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.

During the epochal 1895 Czechoslavonic Ethnographic Exhibition, the musicologist Otakar Hostinský described folksong as “one of the most significant and simultaneously most noble expressions of the people’s spiritual life.” In this chapter, the discourse is explored that gave rise to Hostinský’s statement by analyzing the relationship between Czech folk and art music– and the dialectical interdependence of those two terms– through the case studies of Bedřich Smetana’s operas Dvě vdovy (1874, rev. 1877) and Hubička (1876). These operas, and the reception of Smetana’s music more generally, were crucial components in the larger process of institutionalizing folk music as one of, if not the primary resource for musical nationalism in the toolbox of Czech composers. If we are to appreciate the fullness of Czech composers’ oeuvres in all their complexity, it behooves us to understand, and to dismantle wherever appropriate, the dominant narrative of their reliance on folksong.