The benefit concert in early eighteenth-century London is traditionally associated with professional singers and vocal music, but it has equal importance for instrumental music and the Italian concerto in particular – a genre whose success in Britain preceded that of opera seria. As with opera seria it was Continental composers and performers working in London who were the driving force behind the performances of concertos at benefit concerts. The new Italian concerto sought to rival the da capo aria in musical, physical, and aural experiences – a situation unique to Britain at the time. The rise in status of the concerto is also reflected in changes to the language of benefit advertisements. By the 1720s, rather than the earlier and more generic mention of ‘instrumental music’, readers now expected to know the composers and soloists of any concertos presented, just as they came to expect to know the names of singers, operas and arias – a distinction not always given to other instrumental genres.

The unsettled relationship between the Austrian Empire and France would help to ensure that the Italian influence remained stronger than the French in the second half of the seventeenth century. Italian music had dominated courtly life in the Czech lands long before the Thirty Years War. Furthermore, many of the stylistic traits associated with the Italian style by the early eighteenth century had long been central features of Czech music. The anapaestic and syncope rhythmic patterns, the use of parallel keys and the new emphasis on melody often at the expense of a contrapuntal bass have come to be closely associated with the Italian style, but all of them were common occurrences in Czech music long before their more conspicuous appearance in the music of Vivaldi and his contemporaries. Vivaldi's connections to Prague were via two main fascinating personalities—through Count Morzin (to compose instrumental music) and Count Sporck's theatre (for opera). Vivaldi had arrived in Prague by the spring of 1730, if not earlier, for a revival of his popular opera Il Farnace. His greatest era of influence in Bohemia, however, was through his concertos—though closer examination suggests that the influence was not entirely one way.

Outside of a few notable courtly circles, Italian opera struggled garner the sort of public enthusiasm it had in many other parts of Europe. With a Bohemian tradition of plays with musical songs or interludes (perhaps closer to the English ballad opera genre), the genre of all-sung opera had neither the number of outlets or committed artists to make it succeed. As with the English case, the lack of enthusiasm for Italian opera in the Czech lands has historically been seen as a collective national failing. Tantalising hints survive, for example, of elaborate productions as part of the festivities in Prague in 1617 for the official proclamation of Ferdinand II of Styria to succeed Mathias as King of Bohemia. While few particulars of the production survive, a manuscript of notes commenting on the performance is preserved in the British Library, and the comments suggest that the performance was probably a mixture of spoken allegory with some singing. The single manuscript sheet is headed ‘La musica de Regno di Bohemia’ [The music of the Kingdom of Bohemia] and lists those with singing parts: Archduke Ferdinand (alto), Archduke Maximilian (bass), the Emperor Mathias (tenor) and possibly the Pontifical Ambassador. The Grand Duke of Tuscany and the ambassadors of Venice and Spain all had speaking roles. There were other grand musical entertainments in the years leading up to the Thirty Years War, but the political and social upheaval of the war would bury any of the early promise of operatic flowering for about a century.

The revival and rehabilitation of the cult of saints—and, more specifically, patron saints—was a key part of the more visible aspects of the plan for re-Catholicisation of the Czech lands. The rehabilitation of local patron saints provided Catholic inroads into existing historical (or quasi-historical) figures from Bohemian history and through them Catholic reformers saw the opportunity to exploit existing patterns of devotions to achieve several goals at once: the Catholicisation of Bohemia's past and the restoration of Catholic orthodoxy to her present and future. These efforts provided a popular and enduring legacy in a variety of musical devotions—patterns that helped to create a body of musical works on the subject of Czech patron saints which drew upon both ancient and modern customs, Latin and vernacular texts, and both native and Italian musical styles and forms. In some cases, the combination of such a variety of traditions and practices resulted in vernacular devotional works without parallel elsewhere in Catholic Europe.

The cult of saints found a good deal of overlap between the superstitious Habsburgs and the superstitious Czechs. There was already a cult of saints in the Czech lands before the Counter-Reformation, primarily built around national patron saints, in particular Wenceslas [Václav], his grandmother Ludmila, Adalbert [Vojtěch], Ivan and Procopius [Prokop]. Although not quite ‘national’ saints, Cyril and Methodius as well as St Vitus ought to be considered in a similar sense.

