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
Preface
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
Positive criticism, from both professionals and laypersons, could accomplish much here; unfortunately, its state today shows that, on the basis of our isolation, and having grown up among the “young postwar fighters,” it has churned out more or less personally pointed, comfortably convincing, and attractive slogans about the decadence of foreign art and the elevation of our art above that of all nations of the world, thus fostering a “healthy” conservatism and petty-bourgeois indolence, simultaneously with an inability to healthily express the [critic's] personal relationship to the real values of artistic works. From whence come all these tiring and shaming arguments, not touching the core of the issue and expressing themselves only through the assembly of mutually antagonistic theories, within which Smetana's name appears like a deus ex machina, invoked to help in the most convoluted circumstances.
This quotation, from an essay by a young composer, Josef Stanislav, in 1924, expresses in two sentences what this entire book attempts to solve: the problem of why the incredibly rich musical sphere of Prague in the early twentieth century has remained all but unknown to Western ears for three-quarters of a century. And yet the circumstances, while certainly convoluted, were not always as dire as Stanislav would have us believe, and there are a great many artistic creations and critical ideas that inform the greater understanding of European modernist culture in its day.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Opera and Ideology in PraguePolemics and Practice at the National Theater, 1900–1938, pp. xi - xivPublisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2006