Drawing on postcolonial and decolonial theory developed since the 1990s for the study of socialist and post-socialist East Central Europe, this chapter approaches opera as a crucial cultural site for (re)negotiating the relationship with “the West,” Soviet hegemony, and the Global South after 1948. It focuses on the ambivalence in representations of the racialized Other in Czech opera, which highlights the specific, lateral relationship between what was formally known as the Second and Third worlds. The chapter offers a close reading of the opera Jezero Ukereve (“Lake Ukerewe”) by Otmar Mácha, premiered in 1966. Featuring Black and mixed-race characters, the opera generally expresses empathy for and solidarity with the colonized populations, informed by the Czechs’ experience with German oppression, yet it unavoidably reproduces the colonial ideology of a civilizational mission. The opera is interpreted in relation to Czechoslovakia’s official Africa policy and the aesthetic debates about Czech New Music.

This chapter situates itself between the untheorizable singularities of specific case studies and the unsustainable generalities that usually result from attempts at broad historical characterization.  By looking at everything from a late fifteenth-century image of Jews making music in a Prague synagogue to armies of wooden klezmer musicians in a twenty-first-century store window, and from a nineteenth-century Jewish musical caricature to a bit of concentration-camp ephemera involving Hebrew words spelled with musical notes, this chapter endeavors to give some of the flavor of the Czech Jewish musical experience.

It is the winter of 2021. Like many parents around the world, I have donned the new hat of home-school administrator. My children are high-school age, so they resist oversight (as expected), but I have come to see that they do not need much (who knew?). My role is simply to find suitable remote-learning resources. Again, I am pleasantly surprised, and relieved: high-school level art history, for example, seems to be an especially engaging subject online, given the potential for abundant accurately coloured images, flexible user interfaces, and up-to-date critical content. This happy realisation hits me as I notice that the unfamiliar hat has slipped off the side of my head: I am no longer surveying the resources for the kids’ sakes, but rather I am absorbed, of my own accord, in a lesson on Fauvism.

The societal liberalization of the decade that culminated in the Prague Spring in 1968 was evident early on in a wave of new small-scale theater companies. One notable example is the Semafor Theater, founded in 1959 by Jiří Suchý and Jiří Šlitr. The main model for these ensembles, especially for Semafor, was the Osvobozené divadlo (the Liberated Theater) of the interwar period (1926–38). The Liberated Theater earned a legendary reputation, thanks in part to the comedy duo Jiří Voskovec and Jan Werich. Equally legendary was the music of the nearly blind in-house composer and bandleader of the Liberated Theater, Jaroslav Ježek (1906–42). This chapter begins by exploring the place of the Liberated Theater and its music in Czech theater culture and concludes by highlighting the continuities with the Semafor Theater.

This chapter explores the ways folksong research in the Czech lands emerged both within and alongside race and ethnicity studies during the first half of the twentieth century. Many scholars have thoughtfully examined interrelationships between folksong research and German nationalism, specimen culture, and Darwinian assumptions, and yet these same interrelationships in Czech music studies have only recently begun to emerge. Anthropologists, too, have brought into focus the political roles of ethnographic studies in defining the Czech and Slovak nations, but the specific role of folksong research within this remains unstudied. Examining the ways music research in the Czech lands participated alongside and sometimes overlapped with German nationalist race and ethnicity research, however, illuminates early Czech folk-music studies as an instrument of ethnonationalism; a tool not merely descriptive of a repertoire, but also delineative of who belonged and who did not.

With this contract, Nicholas Mathew opens the final chapter of his recent book The Haydn Economy, which is simply entitled: ‘Work’. ‘For most of his life’, Mathew writes, ‘Haydn was constantly busy’. In the chapter, Mathew deftly traces the common origins of the musical work concept and the economic concept of work. As Mathew builds his argument, he delves into Haydn’s varying forms of labour and work, and Haydn’s reflections on them. Mathew places special emphasis on Haydn’s career after the death of Prince Nikolaus in 1790: Haydn’s new-found ‘freedom’ brought yet more labour as he entered the London marketplace.

In 1974 Geoffrey Chew, building on work by H. C. Robbins Landon, established that Haydn quoted a melody that has come to be known as the ‘night watchman’s song’ on at least seven occasions. Most of these works date from the earlier part of the composer’s career – divertimentos and pieces with baryton, as well as Symphony No. 60, ‘Il Distratto’, of 1774. A canon from the 1790s, ‘Wunsch’, represents a late engagement with the tune, while it is also used in the minuet-finale of the Sonata in C Sharp Minor, one of a set of six sonatas published in 1780. The melody has been found in many sources dispersed over a wide area of central Europe, principally Austria, Bohemia, and Moravia, dating at the least comfortably back into the seventeenth century.

Musicologists have started to engage critically with the international reach of Haydn’s music and the claims of ‘universal language’. Miguel Ángel Marín has shown that Haydn was a significant virtual presence in Spain; Thomas Tolley has explored Carpani’s assertions that Haydn composed a ‘New World’ symphony; W. Dean Sutcliffe has documented the discovery of three autographs from Haydn’s Op. 50 in Australia; and Peter Walls considers The Creation in colonial New Zealand. Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann has stepped back to consider the style, aesthetics, and ideas behind the claims of universality; and Nicholas Mathew has discussed what it meant for Haydn and his music to go abroad as a cultural product in the composer’s era.

Most public music institutions in the Czech lands have been affected by the region’s complex political history. This chapter focuses on the politicization of public music institutions dedicated to opera (both opera theaters and opera companies, such as the Estates Theater, the Czech National Theater, and the New German Theater) and symphonic music (both concert halls, such as the Rudolfinum and the Municipal House, and the ensembles that performed in them). To avoid Pragocentrism, the chapter also explores music history in the north Bohemian spa town Teplice (Teplitz). Unlike Prague, Teplice remained a predominantly German-speaking city until the forced removal of the German population from the Czech lands after World War II. In both cities, musical institutions transformed according to their inhabitants’ social and political preferences, and musical works of the past entered the artistic canon in connection to patriotic and national agendas.

Compared to the developments in the Czech lands, where the idea of a Czech nation had become widespread by the late 1800s, the Slovak national awakening was, for a long time, driven by a relatively small group of enthusiasts. In the nineteenth century, the only highbrow artform to be established was literature. The situation changed radically after the creation of Czechoslovakia in 1918 when the formation of Slovak national culture became an important political goal in the new republic. This chapter explores the roles of Czech musicians, such as Vítězslav Novák, and musicologists, such as Dobroslav Orel, in shaping the concepts of Slovak national music. Additionally, the chapter traces the ways in which these concepts were developed by Slovak composers, such as Ján Levoslav Bella and Eugen Suchoň. Thus, modern musical culture in Slovakia aimed at authenticity while being steeped in the value system of Czech culture.