Music in Literature: Dvořák and Škvorecký

October 11, 2011, 7:00 PM

Charles University scholar, affiliated with Brown University, Richard Müller will give a lecture-recital about Škvorecký and Dvořák. Prof. Müller will cover several topics, including Škvorecký’s novel Dvorak In Love about the composer’s stay in the US, ‘mutual inspirations’ of music and literature in Škvorecký’s work, and biography and novelistic form. The lecturer will explain how Škvorecký, an Americanophile and jazz lover, creates Dvořák as a distant alter ego figure: if the Czech composer was inspired by the black American music, Škvorecký enriched the Czech novel with elements taken from the American literature. The lecture will be followed by a recital, with Emily Arai, a Brown University violin graduate, on the violin, and Richard Müller on the piano. The program includes Dvořák’s Romantic Pieces, Brahms’s “Allegro non troppo” from Violin Concerto in D major (arrang. by the composer) and Gershwin’s jazz songs.

Download the Program (PDF).

Location: Embassy of the Czech Republic
3900 Spring of Freedom Street, NW, Washington, DC

Admission is free.

For reservations, please e-mail reservations@mutualinspirations.org and put "Dvorak in Love" in the subject line.

Richard Müller is an Assistant Visiting Professor at Department of Slavic Languages, Brown University, and Lecturer at Department of Czech and Comparative Literature, Charles University. He specializes in literary theory and 20th century Czech literature (Hrabal, Škvorecký, Kundera, Havel), and particularly questions of literature and ideology, textuality, literary communication and its subjects, representations of city in modern literature. He published nine scholarly articles in Česká literatura, Svět literatury, Literární noviny, Host, A2 and Rukopis, and he is a co-author and co-editor of Slovník novější literární teorie, a major dictionary in the field prepared by Czech researchers (Dictionary of Modern Literary Theory; Praha: Academia 2011, prepared for publication). He speaks five languages.