Staying on track

Well trained composers

A major railway enthusiast from boyhood, Antonín Dvorák spent much of his adult life in Prague’s Franz Jozef I central station. There, he would chat to drivers about the latest locomotive technology and make extensive notes.

Following a crisis of confidence in the early 1870s, Russian composer Mily Balakirev took up a job as a clerk on the Warsaw line of the Central Railway Company to make ends meet and withdrew himself almost entirely from music for a couple of years.

Remarkably, Herbert Howells’s 1919 carol anthem A Spotless Rose was inspired by trains.

‘I sat down and wrote

[it] after idly watching some shunting from the window of a cottage which overlooked the Midland Railway,’ he described.

Pity the poor passenger who, in October 1880, went to light a cigar on a train to Mulhouse, only to be stopped by a revolverwielding Hans Rott (above). The Austrian composer’s reasoning was that Brahms had laced the carriage with dynamite. Rott was later committed to an asylum.

Stations named after composers include Gare d’auber in Paris, Stanis¯aw Moniuszko Central Station in Warsaw and, since

1998, Mendelssohnbartholdy-park station on Berlin’s U-bahn.