David M. Shribman
SPILLVILLE, Iowa — Here, the fields of corn and soybeans go on forever, and here the road into town makes incongruous turns in a territory whose byways are defined by 90-degree angles. Here, in the mere course of a magical summer 132 years ago, a community, a composer and classical music were transformed.
Spillville is a speck on the map, home to 372 souls living 25 miles from the Minnesota line, otherwise unremarkable unless you consider that it is where pioneers from Bavaria busted the stubborn sod the year after rebellion coursed through Europe in 1848; where former Czech serfs streamed the year the Republican Party was founded; where Louis Armstrong, Glenn Miller and Guy Lombardo played in the Inwood Ballroom in the big band era; and where today town leaders hold an annual Masopust festival, which you might think of as a Czech Mardi Gras.
In short, this is a purely distilled American place on the Great Plains — and a refuge in the 19th century for the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, to worship in freedom, to live free from tyranny.
Which is precisely why composer Antonin Dvorak decided to move his family here for the summer of 1893 — arriving here by horse and wagon accompanied by two priests on a road that still exists — amid the populist rebellion that swept the prairies and changed American politics.
Dvorak came here after Josef Kovarik, a violinist who acted as the composer’s secretary, suggested he visit his Iowa hometown — and here he took morning walks along the Turkey River, attended Mass, played the organ in the St. Wenceslaus Church, gabbed with the locals, drank beers with the priest, played cards, heard tales of the unbroken soil of the north-central Iowa grasslands, and met the Iroquois who lived in tents across the creek.
Here he wrote String Quartet No. 12 in F major, and String Quintet No. 13 in E flat major, both of which now carry the name “American” and were first played in the 1870 “Old School” building, with the composer himself playing first violin and members of the Kovarik family on the other string instruments.
And here he polished the largo section of the second movement of the “New World Symphony” — a haunting, even nostalgic passage now employed at many funerals in Spillville. “You’re sitting in the church and listening to that movement during a funeral, and it is the most moving thing you can imagine,” said Steven Klimesh, one of the most devout local curators of the story of Dvorak’s visit.
On his first day in Spillville, Dvorak rose at dawn, walked the paths and encountered Kovarik’s mother. Startled by his early morning wanderings, she asked whether something unpleasant had happened to him. “Nothing happened, and yet a great deal,” Dvorak replied. “Imagine, I was walking there in the woods by the stream and after eight months I heard again the singing of birds! And here the birds are different from ours, they have much brighter colors and they sing differently, too. And now I am going to breakfast, and after breakfast I shall come again.”
He returned to those woods time and again.
“It is wild here,” the composer said, “and sad.” Both are true today. The wildness is in the land, which, as in so many small prairie towns, is the element that gives definition to the lives of their residents. The sadness is in what once was: the three bars that are gone, the butcher shop and two grocery stores that are no more, the International Harvester outlet that departed, the four gas stations that closed. Even the undertaker left.
But what is left — what endures — is the building where he, his wife and two children lived, now a museum dedicated to him and to the clocks that were hand-carved by Frank and Joseph Bily. What also is left — what endures — is the music produced here by the hand of Dvorak, who listened to the river, and to the song of the red-eyed vireo he thought was a scarlet tanager, and whose outlook was shaped by his neighbors, who told him how a strong people battled harsh conditions to carve a home out of the plains — a home that reminded him of his own home, 4,520 miles east.
“It seems,” he said, “as if we were in Vysoka,” and indeed his daily routines matched those of Vysoka u Pribrame, where, 31 miles southwest of Prague, Dvorak tended to a garden that, he wrote in a letter to his publisher, he “nurtured with great care and loved as God’s divine work.”
For Dvorak, Spillville was retreat and reverie. He complained about the summer heat — a contrast to the day, with temperatures double-digits below zero, when I visited last month — and noted that the vast open spaces, where farmers lived 4 miles from each other, could drive one to despair.
David Beveridge, an American musicologist living in Prague and regarded as a leading Dvorak scholar, said the summer that Dvorak spent in Spillville was “one of the happiest times of his life,” adding, “Again and again he wrote home how contented he and his family felt there.” Beveridge said the two string pieces Dvorak wrote “seem redolent of the real American environments in which they had sprung from the composer’s mind.” The quartet is marked by the call of the red-eyed vireo.
“I liked to be among these people,” Dvorak said, “and they all liked me as well, especially the elderly citizens, who were pleased when I played ‘O God, we bow before Thee’ or ‘A Thousand Times we greet Thee’ for them on the church organ.” That organ remains in the church, worshipped, it is not too much to say, for Dvorak’s fingers having touched it.
Two days before my visit, I heard the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra play the “New World Symphony,” conducted by music director Manfred Honeck, who is elegant in an age of inelegance. “I admire Dvorak for the honesty of his feelings,” he told me. “I can’t help myself: His work describes the environment and his love and experience of the countryside and the drama of human life — conflict and peacefulness, suffering and joy.”
That is what Dvorak found in Spillville. That is what remains here, along with what is now known as the Dvorak Memorial Highway, in a place where Dvorak found music in the air.
A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