As Koželuch rather wryly observed in his remarks to Brixi about perpections of high and low music, it seems that the rustic style was not far beneath the surface of at least some works for rather elevated contexts. In some cases these rustic influences are merely a constituent part of the experiences gained in rural towns and schools, and in other cases they are more consciously employed to evoke the music of rural Bohemia and Moravia. The musical evocation of rustic life ranged from the use of certain textures and harmonic and melodic idioms to outright quotations of popular (or ‘folk’) songs or to bring to mind particular regional traits. It would seem that, in some cases, Koželuch was scarcely exaggerating.

In one example by Jan Zach a number of the characteristics that had dominated Czech music since the seventeenth century (and probably earlier) are made clear when comparing the blacksmith's drinking song (Example 36) with the final movement of one of his sinfonias (Example 37). In his pioneering study on Zach, Karl Komma has pointed out the influence of folksong and other rustic idioms on Zach's musical style. The clarity and simplicity of the organisation of Czech popular songs suited the galant taste and Zach often employed a motivic organisation of his melodies that is typical of central-European Slavonic song. This can been seen in features such as the AABA motivic organisation of melodic form and the frequent use of the bass in a rhythmic and harmonic, rather than contrapuntal, role.

On 21 June 1621 the twenty-seven Protestant and Utraquist nobles (the composer Kryštof Harant among them) who had led the rebellion against the Habsburgs stepped onto the executioner's platform on Prague's old town square. Looming over the square opposite the platform was the the imposing Týn Church, between whose towers sat a large golden chalice situated above a platform that held a statue of Jiří [George] of Poděbrady, the last Hussite king. The chalice had been the Hussite symbol adopted by the Utraquist cause which maintained that communion should be given to the laity in ‘both kinds’ [sub utraque specie]. By 1626 the statue and the chalice had been removed by the Roman Catholic victors, who then undertook a symbolic act intended to serve as a warning. In a move that echoed the Habsburg obsession with alchemy and the transformation of base materials, they melted down the golden chalice and recast it as a golden halo, crown and sceptre to adorn the newly installed statue of the Virgin Mary in the very place where the chalice had been. In short, the old materials that represented the Utraquist cause were reshaped into something new and something specifically Catholic. Other political, cultural and religious transformations soon followed—and so it would be with music as well.

The traditional lands of the Czech-speaking people are Bohemia, Moravia and parts of Silesia, and it is these provinces that make up the modern Czech Republic (though only part of historical Silesia). The origin of the name ‘Bohemia’ itself, however, has nothing to do with Slavonic culture at all, but rather the Boii, a Celtic tribe that inhabited that region until around the first century AD. The Boii were driven westward by Germanic tribes from the area around modern-day Bavaria, who were then, in turn, driven back westward by Slavic tribes from the east. These Slavic tribes contributed to the massive Great Moravian Empire, which, during the ninth to tenth centuries, extended from their present borders as far as the Black Sea. The most significant historical importance of this new empire is that its success drew attention from both east and west and resulted in the Christianisation of its Slavic-speaking subjects.

In around the year 860, Louis the Germanic King of the East Franks tried to get involved with the conversion of the Bulgarians with the hope of having leverage on the other side of the vexatious Moravians. His action had the important, though unintended, result of pushing the Moravians into the arms of Constantinople. In 863, at the request of Prince Rastislav of Moravia, Patriarch Photius sent two brothers, Cyril and Methodius, to preach Christianity in the Slavic tongue to the Moravians.

In the context of Bohemia and Moravia, music history has inherited a strange legacy from literary history. I use the plural ‘narratives’ at the start of the book to highlight the fact that there is no single national narrative, but rather several competing ones, written along linguistic, religious, confessional and, later, geographical lines. These are not stable concepts and the determining factors of ‘nation’, real and imagined, changed over time. So when eighteenth-century writers describe Bohemian patriotism, it would be anachronistic to apply this to the same idea of ‘nation’ understood amongst the Hussites, for example. Certainly, up to the second half of the eighteenth century, one common strand in the idea of the Czech nation is language. But even within this stream of historical narrative, there are diverting and competing rivulets. However, a ‘Czech’ identity was clearly observed in the literature of the time—usually described in contrast to a German one. After the Thirty Years War these identities became even more complicated. It remains possible sometimes to clearly identify one from the other (and this certainly happened in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), but in other cases the distinction is impossible and-or of little use to the historian. In the context of cities and at many courts, the two, the German and the Czech, were too close together for too long to be easily or usefully separated from one another—especially in Prague.