Born in Bohemia, Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904) spent his uneventful younger days assisting his family and studying music whenever possible. A public scholarship enabled him to get a good education and made him a lifelong supporter of state arts funding and grants. Deeply influenced by the music of Wagner, Dvořák had the opportunity to play in a concert of Wagner excerpts led by the composer. Dvořák not only considered the experience life-changing, but even followed Wagner in the streets, completely fascinated with him. Dvořák played viola in the Prague National Theatre Orchestra from 1864-1873. Bedrich Smetana became principal conductor in 1866, also having a powerful impact. Dvořák left the orchestra in 1873 to devote his life to composition, and his Third Symphony was premiered soon after, winning him the Austrian national prize and the attention of Johannes Brahms, who was on the jury. Two years later, Dvořák won the same prize with his Moravian Duets, but his Slavonic Dances would soon establish him as the most significant and most popular Czech composer. His fame and fortune on the rise, Dvořák found himself in a difficult position: Leading composers of the day were expected to live in Vienna, but he knew his folksy style would only bring ridicule among the polished Viennese. Under intense pressure from his publisher to move to Vienna, Dvořák luckily won a position as Professor of Composition at the Prague Conservatory, but quickly gave it up when he was offered a shockingly lucrative directorship of the National Conservatory of Music in New York in 1891.
Once in the United States, Dvořák turned his attention primarily to Native American and African American music, which eventually culminated in his New World Symphony. In 1895, he returned to teach at the Prague Conservatory and became its director in 1901, and his sixtieth birthday was celebrated as a national holiday. His final years were spent working on tone poems and operas, though sadly only one of his operas — Rusalka — ever gained any popularity. He died of heart failure in 1904.
The low opus number of his Czech Suite was a bit of deception by Dvořák, who disliked publishers and was evading an agreement for future works by pretending that this was an old one. It was probably written in 1879. All but one of the five movements contains elements of Czech folk dance.