Dvorak was born on September 8, 1841, in a village near Prague, the eldest of fourteen children. His father was an innkeeper, zither player, and butcher. The boy showed musical talent early, studying violin, and by the time he was thirty-one, his compositions were being performed in Prague. Recognition came slowly. He entered Austrian state competitions repeatedly, losing until 1874, when a jury that included Johannes Brahms awarded him a prize. Three years and two more prizes later, Brahms recommended him to his publisher, Simrock, who commissioned what became the Slavonic Dances. The sheet music sold enormously. A London performance of his Stabat Mater in 1883 opened doors across Europe, and by 1890 his reputation had reached Russia and the United States.

In 1892, Jeanette Thurber, the president of America's National Conservatory of Music, offered Dvorak $15,000 a year to direct her school -- twenty-five times what he earned in Prague. He accepted, moving his family into a five-room apartment at 327 East 17th Street, conveniently a five-minute walk from the Conservatory. New York overwhelmed him. He missed the Bohemian countryside, his pigeons, and the village rhythms of home. But Thurber had a specific vision: she wanted Dvorak to help forge a distinctly American classical music tradition. She encouraged him to listen to African American spirituals, and one of his students, Harry T. Burleigh, sang them for him regularly. Dvorak declared that the future of American music lay in what he called "Negro melodies," a conviction that made headlines and stirred controversy.

In the summer of 1893, homesick and creatively charged, Dvorak took his family to Spillville, Iowa, a tiny Czech immigrant community where he could hear his native language spoken on the streets. There, in the space of a few weeks, he composed his String Quartet No. 12 in F major, known simply as the "American." It remains one of the most beloved pieces of chamber music ever written. The quartet blends the pentatonic scales Dvorak associated with both American folk music and Bohemian village songs, as though he had found the place where two musical worlds overlapped. Walking through Spillville's fields and attending the local church, he was simultaneously at home and abroad, and the music captures that double vision perfectly.

The New World Symphony, composed between January and May 1893 in his East 17th Street apartment, channeled everything Dvorak was absorbing: the pentatonic melodies of spirituals, the rhythmic drive of a city in constant motion, the longing for a homeland an ocean away. At its premiere, conducted by Anton Seidl at Carnegie Hall, the audience demanded encores after every movement -- an almost unheard-of response to a symphony. The famous largo second movement, with its English horn solo, became so associated with homesickness that it was later set to the words "Going Home," though Dvorak himself never intended it as a song. He later claimed he had not directly quoted any specific American melodies, but had created something new from their spirit. The debate over what is "American" in the symphony has never been settled, which may be the most American thing about it.

Dvorak returned to Prague in 1895, homesick and frustrated by pay cuts at the Conservatory. He died on May 1, 1904, at sixty-two. His New York apartment survived him by eighty-seven years. When developers demolished it in 1991 to build a medical residence, the outcry was fierce but futile. Today, a statue of Dvorak stands in Stuyvesant Square, across from where his home once was, a memorial procured by the Dvorak American Heritage Association in cooperation with the New York Philharmonic. Armstrong carried a recording of the New World Symphony aboard Apollo 11 in 1969, making it the first classical work performed on another world -- or at least to orbit one. From a butcher's cottage in Bohemia to the surface of the Moon, the journey of Dvorak's music tracks the arc of a composer who understood that the "new world" was not a place but a way of listening.