Joseph Haydn’s Il ritorno di Tobia (Hob. XXI:1) has had a complicated reception since its first performance on 2 April 1775 at the semi-annual concerts of Vienna’s Tonkünstler-Societät. Despite its highly praised ‘fiery’ choruses and virtuosic arias, the work was criticised for its length, difficulty, and even monotony. Haydn and others attempted to correct the work’s ‘faults’ – leading to the oratorio’s existence in multiple versions. It seems unfair, however, to critique Haydn’s Tobia oratorio in isolation, without considering local precedents and its original multifaceted context: an audience following a libretto (with stage directions) based on a well-known biblical story; an event raising funds for musicians’ families; a musical dramatisation exploiting through demanding arias the virtuosity of its vocal soloists; and performance in a nearly five-hour ‘multimedia’ concert that included other works.

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.

Haydn’s last opera, L’anima del filosofo (The soul of the philosopher), is a highly unusual retelling of the Orpheus myth. Written for the London stage in 1791 to a libretto by Carlo Francesco Badini (c. 1730–1810), the opera was never staged then nor during the composer’s lifetime. Shut down in rehearsal and banished from performance, the opera never reached the stage of the Haymarket Theatre. As Haydn himself concluded, ‘Orfeo was, so to speak, declared contraband’ (‘Orfeo wurde, so zu sagen, als Contrebande erklärt’).

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.