Visions of the Village: Ruralness, Identity, and Czech Opera
Visions of the Village: Ruralness, Identity, and Czech Opera
Assistant Professor of Musicology
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Abstract
Visions of the Village: Ruralness, Identity, and Czech Opera provides a nuanced investigation into the cultural history, political salience, and social resonances of Czech village operas, especially those by composers Bedřich Smetana, Antonín Dvořák, and Leoš Janáček. By examining music-critical writings, institutional and government records, letters, and other archival sources, this book shows how musical representations of the idealized village acquired and provided meaning for Czech audiences, serving as the basis for understandings of a wide range of sociocultural and political issues, including gender, class, nationalism, imperialism, ethnicity, and race. Operas like Smetana’s The Bartered Bride, Dvořák’s The Devil and Kate, and Janáček’s Jenůfa served as focal points for the articulation of an essentialist sense of Czech identity, one deeply intertwined with the strictures and discourses of empire. Even after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, essentialist understandings of society continued to be expressed through reference to village operas and idealized rural life, a practice that persists, if in attenuated form, to this day. In addition to composers and their operas, Visions of the Village investigates the output of critics, administrators, and other urban intellectuals like Otakar Hostinský, František Adolf Šubert, and Zdeněk Nejedlý to understand the impact of village operas on public discourse. Thus, this book provides insight into how music functions at the nexus of the desire for politically resonant ethnoracial identities and the representation of ruralness, from the nineteenth century to the present.
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Front Matter
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Introduction
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1
Building the Operatic Village: Composers, Ethnicity, and Czech Identity
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2
The Village on Display: Opera and Exhibitions in the 1890s
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3
Contesting the Village: Morality, Gender, and Village Opera at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century
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4
The Village as State: Smetana and Opera in the First Czechoslovak Republic
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5
The Village and Modernity: Ruralness and Opera in Post–Velvet Revolution Czechia
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End Matter
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