This chapter explores Leoš Janáček’s innovative and individualistic approach to opera, with a particular focus on his most frequently performed work, Jenůfa. Composed between 1894 and 1903, Jenůfa reflects Janáček’s interest in the concept of realism, influencing his choice of subject matter, the use of a prose text, and a compositional style rooted in spoken language. The chapter also discusses Janáček’s fascination with Gustave Charpentier’s 1900 opera Louise and its impact on Janáček’s musical language. Similar approaches can also be identified in Janáček’s other operas. The composer’s innovations encountered resistance within Czech musical circles, and it took more than a decade for them to receive even partial appreciation.

This chapter explores how five medieval religious songs with Czech texts transformed into musical signifiers of national identity in the nineteenth century. The songs under consideration are: Hospodine, pomiluj ny (“Lord, Have Mercy upon Us”), Buoh všemohúcí (“God Almighty”), Svatý Václave (“Saint Wenceslas”), Jezu Kriste, ščedrý kněže (“Jesus Christ, O Bounteous Prince”), and Ktož jsú boží bojovníci (“You Who Are the Warriors of God”). These samples of medieval sacred music gradually shed their predominantly religious functions to become prominent symbols of Czechness in music. As such, they have been discussed by generations of Czech musicologists and critics. These songs reflect both medieval and modern Czech cultural history. In the nineteenth century, incorporating these songs into new works was associated with the rise of Czech nationalism, illustrating how modern ethnocentric Czech identity is rooted in ancient traditions dating back to the Middle Ages.

This chapter begins by exploring the professionalization of Czech rock under the influence of The Beatles in the 1960s, exemplified by the group Olympic. The second part of the chapter focuses on the distinction between official and unofficial types of popular music that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. An examination of the output and reception of the groups Blue Effect and The Plastic People of the Universe during this period illustrates how rock music became politicized during normalization and how this politicization influenced later Czech historiographies of rock.

This chapter discusses the search for a modernist musical culture in Czechoslovakia after 1918 and the ideological underpinnings of this search. The chapter also focuses on three specific modernist tendencies: neoclassicism, neofolklorism, and a set of musical trends termed civilism, which runs parallel to the German New Objectivity movement. Although based on different techniques and viewpoints, the three tendencies are marked by internal similarities. All three approaches to modern composition aim at abandoning Romantic sensibilities and avoiding romanticism through different means: neoclassicism by a recourse to pre-Romantic music; neofolklorism in an exploration of musical traditions of the common people from different ethnic groups; and civilism in a reliance on jazz.

Despite Prague’s exponential growth in the early twentieth century, its musical communities of Germans and Czechs still operated like small villages, locked in a perpetual struggle over cultural values, long-standing grudges, and personal advancement. Not only did the Czech and German music critics inhabit almost entirely separate musical worlds – rarely, if ever, commenting on the other community’s accomplishments – but each also contained rival factions, most notoriously those of the Czechs at the Prague Conservatory and the emerging Musicology faculty at Charles(-Ferdinand) University. Though these divisions existed before 1900, the appearance of musicologist/critic Zdeněk Nejedlý (1879–1962) on the musical landscape of Prague became a watershed moment that solidified polemic lines of battle over much of the twentieth century. Though less virulent, conditions at the German University paralleled the Czechs’ near obsession in this generation over what constituted Czech or Bohemian music, and who might be included or excluded as its representatives.

Musical life in the Czech lands was decisively shaped by the thirty-year presence of musicians employed by the Habsburg Emperor and King of Bohemia, Rudolf II (d. 1612), who established Prague as the imperial capital for the second time in its history. The teaching of imperial instrumentalists influenced performance practice throughout the region. Discerning Bohemian and Moravian music patrons and enthusiasts acquired the polyphony of imperial composers, most of whom were from the Low Countries. Latin sacred texts proved useful for worship, while vernacular partsongs satisfied the desire for fashionable amusement. The interpretation of music and musical practices connected to the Rudolfine court is complicated by its adoption and recontextualization by the linguistically and religiously diverse inhabitants of the Czech crown lands.

This chapter focuses on the history of the Prague Conservatory from its inception to the end of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Founded in 1811, the Prague Conservatory is the second oldest institution of its kind in Europe outside of Italy, following the Paris Conservatory established in 1795. The first part of the chapter explores the development of the institution’s curriculum under the director Friedrich Dionys Weber. Subsequently, the chapter explores how the conservatory achieved international prestige in the second half of the nineteenth century. The last part of the chapter discusses how the rising nationalistic tensions in Prague during the late Habsburg period influenced the conservatory’s operations.

