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This book reveals Czech composer Bedřich Smetana as a dynamic figure whose mythology has been rewritten time and again to suit shifting political perspectives.
This volume focuses on the circumstances of women’s music-making in the vibrant and diverse environment of the Czech lands during the nineteenth century. It sheds light on little-known women musicians, while also considering more well-known works and composers from new woman-centric perspectives. It shows how the unique environment of Habsburg Central Europe, especially Bohemia and Lower Austria, intersects with gender to reveal hitherto unexplored networks that challenge the methodological nationalism of music studies as well as the discipline’s continued emphasis on singular canonical figures. The main areas of enquiry address aspects of performance and identity both within the Czech lands and abroad; women’s impact on social life with a view to different private, semiprivate, and public contexts and networks; and compositional aesthetics in musical works by and about women, analysed through the lens of piano works, song, choir music, and opera, always with the reception of these works in mind.
As both an in-depth study of Mozart criticism and performance practice in Prague, and a history of how eighteenth-century opera was appropriated by later political movements and social groups, this book explores the reception of Mozart's operas in Prague between 1791 and the present and reveals the profound influence of politics on the construction of the Western musical canon. Tracing the links between performances of Mozart's operas and strategies that Bohemian musicians, critics, directors, musicologists, and politicians used to construct modern Czech and German identities, Nedbal explores the history of the canonization process from the perspective of a city that has often been regarded as peripheral to mainstream Western music history. Individual chapters focus on Czech and German adaptations of Mozart's operas for Prague's theaters, operatic criticism published in Prague's Czech and German journals, the work of Bohemian historians interpreting Mozart, and endeavours of cultural activists to construct monuments in recognition of the composer.
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