Workmanlike biography of an interesting composer, but with a lot of minutiae. Recommend for classical music geeks only. Dvorak was an idiosyncratic guy and the near-polar opposite of a sellout: he was frugal and watched his pennies and didn't care much for the trappings of wealth, even after he met with significant success later in his life; he feared travelling, yet was the type of person who would carefully record in his notebook the distance he traveled each day on an ocean steamer; he never sought fame--he was uncomfortable with it in fact--but rather sought only to bring the music of Bohemian/Czech culture to the world. Finally, one of the structural problems of this book--and of all music writing--is how to convey the essence of a musical piece in the radically different medium of words. I've written elsewhere about classical music's useless and unreadable liner notes . This author, as earnest as he is, cannot convey context about Dvorak's compositions. I think ...
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