Antonin Dvořák

It's Dvořák's birthday!  (There's altogether too many punctuation and accents in that word, there.)

It's convenient, when studying the history of music (that is, examining the sequence,  or the panoply, of composers in chronological order), to group them into lots of composers that write music that was broadly (very broadly) similar.

Renaissance Music.  The Renaissance composers I know are Gabrielli, Dowland, Gibbons, Palestrina, and several fellows I want to mention, but whose names I forget.  They use beautiful harmony, very fluently, and I find the music very soothing (though it may not have been intended to be soothing).  Next comes:

Baroque Music.  The characteristic of this style of music is ornamentation.  The melodies are ornamented, and the harmony is complex, but only from the point of view of a century or so later!  When it was being written, though, everyone thought it was perfectly normal.  My favorite composer, J. S. Bach falls into this group, as do some of the people in the Renaissance list, e.g. Byrd; Telemann, Handel, Scarlatti, Vivaldi, Purcell, and many others.  Counterpoint, the art of combining melodies, which had been developed by Palestrina, was raised to new heights by Bach.  But counterpoint was considered too fussy by those who came after.  They considered it insanely busy, and the next generation wanted music that was sane.  It was called the Age of Reason.  The music of this era is called...

Classical Music.  Many people take the term classical music to mean 'not popular music', and that's not wrong.  But even within classical music, there is classical music, exemplified by Haydn, Mozart, Salieri, Boccherini, Clementi, Gluck and others.  Compared to music of Bach's time, it is simple, minimalistic music.  That description is not the final word; Mozart's music is often very complex indeed; it is simple only to the eyes of those of that time. 

Romantic Music.  Then came Beethoven, who can be regarded as the pioneer of Romantic music.  Unlike the previous eras, which could be characterized by a single aspect of musical style, romantic music has several facets.  (1) It is highly expressive, and individualistic.  (2) It is closely related to literary themes.  (3) It is inspired by nationalistic and folk music, and feelings of national identity.  (4) It rejects constraints, and resists rules and structure, and convention.  Beethoven's music achieved all of these ideals, and those who came after him tried very hard to write music that had some of the qualities of Beethoven's music, while trying very hard not to sound like Beethoven's music!  This kept them quite busy. 

It's into this era that Dvořák arrived.  He had the gift of writing music that sounded amazingly melodious, very rhythmic and engaging, very unique, very colorful, modern, but at the same time traditional.  It was simple and intimate, but also grand and exciting!

He was Czech by birth... born in the vicinity of Moravia and Bohemia, melodic motifs from these parts frequently appear in his music.