The core works of what is considered the Czech national opera tradition were created in the late nineteenth century, a time when Czech cultural and political elites were shaping modern Czech identity and cultural institutions. These works were, and to a large extent still are, seen as both establishing national values and representing the Czech nation internationally. Throughout Central Europe, and particularly in the Habsburg lands, opera became an important tool for expressing the political interests of various national groups. This chapter explores the formation of the Czech operatic tradition by focusing on three aspects: the connection between opera and the establishment of the modern Czech language and poetry; the search for suitable subjects that would both incorporate national viewpoints and attract Czech and non-Czech audiences; and the ways in which Czech librettists and composers both familiarized themselves with the conventions of various operatic types and approached them from unique perspectives.

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.

This chapter begins with an introduction to the musical traditions of the Roma, the largest ethnic minority in the Czech Republic. While the chapter touches on various aspects of Romani culture, its primary focus is on the genre of rompop, a distinctive style of Czech Romani groups. Rompop relies on a shared musical language, texts, and social references. Through an examination of recordings, interviews, and other primary materials, this chapter illustrates the history of rompop from the 1970s onwards. Its aim is to define the genre’s characteristic features and explore the meanings it holds for the Romani community in the Czech Republic. Specifically, the chapter delves into the career and legacy of the renowned Romani singer Věra Bílá. The concluding interview of the author with the contemporary rompop musician, Jan “Jenda” Dužda, illustrates some of the cultural values associated with this genre and the perspectives of the younger generations of Roma musicians.

During the nineteenth century, the symphony carried many connotations – seen both as the pinnacle of achievement in instrumental music owing to its lingering Beethovenian prestige and as an increasingly outdated genre to be set aside in favor of the more progressive symphonic poem. The symphony also had uniquely German associations, making it a complicated vehicle for Czech composers at a time when the Czech nationalist project took on a new centrality.

This chapter investigates how these dichotomies – of traditional versus modern, abstract versus concrete, and Czech/Slavic versus Viennese/German – played out within a Czech context. Against the backdrop of these tensions, the chapter surveys the symphonic oeuvre of nineteenth-century Czech composers, focusing on Dvořák. In foregrounding the perspective of the Czechs, this study aims to complicate prevailing symphonic narratives and expose the many challenges and contradictions that Czech composers faced when pursuing this genre in the nineteenth century.

The church music in Prague at the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was predominantly monophonic, but nevertheless remarkably diverse. In St. Vitus’s Cathedral, the main institution of the Prague diocese, traditional Gregorian chant, partly distinctly archaic, was cultivated in the second half of the fourteenth century as a manifestation of the political aspirations of the Luxembourg rulers to establish Prague as the new megalopolis of Christianity and heir to Rome. In diocesan churches on the other hand, new liturgical repertory flourished, characterized by extravagant melodies and partly rhythmic performance. At the same time, the repertory of vernacular sacred songs was gaining increasing popularity in Bohemia. All these aspects found expression in the constitution of the vernacular liturgy for a parish church – the first in the history of the Western Church– – after the outbreak of the Hussite Wars in 1419.

The Czech Reformation was unique in some of its manifestations. It preceded the main Reformation wave of the early 1500s by a century. One of its distinctive features was the creation of its own repertory, with vernacular (Czech) songs and paraphrased chant, preserved in characteristic songbooks, so-called cantionals. Certain printed cantionals, especially those produced by the Unity of Brethren, stand out in terms of both scope and typographic sophistication, even in an international context. The polyphonic repertoire, persisting well into the sixteenth century, retained some aspects of late medieval style. Despite the defeat of the Bohemian Revolt in 1620, leading to the prohibition of non-Catholic worship in Bohemia and Moravia, the practice of singing in Czech during liturgy continued to be tolerated within Catholic worship. Several songs have endured as a consistent part of the church repertory up to the present day.

In 1708 and 1710, after Saxon Elector Friedrich August I (August II, as King of Poland) converted to Catholicism, public Catholic churches were established in Dresden and Leipzig. Their organisation was set out in an undated, incomplete draft document by the king’s confessor, Fr. Maurizio Vota SJ, who advised that the principal establishment at the Dresden court would comprise six chaplains from the same order, and six choristers, or clercs. The final set of royal decrees, however, increased the music establishment to include an organist and four instrumentalists, and both churches came to be served by musicians and Jesuits from the province of Bohemia. This chapter reports on the migration of a succession of young Bohemians who musically served both royal Catholic churches. While many returned home when their voices broke, others remained to become important contributors to the musical life of Dresden during the Polish-Saxon Union era.