1891 was an auspicious year for the composer. In March, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Prague University and three months later, received a similar honor from Cambridge. His fiftieth birthday, on September 8, was celebrated with a host of ceremonies and performances, and on 9 October 1891, in Birmingham, England, Dvorak conducted the premiere of his Requiem in B-flat minor (Op. 89), "the romantic era's largest and grandest" ("Dvorak," David Hurwitz) - and one of the most beautiful and original - settings of the Mass for the Dead.

Dvorak’s decision to write a Mass for the dead was not motivated by the death of someone close to him, or by a premonition of his own death; the impulse for the composition was much more prosaic: a commission from the music festival in Birmingham for a work “of first importance”. What was originally a somewhat vague commission assumed a more concrete form when Dvorak’s London-based publisher Alfred Littleton (Novello) suggested he might like to write a Requiem. This incentive appeared to come at an auspicious time. Dvorak had almost reached the age of fifty and, in this new work, he intended to review and, in principle, recall everything that he had achieved, both as a composer and as an individual. At the zenith of his career he would embark upon a true testimony of his relationship with God and attempt to answer the most fundamental issues of human existence.