Vítězslav Augustín Rudolf Novák was baptised Viktor and born on 5 December 1870 at Kamenice nad Lipou in southern Bohemia. The family moved to Počátky in 1872, where he took violin with Antonín Šilhan and piano with Marie Krejčová, and after his father’s death in 1882 to Jindřichův Hradec. In his late teens he went to Prague, entered the conservatory, and changed his name to Vítězslav to assert his Czech identity, as many of his generation were doing. He studied piano and took Dvořák’s composition masterclass alongside Josef Suk, Oskar Nedbal and Rudolf Karel, and when Dvořák left for America in 1892 continued with the conservative Karel Stecker. He died on 18 July 1949.

Shortly before and after 1900 he wrote a series of works that put deliberate distance between himself and both his teachers, and turned toward the folk music of Moravia and Slovakia — regions Prague then thought culturally backward — along with bitonality and non-functional parallel harmony. He said in later life that he had reached those techniques without hearing Debussy, and dated his lasting attachment to Richard Strauss to the Prague premiere of Salome in 1906. He taught at the Prague Conservatory from 1909 to 1920, with Alois Hába, Iša Krejčí, Vítězslava Kaprálová, Ladislav Vycpálek, Otakar Jeremiáš and Stefania Turkewich among his pupils, and from 1901 to 1917 his flat housed the Podskalská filharmonie, the discussion group through which Czech modernists — Suk, Karel, the conductor Václav Talich — read new work from abroad. After independence in 1918 he worked openly for a Czech identity in music.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%ADt%C4%9Bzslav_Nov%C3%A1k
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q347611