The poem "Expectance" was written by Serbian author Mirjana Stefanović (1939-2021) and was published in 1967 in the collection Spring in Terazije. Almost sixty years later, young composer Ivana Govorčin brought these verses to life musically by using, among other things, marked sound signifiers which direct the listener's attention to the key points of the narrative flow. The starting point of analysis is the poem itself, in which elements such as a humorous-ironic attitude towards life, stylistic figures of gradation and contrast, issues of borders, motifs of time and transience, and the finality of life are highlighted. This paper will point out the sound configurations which the composer uses as amplifiers of these elements and marked parts within the text, playing with their sound and semantic potential. For this purpose, the semiotic theory will be used to show how music acts "through" and thus "for" the narrative.

According to current knowledge, the music writer Ludwig Hartmann (­1836-1910), who came from the Rhineland, was Smetana's most important promoter in Germany before and after the composer's death. Trained at the Leipzig Conservatory, he lived in Dresden from 1859 onwards. From there, he worked as a music critic throughout Europe and championed contemporary music. He paid particular attention to Smetana's operas and instrumental works, not only making the composer known in Germany through his writings, but also lobbying the relevant institutions for performances and sheet music publications. He contacted Smetana and his pupil Ludevít Procházka, who was temporarily living in Dresden, extended his commitment to other representatives of Bohemian-Czech music, and traveled to Prague to attend performances. In addition to articles about Smetana in Dresden daily newspapers, he published opera guides on Prodaná nevěsta and Hubička in Leipzig. He translated Smetana's operas Hubička and Libuše. In addition to letters from and to Hartmann about Smetana's work, texts from Dresden daily newspapers about the composer are included (Appendices I and II).

Of all the operas by Ferenc Erkel, we know the most about Erkel's efforts to present abroad his second opera Hunyadi László, while the absence of similar data concerning the other operas may be the result of the fact that the composer himself and/or the National Theatre did not even try to have them performed outside of Hungary. For Erkel's first two operas - Bátori Mária (1840) and Hunyadi László (1844) -, the National Theatre had a German-language score prepared after the premiere, and Franz Liszt, among others, tried to promote the premiere of Hunyadi László, which ultimately became one of the most performed Hungarian operas abroad. After Ferenc Bónis, Dezső Legánÿ, Katalin Szerző Szőnyi, and Inge Birkin-Feichtinger, who have already published on this negative performance history, this study would like to highlight a few minor details that contrast with our previous perception of Erkel's lack of interest in the distribution of his operas outside of the Hungarian capital's National Theatre. Through the performance history of Hunyadi László, and by taking into account the performance copies surviving from the period as well as the contemporary press, we get an insight into the moves and changes that occurred within the theatrical/opera companies during the second half of the 19th-century as well.

This article presents a hermeneutic and analytical study of Nikos Skalkottas's Sixteen Songs (1941), focusing particularly on the first song of the cycle. After an outline of Skalkottas's biography and cultural context, the work explores the complex interplay between poetic text, musical rhetoric, and dramaturgical structure within the song cycle, emphasizing their roots in both Greek tradition and European modernism. Employing tools of topical, textual, and serial analysis, the study demonstrates how Skalkottas fuses dodecaphonic techniques with references to folk music, popular contemporary dances, and rhetorical devices, creating a unique and ironic sound world that transcends the boundaries of tonality, atonality, and genre. The article highlights the cycle's oscillation between lyrical and agitato moments, its dense web of literary and musical topoi, and the innovative handling of form and voice. In addition to presenting a detailed analysis of the first song - including its motivic, harmonic, and structural features - the article provides new English translations of the cycle's lyrics and offers a broader dramaturgical and interpretive perspective on the work as a whole. By considering the technical, symbolist, and expressive dimensions together, the study situates Skalkottas's songs as a singular synthesis of tradition and avant-garde, urging greater recognition of their artistic quality and significance for both Greek and international repertoire. Nikos Skalkottas; Hermeneutic analysis; Sixteen Songs (1941); Musical rhetoric; Musical dramaturgy

