insufficient persuasive powers. In 1899 Dvorák had great success with his folk-fairy tale opera The Devil and Kate, premiered in Prague in 1899. Soon he was hunting for another operatic subject. He came upon one by chance. A young poet, 31-year old Jaroslav Kvapil, had written a libretto inspired by Fouqué’s Undine and Hans Andersen’s Little Mermaid. Various lesser composers had rejected it but when Dvorák was shown the text, he fell upon it. This was to become his greatest opera, Rusalka. “I received my inspiration in the land of Andersen, on the island of Bornholm, where I was spending my holidays,” he once said. He began work on the first act in the spring of 1900, causing his librettist uncommonly little trouble. Of how many composers can that be said? As Kvapil recorded: “Dvorák accepted my text as it was written and I only had to insert something new into the first act: Rusalka’s Song ‘Wisdom of Ages: at the feet of the old Witch’ [...] At this time Dvorák often came to see me; he would come not seldom after seven o’clock in the morning, in fact sometimes he had to get somebody to call me, and then he was already on his way back from the morning round of the Prague railway-stations where he went to look at the locomotives. Usually he would begin to speak about anything and everything but his opera: either about the engines he had just been inspecting, or about pigeons - in short, about everything possible that had nothing to do with the libretto. Then he would forget why he had come, light the stump of his cigar and, without warning, went as he had come without having come to the point.” Despite his Catholicism, Dvorák had some decidedly puritanical tendencies. His only objection to the text related to an oath yelled out by the mad Prince in Act 3: ‘…on Heaven and Earth I lay my curse, I curse both god and spirits all, Answer then, answer now my call!’ This did not
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please the God-fearing Dvorák. Kvapil wrote: “He said to me: ‘Listen, I am a believer. I can’t curse God in my music.’ And I had to go into a long explanation that the libretto does not in any way force him to do that and that ‘to curse god’ is not to curse the Lord God. He allowed himself to be persuaded and composed to the words as I had written them.” By November 1900, Rusalka was finished. Dvorák was nearly 60 years old. The National Theatre honoured him with a fine, lavish production. The premiere took place, with great celebration, on 31 March 1901. It was a huge success. An admiring Mahler requested permission to conduct it at the Vienna Hofoper - though in the event that never came about. Kvapil, meantime, had become literary adviser to the National Theatre: “First thing in the morning after the premiere, Dvorák called in to see us at the Theatre office in the best of moods. Straight away on seeing me, he calls out: ‘And now, quick, quick, a new libretto!’. I reply: ‘I haven’t any, Master.’ And he: ‘Then write something quick as long as I feel like it and a nice role for Maurova.’ I promised. Yes, I promised. But I did not keep my word.” In an interview near the end of his life, on 1 March 1904, Dvorák said: “In the last five years I have written nothing but opera. I wanted to devote all my powers, as long as God gives me health, to the creation of opera. Not, nowhere, out of any vain desire for glory but because I consider opera the most suitable form for the nation. The music is listened to by the broad masses, whereas when I compose a symphony I might have to wait years for it to be performed.” As ever, his nation, his people, his Czech fatherland were all that mattered. A few weeks later, he caught a chill pursuing his old passion: looking at trains. How he would have enjoyed the Grange’s own model railway built into the floor of the auditorium. On May Day, when according to old Czech folk tradition witches leave their lairs and fairies roam the land, following a heart attack Antonin Dvorák died.