Jakub Hrůša is one of the most renowned Czech classical musicians of the present day. Throughout his career, Hrůša has collaborated with orchestras and opera companies worldwide. In 2022, Hrůša engaged in a series of email exchanges with his friend, composer and musicologist Aleš Březina. The conversation presents Hrůša’s views on the traditions of Czech music and the place of Czech composers in the world of classical music. Hrůša explains what the term “Czech music” means to him, how he distinguishes it from Central European music, and what he thinks about the concepts of mainstream and peripheral musical traditions. He also comments on his experiences as a Czech conductor in the cosmopolitan environment of classical music and more specifically as the music director of the Bamberg Symphony, the German orchestra formed in 1946 predominantly from German musicians expelled from Czechoslovakia after World War II.

Bertolt Brecht, the most influential playwright of the twentieth century, is unthinkable without music.Many of his poems, as well as his forty-eight completed dramas and roughly fifty dramatic fragments, are connected to music.There is hardly another writer or dramatist of the twentieth century who based his work as clearly and decisively on the complex relationship between music, text, and drama.Brecht worked with some of the most important composers of the twentieth century, in particular Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, and Paul Dessau.Although Brecht rejected some of the aesthetic ideas and ideology of Richard Wagner, in his ambition to combine the arts together and to leave a major legacy, he nevertheless in some respects ultimately came to resemble Wagner.The music connected to Brecht‘s texts is performed and passed on in the media throughout the world, from the early recordings made by the young Brecht himself all the way to innumerable versions of his “Ballad of Mack the Knife” created and spread by the globalized music market.