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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 1970
Jan Vořišek is an oddly shadowy figure in musical history. Admirer and intimate of Beethoven, friend of Schubert—yet exponent of Bach fugues and continuo realisations for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century compositions; on the one hand a war-office clerk, on the other organist to the Imperial Court—his life is made up of such contrasts. He was born into the generation that saw the rise of Czech cultural nationalism, but took no part in it. Indeed, he is almost the last of the long line of emigré Czechs (the Stamitz family, the Bendas, Mysliviček, Vaňhal, Reicha and others) who practised with distinction the international musical style. He was a virtuoso pianist and a popular, even fashionable, figure in the salons of the Viennese musical dilettanti, yet he left some compositions of such excellence that one marvels that their revival has been so long delayed. The more one knows about his career, the further one seems to travel from Jan Voříšek as a person.
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