Research into the urban musical culture of Early Modern cities is impossible due to the frequent absence of primary musical monuments without a systematic study of non-musical sources. These are sources that are linked to the functioning of specific urban institutions, such as the town office or the parish. In addition to account books, council books, books of town correspondence, or the rather varied record material, probate books and inventories of estates also contain partial information on music. The sources have often survived continuously since the Middle Ages and their contents have not yet been properly evaluated. From a musical point of view, these sources mainly provide information on individual musicians and their estates, on specific music books or musical instruments in their possession, as well as partial reports on the bequests of music-loving burgesses. The study points out the importance of studying these sources, with specific examples from three Moravian royal cities. More than a dozen wills or inventories of the estates of organists, organ builders, cantors and town trumpeters have been preserved in Brno, Znojmo and Olomouc, which contain information essential for understanding the musical culture in these cities in the 16th and early 17th centuries.

Since 2014, the work of Ukrainian composers has held a mirror up to the events of the Russo-Ukrainian war. A piece from early 2014 by contemporary composer Olena Lys is considered in this article. The piece begins with the composer's reflection on the events of Maidan in winter 2014 in the form of a choral diptych based on Vasyl Dovzhyk's poem "By the Stairs to Heaven…". In its two parts, it illustrates the death of the Maidan defenders (in the first part) and the mother's prayers for her dead son (in the second part). The present article focuses on a semantic analysis of Ukrainian symbols in both the libretto and the musical text, ultimately suggesting that Olena Lys and Vasyl Dovzhyk do not reconstruct the past: they comprehend the spiritual values of the Ukrainian people in the contemporary context in a new way.

This article examines the representation of Ukrainian music abroad through an analysis of programming in French musical institutions since 2022. Numerous concerts featuring Ukrainian compositions have occurred in France, signifying a renewed interest in, and at times a novel encounter with, this repertoire since the onset of Russia's full-scale invasion. We explored how two leading Parisian musical institutions, the Philharmonie de Paris and the Opéra National de Paris, have supported Ukraine, both symbolically and practically. Further, we analysed how the selected works, chosen to represent Ukrainian cultural identity on European musical stages, have been framed as part of a shared European heritage, thus demonstrating the role of music as a form of soft power in the current wartime context. Finally, we considered the 1991 Project, an initiative led by Anna Stavychenko that supports Ukrainian musicians and strives to preserve Ukrainian musical heritage. In this context, Ukrainian music emerges as a resilient force and a symbol of resistance within the European cultural sphere.

Classical sonata cycles often end with effervescent dance-like movements. From the eighteenth century into the nineteenth, composers developed a taste for more substantial finales of serious character and reconceived the arrangement of multi-movement works altogether. This article examines a small collection of finales written at the turn of the century by Paul Wranitzky and Jan Dussek that occupy a unique position in these transformations and integrate slow movement and fast finale into an inseparable unit. The last movements of Wranitzky's String Quartets Op. 30 Nos. 2 and 5 and Dussek's Piano Sonata Op. 39 No. 1 constitute an original type of finale defined by the following features. (1) The opening suggests that a slow movement is underway. (2) A shift to a fast tempo signals an attacca transition to the finale. (3) The slow section returns. (4) The fast tempo resumes and provides closure. The formal design of these movements includes elements of rondo ­and/­or sonata and require frequent re-evaluation on the part of the listener. These movements also display resemblances in their expressive content: the slow sections feature a solemn tone provided by the hymn topic. The return of the slow section - the most striking feature of these cyclic finales - will support two interpretations: a memory from the past and a musical analogy of Schiller's cyclical journey of human growth. The comparative study of these works provides a springboard to address the varying aesthetic demands of final movements, examine the evolution of the sonata cycle, and illustrate how form and expression interact in standardized ways.

