innkeeper and butcher at Mühlhausen. Coming from the people, he was familiar with the folk songs, and although his father wanted him to be an innkeeper and butcher, Antonin used to follow the strolling players and showed a decided talent for music. He learned to sing, to play the violin and the organ, and studied harmony. Later he went to Prague to continue his work. He was very poor but Smetana befriended him, and five years after he entered school, he wrote his first string quartet. Thirteen years afterwards, he became organist at $60.00 a year at St. Adalbert’s Church. He is another man whom Liszt helped by performing his works and finding publishers for them. He became famous through his fascinating _Slavonic Dances_ and was soon invited to London after his _Stabat Mater_ had been performed there. He wrote _The Spectre’s Bride_ for the Birmingham Festival of 1885, and his oratorio for the Leeds Festival, _St. Ludmilla_, in the following year. The University of Cambridge made him Doctor of Music and before that, he had been Professor of Music at the Prague Conservatory. Soon he came to New York and received a salary of $15,000 a year as director of the New York Conservatory of Music. Homesickness overcame him and he went back to Bohemia where his opera, _Armide_, was given before he died. Dvorak was a sound musician. He had studied Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert but was devoted to his own folk-lore and the harmonies which appealed to his nation. He was particularly interested in national types of music and when in America the negro music appealed to him tremendously. While here, he taught H. C. Burleigh, the negro composer and singer, with whom he had an interesting and fruitful friendship. When he went back to Bohemia, he wrote the _New World Symphony_, built on negro folk ideas, and a string quartet in which he has used negro themes. Isn’t it curious that it often takes an outsider to show us the beauties at our own door step? He wrote many songs, symphonic poems and five symphonies and many other forms of music. Although he was very strict in the use of form, his work was free, full of melody and imagination. It is distinguished by warm color, beautiful rhythms and flowing melody, daring modulations and withal a sense of naturalness. Some people consider him one of the greatest masters of orchestration of the 19th century. Probably you have heard Fritz Kreisler and many others play the famous _Humoresque_, and you may also know his incomparable _Songs My Mother Taught Me_. ROUMANIA