December 16, 1893: Antonín Dvořák's "New World Symphony"

December 16, 1893: Antonín Dvořák's Symphony No. 9 "From the New World" receives its première at Carnegie Hall in New York.

Antonín Leopold Dvořák was born on September 8, 1941 in Nelahozeves, in Bohemia, in what was then the Austrian Empire, now in Czechia or "the Czech Republic." A talented violinist as a boy, by 1873 he was regarded as one of the best in the world.

He began submitting the scores of symphonies and other works to German and Austrian competitions. In 1874, he won the Austrian State Competition, with Johannes Brahms on the jury of the Austrian State Competition. In 1877, Brahms recommended Dvořák to his publisher, Simrock, who commissioned what became the Slavonic Dances, Opus 46. This led to commissions that spread his fame to Britain and America in the 1880s, and Russia in 1890.

In 1892, he was appointed the director of the National Conservatory of Music of America in New York. While there, he wrote his 2 most successful orchestral works: His Symphony No. 9, titled From the New World, which spread his reputation worldwide; and his Cello Concerto, one of the most highly regarded ever written.

But he was a patriot, for a country that was then subsumed by another, and wrote many pieces extolling what was then called "Czechoslovakia." Homesickness led him to return to Prague, the Czech capital, in 1895. He died on May 1, 1904, at the age of 62.

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December 16, 1893 was a Saturday. There was 1 score on this historic day, a football game between schools 21 miles apart: The University of Chicago beat Northwestern University, 22-14, in a then-rare indoor football game, at Tattersall's Pavilion, at 17th and Dearborn Streets on the southern edge of downtown Chicago.