I’m back in the Czech republic again, this time with a folding bike. I’m staying in Příbram, a former mining town an hour from Prague. An easy bike ride away is the village of Vysoká. Here there are various summerhouse retreats of the great Antonín Dvořák, the great composer and redesigner of computer keyboard layouts.
(Well, OK, of course, Ant didn’t actually do that keyboard stuff. The supposedly more efficient alternative to the usual typewriter layout was the 1930s invention of US psychologist and academic August Dvorak (Americanised with no accents, so pronounced ‘Dvor-rack’ rather than the composer’s ‘Dvorrr-zhark’; it’s a common surname in the Czech lands). In it, QWERTY becomes “<>PYF. You can see why it hasn’t caught on.)
But I wasn’t interested in arcane touch-typing schema. I was interested in the music, and how the sense of place might have inspired one of music’s greatest composers of ‘proper tunes’.
So I cycled out from Příbram along some pretty good signed bike paths, which the Czech Rep has in as much abundance as melodies in the Dvořák catalogue. It was all sunny, car-free paths with trundling leisure riders and familes with child buggies. Rather nice.
Vysoka is the village where Ant spent his summers in the 1880s, just as he was getting a name for his music. Family friends had a mansion here, and he found the rural tranquillity ideal for composing. He lodged at first in a woodcutter’s cottage with his family, then in the mansion, and eventually in a cottage he bought round the corner: Villa Pgoanta, named after his most famous opera.
Oh, damn that pesky Dvorak keyboad. I mean Rusalka. It’s also the name of a bus stop nearby. I wonder how many bus halts are called after major operas. That must be a temptation to passengers alerting the bus driver where to get off. You could sing a quick aria, such as ‘Orbi yr yd. Mrrb’ – curses, keyboard again, I mean ‘Song to Moon’. I wonder what Czechia’s consistently grumpy and jobsworth bus drivers would make of that.
The mansion is now a museum, with rooms decorated as Dvořák would have known, and with period pianos that the great man himself played on. Concerts are regularly staged here, and I thoroughly enjoyed looking round and chatting to one of the guides. It was easy to imagine Ant relaxed and away from his hectic life in Prague, strolling through the woods, listening to birds, and dreaming up works such as the Symphony No 8, and the 16 Onakrbcj Eabj.o. Er, I mean, Slavonic Dances.
I trundled round the village to see his cottage, Villa Rusalka, too. It’s still owned by a branch of the Dvořák family, albeit uninhabied, and unlike the mansion it’s not open to the public (except for an annual concert). Just outside it, though, is a memorial to the man with a note of some his great works written here, such as V Přírodě and Čert a Káča. That’s not the Dvorak keyboard mischief, that’s the Czech for In Nature’s Realm and The Devil and Kate.
Ah, bikes. They can take you to all the key places. Even when the keys don’t quite return what you expect.