In the twentieth century we have witnessed, to an extent probably without parallel in human history, the far-reaching—and sometimes devastating—effect that political events have had upon the fate of artists and their work. At first glance, other things being equal, there would seem to be no reason why the fates of two exceptionally gifted composers and musicians, born within a few years of each other in the same country about a hundred years ago, should have been so very different. The ‘other things’, however, were not equal. So grotesquely unequal did they become that the younger musician, from a musical, well-connected middle-class family and encouraged by Dvorák, who served in the Austrian army in World War I and thereafter embarked upon a brilliant career as a composer and pianist, died before he was fifty in a Bavarian concentration camp, his music all but forgotten for over forty years.