After the death of his father in 1882, the family moved to Jindřichův Hradec, where Novák continued his studies at grammar school (Schnierer and Tyrrell 2001).

At the conservatory, he studied piano and attended Antonín Dvořák's masterclasses in composition[2] where his fellow students included Josef Suk, Oskar Nedbal, and Rudolf Karel.

[citation needed] However, just before and after 1900, shortly after his graduation, Novák wrote a series of compositions that put distance between himself and the teachings of both Stecker and Dvořák, edging his style toward the fledgling modernist movement.

[citation needed] Beginning in the late 1890s, Novák began to explore influences beyond the prevailing Wagner/Brahms aesthetic of his contemporaries in Prague.

Finally, after the Prague premiere of Salome in 1906, Novák formed an attachment to the music of Richard Strauss that would remain for the rest of his career.

Among his students were Alois Hába, Iša Krejčí, Vítězslava Kaprálová, Ladislav Vycpálek, Otakar Jeremiáš and Stefania Turkewich.

In this capacity, he led the push toward de-Germanification and nationalization of the Conservatory, during which process his German-Bohemian colleagues, including Alexander Zemlinsky and Paul Nettl, were forced out to form a segregated institution.

After the collapse of democracy and the subsequent Nazi protectorate in 1939, Novák, then retired, gained credibility among his younger Czech contemporaries through the performance of several patriotic and morale-boosting works, meant as a musical form of resistance.

The height of his compositional career was considered, including in the criticism of the day, to consist of two principal achievements, both completed in 1910: Pan, the five-movement tone poem for piano solo (totalling some sixty pages of music, op.

[3] The latter was a grandiose symphonic cantata for soloists, chorus, and orchestra, running to just under an hour of unbroken music; its attention to musico-dramatic detail was evidence of Novák's increasing interest in opera, a style in which he had not written at that point.

His conflict with Nejedlý brought about a sharp change in Novák's attitude to composition, wherein fear of rejection became more important than artistic exploration.

The negative response from the public to the orchestrated version of Pan (1912) and the next cantata, Svatební košile ("The Wedding Shirt", 1913),[6] based on the same Erben text as Dvořák's more famous work) caused severe self-doubt and depression.

With two ballet-pantomimes completed in 1928–29, Signorina Gioventù and Nikotina, Novák regained some of the respect he had lost among his colleagues; the layering of orchestral effects (including mixed meters and even references to tango) won him the approval of some younger composers, such as Iša Krejčí and Alois Hába.

During the Nazi occupation, Novák rose again in the estimation of his compatriots as a result of his patriotic works: the symphonic poems with organ, De Profundis (op.