The tortured heart of Dvořák

Dvořák’s suppressed love for his sister-in-law, Josefina Kaunitzova. As a young man, he had been in unrequited love with Josefina, who had made matters worse by marrying into Habsburg nobility. Like Mozart, Dvořák consoled himself with the younger sister, Anna.

When in the early 1890s Dvořák finally accepted the lucrative offer to become director of the New York National Conservatory, his heart never really travelled to the United States. Thoughts of Josefina made his homesickness worse, and when news reached him in New York in 1895 that she was ill, his feverish response was to draft the Cello Concerto in six weeks. To commemorate her, he quoted from his own song, Leave me Alone, in the slow movement, reprising it in the coda he added after her death. He had been back in Prague for just one month, a “citizen without a country”, as the American official who stamped the departing composer’s Habsburg passport had tellingly remarked. more