Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- Notes to the Reader
- List of Abbreviations
- Timeline of Modern Czech History
- 1 Introduction: Nationalism, Modernism, and the Social Responsibility of Art in Prague
- 2 Smetana, Hostinský, and the Aesthetic Debates of the Nineteenth Century
- 3 Legacies, Ideologies, and Responsibilities: The Polemics of the Pre-Independence Years (1900–1918)
- 4 “Archetypes Who Live, Rejoice, and Suffer”: Czech Opera in the Fin de Siècle
- 5 The Pathology of the New Society: Debates in the Early Years of the First Republic (1918–24)
- 6 Infinite Melody, Ruthless Polyphony: Czech Modernism in the Early Republic
- 7 “A Crisis of Modern Music or Audience?”: Changing Attitudes to Cultural and Stylistic Pluralism (1925–30)
- 8 “I Have Rent My Soul in Two”: Divergent Directions for Czech Opera in the Late 1920s
- 9 Heaven on Earth: Socialism, Jazz, and a New Aesthetic Focus (1930–38)
- 10 “A Sad Optimism, the Happiness of the Resigned”: Extremes of Operatic Expression in the 1930s
- 11 The Ideological Debates of Prague Within a European Context
- Appendix One Personalia
- Appendix Two Premieres and New Productions at the National Theater, 1900–1938
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
11 - The Ideological Debates of Prague Within a European Context
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- Notes to the Reader
- List of Abbreviations
- Timeline of Modern Czech History
- 1 Introduction: Nationalism, Modernism, and the Social Responsibility of Art in Prague
- 2 Smetana, Hostinský, and the Aesthetic Debates of the Nineteenth Century
- 3 Legacies, Ideologies, and Responsibilities: The Polemics of the Pre-Independence Years (1900–1918)
- 4 “Archetypes Who Live, Rejoice, and Suffer”: Czech Opera in the Fin de Siècle
- 5 The Pathology of the New Society: Debates in the Early Years of the First Republic (1918–24)
- 6 Infinite Melody, Ruthless Polyphony: Czech Modernism in the Early Republic
- 7 “A Crisis of Modern Music or Audience?”: Changing Attitudes to Cultural and Stylistic Pluralism (1925–30)
- 8 “I Have Rent My Soul in Two”: Divergent Directions for Czech Opera in the Late 1920s
- 9 Heaven on Earth: Socialism, Jazz, and a New Aesthetic Focus (1930–38)
- 10 “A Sad Optimism, the Happiness of the Resigned”: Extremes of Operatic Expression in the 1930s
- 11 The Ideological Debates of Prague Within a European Context
- Appendix One Personalia
- Appendix Two Premieres and New Productions at the National Theater, 1900–1938
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In the words of Emil František Burian:
Tradition. A hiding place. And it doesn't cost us a lot of sweat to find the usual philistinism and unconscious conservatism in it. It is one of those words that we can throw countless times and it will never come back to us, not even discredited. How many reviews, articles, and analyses abound in this overused definition:
If you are a futurist, you are not traditional.
If you are a dadaist, same thing.
If you are a poetist, still the same.
If you are a romantic = ?
Impressionist = ?
Decadent = ?
If you are traditional, you are a romantic, impressionist, decadent (everything that does not mean tradition for the Czechoslovak Republic).
If you are traditional, you are a conservative, an epigon, chewing the cud of everything tried, tested, and true, ad nauseam.
Why are you a conservative (in the above sense)? Because it hasn't occurred to you to be anything else, because “you are not gifted from above, you cannot buy it at a pharmacy.”
Tradition, the comfortable “pharmacy,” provides you with a peaceful life, disturbed by nothing. You dissolve with happiness that you, too, are finally a creative artist. It authorizes you, though (and this is the main thing), to be for once in your life a competent artist, provides you the advantage of a “licensed” poet or painter, leads you infallibly by impassible roads and gives you the crest of modernism.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Opera and Ideology in PraguePolemics and Practice at the National Theater, 1900–1938, pp. 326 - 338Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2006