Dvorak Lived in Iowa

And you once lived with me.

Sep 13, 2025

Hour nine, late July, an Amish food stand on an empty lot: these are the circumstances that led to our discovery.

We had been driving since dawn. You sighed as we pulled over, reminding me I’d spent an hour chatting with a Minnesota farmer about this year’s corn crop, a subject about which I know nothing, and that I made us stop at Big Dick’s Buckhorn Inn in Spooner, Wisconsin, to see where John F. Kennedy used the restroom in March 1960.

“This is your culture,” I protested. You gestured at your violin, placed with care in the backseat, and said, “That’s my culture.”

“You’ll miss me when you’re gone,” I said, wolfing down my Amish pie. “You’ll miss my book-length bad ideas.” We grew quiet. I watched the corn from the car window and thought about what the farmer said, how the stalks look so small they make you worry, then grow like no one’s business overnight.

We were crossing the back roads across the Iowa border when you saw the sign: Dvorak Memorial Highway.

“Dvořák!” you exclaimed. You once tried to explain Dvořák to me, your simpleton mother, by noting his New World Symphony may have inspired the theme from Jaws.

“I know who Dvořák is,” I said. “I was a piano prodigy, you know, before I went Five Easy Pieces on everyone.”

“But you haven’t played Dvořák,” you said dreamily. “You don’t know how it feels.”

I did not. The violin was hers, an instrument that I’ve never tried and she’s always loved. Now her hero’s name was on a highway in rural Iowa.

“Do we know if it’s the same Dvořák?” my husband asked. We didn’t. There was no internet and no choice but to follow the road. I saw signs for caves and tourist traps, but we had to stick with the Dvorak Memorial Highway. There is no intermission in a swan song.

As we neared a gas station, the internet sprang to life.

“It is the same Dvořák!” I exclaimed. “It says ‘In 1893, Antonín Dvořák lived in Spillville, Iowa for one summer and wrote a number of compositions.’”

“What? Why? Which compositions?!”

“Um,” I read frantically, trying to learn the history of Dvořák before the internet died in a cornfield. “A whole bunch of ‘em. String Quartet No. 12 in F major, Opus 96.”

“Mama, that’s his most famous string quartet!” A teenage sigh. Half-amusement at me, half-elation at this twist of fate.

“And Symphony No. 9 in E Minor.”

“That’s his most famous symphony! The one I told you about!”

“Well then, we need to go to Spillville!” I said, though this was obvious to everyone.

I felt relief: it was the last family road trip before college, and I had finally done something right. We were returning to Missouri from Lake Superior, where I had envisioned a week of cool air and clear water and got wildfire smoke and storms instead. You reminded me that I could not control the weather and said you had a wonderful time. But I wanted it to be perfect, like you.

* * *

On Main Street stood a brick house with a sign: “The Great Composer Antonín Dvořák LIVED HERE during the summer of 1893.”

It was a hybrid museum: half handmade clocks, half Dvořák dwelling. It was also closed. I looked for people, having talked my way into shuttered venues in the past. Spillville has a population of 385, about the same as in the 1890s. Towns this size tend to enjoy an enthusiastic guest. Dvořák was proof of that.

In the late 19th century, Spillville was a Czech-American farm town. Dvořák had grown weary of New York City and missed the countryside. When his friend Josef Kovařík invited him to Iowa, saying it reminded him of Bohemia, Dvořák hopped the train. He spent the summer of 1893 strolling along the Turkey River, listening to birds, incorporating their songs into his. He became fascinated with Black American spirituals and Native American instruments. Dvořák was Czech, but his music was becoming American in that best of ways, where folk cultures collide. When he finished “String Quartet No. 12 in F major, Opus 96”, he dubbed it “The American Quartet.”

When we visited, the streets of Spillville were empty. You peered through the windows to see if his violin was visible. It was not. I felt a surge of disappointment. I had to make things good, make them special. You never demanded this of me but I felt it like an internal clock, memory ticking like a metronome.

Six weeks, five weeks, one month until you were gone.

“I read that when Dvořák lived here, he incorporated the sounds of Spillville in his symphonies,” I said. “And he played organ at the local church. So let’s go see what Dvořák saw, let’s hear what Dvořák heard.”

We walked to St. Wenceslaus Church, the oldest Czech church in the United States. It looked like a castle on a hill, and we ducked under an iron gate saying “1860-1910: In Memory of the Golden Jubilee” in Czech. I heaved a sigh of relief when the church doors opened: something had worked out. Inside, parishioners were praying. I gestured to keep quiet and pointed upstairs. Your eyes widened.

An organ, wooden and gold. Was it Dvořák’s? We decided to believe it was. We knew we were in the place he played. Imagine going to mass in a prairie town and there’s Dvořák, belting out the hymns. Did the townsfolk care that he was famous? Or was Spillville where he could shed that burden, and feel the music again?

“I liked to be among these people 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,” Dvořák wrote. He called Spillville “American Vysoká”, in tribute to his Czech summer home. He noted how easy it was to compose “String Quintet No. 3 in E flat major” in an Iowa field of dreams.

We walked to Riverside Park to see the Dvořák memorial. When we found it, the sides bearing the names of his compositions were faded and nearly illegible. A worn tablet from 1925 commemorated his visit. It seemed like no one had cared in a while.

But you did, and that’s what mattered.

* * *

As soon as we got home, you took out your violin, closed your bedroom door, and began to play. The relentless repetition of an incoming conservatory student: scales and motifs and sounds I did not understand, sounds I thought were pretty, but you insisted were wrong. I told you it didn’t need to be perfect, and you reminded me how I once spent a day agonizing over whether to change “a” to “the”.

I worked down the hall, banishing you to the basement when I had to do interviews. I felt annoyed and guilty for feeling annoyed. There was too little space but also too little time. My love had turned selfish: I didn’t want you to go.

I wanted to reverse the metronome and relive every day:

Pushing the stroller and hearing singing, and thinking someone was following us, and realizing it was you, and that you could sing before you could talk.

How excited you were to first hold a violin at age nine, and how you burst out laughing at the fourth-grade concert when parents were invited on stage so kids could teach them what they had learned, and I unwittingly held everything backwards.

Not knowing what rosin was and asking if you’d be OK with grapes.

The soul-killing solitude of covid-closure Zoom orchestra; the relief at the return of concerts; the awestruck applause as the years went by. Where did you come from? From me —but the song is all you.

And now the metronome stops, and I cry alone, with no music from your room to drown the silence that surrounds me.

“Songs my mother taught me,” Dvorak wrote, “In the days long vanished; seldom from her eyelids were the teardrops banished.”

The man knew. These days I am a constant traveler on the Dvorak Memorial Highway.

New memories overwhelm. Dropping you off at your dorm, telling you I love you, hugging you goodbye. Feeling an aimless heartache, like I’m picking up a book I started when I was 28 and put down for 18 years. Now I’ve not only lost my place — I’m not sure I still know how to read.

I close the door to your empty room when it’s too plain to see: Dvořák lived in Iowa, and you don’t live with me.

* * *

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