The paper discusses the importance of micro-historiography in music history research, which involves studying the everyday lives of individuals and events to uncover forgotten details and gaps in traditional historical approaches. Reading the main source, the daily Pest-Ofner Localblatt und Landbote it is especially important to emphasize the significance of shorter news, reports, and advertisements in newspapers as valuable sources of information for reconstructing everyday musical life in Pest-Buda. The Pest-Ofner Localblatt und Landbote mentions several guest performers on the stages of Pest-Buda, including the visits of traveling national or folk companies, the performances of the successful Spanish folk dance company at the National Theater in Pest, the tour of the popular Tyrolean folk music company for several months, the supposedly Viennese singing company, marked by the names of Mutzbauer, Honetz, and Lasky, which clearly represented the Wienerlied repertoire on the stage of popular cafés, the guest performances of singer Babette (Betty) Gundy, or Sigismund Thalberg's student, the pianist Rosa Kastner. The present paper also discusses the sources that can be used to list the guest performers, such as the surviving archive material of the National Theater in Pest, the theatre pocket books of German theaters, and the period's press, especially the Pesth-Ofner Localblatt und Landbote. By studying the lives of everyday individuals and the events of everyday life, researchers can uncover information that may have been overlooked or ignored by traditional historical approaches. In the context of music history, micro-historiography can help to shed light on the functioning of an entire city or region, as well as the structure of musical life from a variety of perspectives. It can also help to reveal the realities of everyday musical life, including the network of contacts through which musicians could reach their audience, and how this was reflected in the period's sources.

Beethoven's Seventh and Eighth Symphonies already forecast the integrated tonal architecture and cyclical structures of his third stylistic period (1815-1826). In particular, the composer highlights descending bass lines and third-related pitch centers, such as C and C♯. As a result the linear movements in all four movements of each work are intricately interwoven. In addition, the Finale of Mozart's E♭ Symphony K.543 apparently influenced the harmonic organization of the Finale in Beethoven's Seventh. Whereas Beethoven's Seventh accentuates the stylistic links between its outer movements (i and iv), his Eighth stresses connections between its first and third movements. As Beethoven's work on the Eighth progressed, certain second intervals as f-e and g-f, in addition to a-b♭ and b♭-c-a gained increasing prominence, culminating in the metamorphoses of Haydn's Symphony No. 88 in the Finale.

The Czech composer Vítězslava Kaprálová (1915–1940) maintained a profound connection with Paris throughout her career, undertaking studies at the École Normale de Musique. As both a composer and conductor, Kaprálová distinguished herself within domains traditionally dominated by men, and integrated successfully into the artistic milieu of her era. Despite her achievements, however, her legacy in France diminished after her premature death, remaining largely confined to brief and sporadic references until the early 21st century. This article critically assesses Kaprálová’s position within French music programming since 2001. Many aspects are explored, such as the evolution of the number of concerts that include opuses of Kaprálová, her most interpreted works according to the musical genre, or her place in the French musical institutions. Finally, a broader critique reveals how these observations fit in the institutional structures within the French musical landscape and the negative impact these structures have for the visibility of women composers.

The paper is focusing on historical particularities in close connection with spaces described in terms of geospatial mapping, as enduring places (as recognizable dots on maps). At the same time, different dynamics are to be reckoned with; as such, the once existing stone theatre building in Cluj is considered as a stock of functions and forms tied to processes of the past and the present. On the one hand a geospatial mapping highlights the spatial spreading of Hungarian acting against the backdrop of the ethnically mixed population of the so-called theatre towns in the second half of the 19th century. On the other hand, given the network of theatre scenes established as a consequence of touring companies, the particularity of the theatre in Cluj as it appears, it may be best described by taking into account institutional and artistic perspectives. A parallel between quantitative and qualitative dimensions presents the necessary intertwining of the structural determination (i. e., the theatre as a network element) and artistic career.

In the collection of the University of Warsaw Library, there are three musical sources that testify to the musical culture of the monastery of Canons Regular of the Lateran in Fulnek. The paper focuses on three manuscripts (probably autographs) of sacred vocal-instrumental music by unknown composer Carolus Weldamon (d. 1736). He was a Canon Regular active in the Fulnek monastery in the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries. His compositions from the first decade of the 18th century were obtained by Conventual Franciscans in Głogów monastery in Silesia. The paper contains a biography of the composer and a brief overview of the sources and the music written inside. The Appendix contains a list of organists, cantors, rectors, and musicians associated with the monastery in Fulnek.

