New Paths in Opera

Although Bohuslav Martinu (1890–1959), Emil František Burian (1904–1959), Alois Hába (1893–1973), Erwin Schulhoff (1894–1942), and Viktor Ullmann (1898–1944) were all composers with distinct artistic profiles, a number of various shared aspects can be found in their lives and works. Apart from a generational affinity, they also lived within the territory of Czechoslovakia and the wider Central European cultural context; and despite finding their own individual paths, they contributed together to the project of artistic modernity. This book looks at the opera production of the above-named composers, who all provided innovative solutions to the development of the genre. The book consists of two parts. The first, “Essays”, provides historical-analytical perspectives on the operas of the aforementioned composers; the second, “Interviews & Reflections”, is dedicated to the applied interpretation and performance of these works. In this part, a number of Czech and foreign artists share their own concrete experiences with the operas and outline the challenges they faced while doing so.

Helena Spurná is a Czech theatre studies scholar and musicologist. She works as an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Arts of the University in Ostrava and at the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague (Department of Musicology). She focuses on the opera and theatre of the interwar avant-garde, with special attention to the works of one of the most distinguished personalities of the Czech culture of the twentieth century, Emil František Burian, cf. the monograph Emil František Burian a jeho cesty za operou (Emil František Burian and His Path to Opera) (Prague: KLP, 2014). Kelly St. Pierre works as an Associate Professor of Musicology at Wichita State University, Kansas, USA. Her research examines the roles of propaganda in shaping Czech music and its reception through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cf. monograph Bedrich Smetana: Myth, Music, and Propaganda (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press / Boydell & Brewer, 2017). She also works in Prague as a researcher on the project The Second Sense: Sound, Hearing and Nature in the Czech Modernity at the Center for Theoretical Study, which is a joint program of Charles University and the Czech Academy of Sciences.