Everyone has heard Antonin Dvorak’s music. If you are not sure you did, click on the 30-second sample below: this is how you know Antonin Dvorak.

In 1892, Dvořák became the director of the National Conservatory of Music of America in New York City. While in the United States, Dvořák wrote his two most successful orchestral works: the Symphony From the New World (excerpt above), which spread his reputation worldwide, and his Cello Concerto, one of the most highly regarded of all cello concerti.

On a summer vacation in Spillville, Iowa in 1893, Dvořák also wrote his most famous piece of chamber music, his twelfth String Quartet in F major, Op. 96, the American.

While he remained at the Conservatory for a few more years, pay cuts and an onset of homesickness led him to return to Bohemia in 1895.