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Spillville
is a small town in Iowa. It was there, between 8 and 23 June 1893, that
Dvořák composed his most famous chamber work, the String Quartet in F major
(the ‘American’). Written thousands of miles from his homeland, this score and
the others that came into being at that time, including the Symphony ‘From
the New World’, composed a few weeks earlier, were his only real link with
his native Bohemia. In June 1891 Dvořák had been invited by Mrs Jeannette
Thurber to take up the directorship of the National Conservatory of Music in
New York, of which she was the founder; he had arrived in the city the following
year. It was the first time a European composer of international stature had
chosen to spend a prolonged period in the United States. From 1892 to 1895 he
discovered the East Coast of America. Soon wearying of the noise and bustle
of New York, he moved to Spillville, a small Czech community in north-east
Iowa, where he was able to speak his native language and be in contact with
people from his own country. Missing his homeland, however, he experienced
his stay in the United States as a golden exile.
Dvořák expressed his nostalgia in the great works he composed during that
period, including the String Quartet op. 96 and the String Quintet op. 97. In the
1890s, the Indian and black communities were quite separate and unknown to
one another, but Dvořák was captivated by those new harmonies and rhythms,
which he borrowed, coloured and transformed, as he had always done with
folk sources from his own Central European culture.