An informative and entertaining audio-visual concert at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo (2002) with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and the violinist Gil Shaham conducted by Claudio Abbado and hosted by Michael Beckerman who analyzes the composer Antonín Dvořák 's most famous works. Antonín Dvořák - Symphony No. 9 in E minor 5:15 I. Adagio - Allegro moltgo 12:46 II. Largo 18:24 III. Scherzo. Molto vivace 20:57 IV. Allegro con fuoco "The man who interest us most in music at present are terribly serious," a Berlin newspaper complained in 1878. "We have to study them, and once we have done so, we have to buy a gun to defend our opinion of them. I would be delighted if a musician were to come along about whom it was no more necessary to argue than It is necessary to argue over spring." The writer of this momentous article then went on to announce the good news that such a musician had indeed been found, a hitherto unknown Bohemian composer: "Anton Dvořák (pronounced Dvorshak)." The international world of music now had to get used to this name - and learn how to spell it. Meanwhile, those of Dvořák's works that had just been published - the Moravian Duets and the Slavonic Dances - triggered an unprecedented boom in music sales and gave publishers a voracious appetite for "Bohemian melodies", national dances and Slav fantasies and rhapsodies. Success was immediate - but it was hard won. Dvořák's rise from being the son of a provincial Bohemian butcher to his position as the director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York occurred at a time of increasingly strident attempts on the part of many nations to gain their independence. In the Habsburg territories of Bohemia and Moravia, the silent Czech majority rebelled against the privileged German minority. The Czechs recalled their lost legacy, including their language, songs, dances, fairytales and legends; choirs and choral unions were founded all over the country; and in Prague a Czech National Theatre opened its doors, performing Czech operas and Czech music by Smetana and Dvoik. Elsewhere Dvoräk's Slavonic Dances may have been regarded as no more than a delightful novelty with an unusual degree of local color, but for Dvořák himself all art constituted a profession of patriotic allegiance and was tantamount to a declaration of musical independence. Antonin Dvořák was born in the village of Nelahozeves on the left bank ofthe Vltava on 8 September 1841. He was to remain loyal to his beloved Bohemia throughout his life, a loyalty reflected not only in his thoughts and feelings (hence his reluctance to spend lang periods away from home and his intense homesickness cluring his years as visiting professor in America) but also in his music, which was deeply rooted in Czech Romanticism, in the melodies of Bohemian and Moravian folk songs, in the rhythms of the local language and in the thrilling dances and sounds of Bohemia and Moravia. With his grand opera Dimitrij and his fairy-tale opera Rusalka, his nine symphonies and his countless serenades, concertos, string quartets and piano trios, Dvořák has gone down in history as a pioneer and prophet of Czech music, every bit as famous and well loved as his two Czech colleagues Smetana and Janäek. Following his death an 1 May 1904 he was buried with full honors in the cemetery at Vyšehrad on the old rock that is the site of Prague Castle, high above the Vltava. Dvořák has long occupied the place of a national saint in the consciousness of his Czech compatriots. But this enthusiasm knows no bounds, geographical or historical, and no one has ever had to buy a gun to defend his views on Dvořák. All faces light up when his name appears an concert Programmes. Watch more episodes of the series "Discovering Masterpieces of Classical Music": goo.gl/KBV6cR Subscribe to EuroArts: goo.gl/jrui3M

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