The Olomouc opera stage (as was, after all, true for all of those in Austria) was part of a network of provincial theatres, characterised by constant changes in membership. It was typical that, following the end of a season, theatre director would go to Vienna and other larger cultural centres to seek new talented singers. Another decisive factor in getting a contract was the successfulness of the artists' guest performances throughout the season. For small theatres, it was advantageous to establish contracts mainly with talented newcomers who had lower demands in terms of their salaries. Operating a successful theatre business was largely connected with the ability of directors to recognise the latent abilities of inexperienced singers. During certain periods, the German municipal theatre in Olomouc was a seedbed of future stars, helping kick off their glamorous careers. However, national disputes, the hostility of city council members, fires, and epidemics as well as the fickle tastes of the audience could thwart the efforts of even the most experienced theatre entrepreneur and make them decide to try their chances elsewhere. The aim of this paper is to document, through several examples of singers or directors, the usual direction of artistic mobility in Central Europe in the 19th and early 20th century.

Analytical commentaries on Smetana's symphonic poem Z českých luhů a hájů are based on the development of the non-musical programme presented by the composer himself, which was later elaborated on by his admirer V. V. Zelený. The problematic relationship between the musical structure and the non-musical programme is viewed from the perspective of variable reception. Although Smetana assumed that the listeners would work specifically with their own fantasy, the study points out receptive approaches standing in contrast to the original intention and as such being a sad example of the reception of the symphonic poem.

The aim of this study is not only to present Bible songs but also to reveal several new facts that have not been published yet. The research was focused primarily on the foreign performance of songs and related reviews regarding the reception of the work, e.g. new facts about the performance of songs at the Norwich festival which occurred during the composer's lifetime. It also cites a review that includes a quotation of Dvořák's letter (a copy of which was part of a program) that gives us a sense of the composer's attitude to the orchestral arrangement of his songs. The study also points out an existence of yet-to-be-discovered orchestral arrangement of four Biblical songs for the New York Philharmonic Orchestra instrumented by B. Wagenaar for a singing recital by J. Schwarz in December 1922. I believe that thanks to the new facts presented in this study, it will become a valuable contribution to this Dvořák's work.

The development of the rich Rorate repertoire in the Czech lands and Central Europe, based on Advent hymns in the vernacular, was caused by a long tradition of everyday "Rorate" Advent morning masses, which were cultivated by lay religious confraternities and later by parish churches. The Czech Rorate chants, which originated in 16th century Utraquist Bohemia and is still partially alive today, was only one of many forms of this repertoire. Additional layers of the Rorate repertory in Latin and Czech are documented in the Moravian printed and manuscript hymnbooks. Their forms are monophonic and polyphonic, in plainchants, strophic hymns and figural compositions. This regional repertoire has ties with Utraquist and recatholization Bohemia, and at the same time with neighbouring hymnographies. As evidenced by certain Early Modern cancionales in German, Polish, Slovak, Hungarian and Croatian, in Moravia we can find a Czech-language form of the basic Rorate repertory, common to most countries of the former Jagiellonian and later Habsburg commonwealth.

After receiving his diploma from the Schola Cantorum in 1908, Satie embarked on a series of large-scale instrumental and vocal works. These ambitious compositions all utilize innovative intervallic and key relationships that partly derive from earlier cyclical techniques of the late 18th and 19th centuries. This article presents an analysis of the cyclical tendencies in the later music of Erik Satie.

The study deals with a hitherto little-known personality who shaped Brno musical life in the 1750s and 1760s. Wenzel Joseph Hackenwälder grew up in the environment of a cantorial family active in Svitavy from the beginning of the 18th century, where he probably received his basic musical education. He received further general and musical education from the Piarists in Litomyšl and the Jesuits in Olomouc. After joining the Augustinian Order of Eremites in Brno and being ordained a priest (1755), he became the director of the choir as P. Anselm, a position he held for the next 17 years until his untimely death. The paper summarises previously unpublished facts about Hackenwälder's origins and family background. It also discusses his extensive acquisition activities for the music collection of the St. Thomas' Convent Choir, for which he himself acquired many copies of works by composers known and performed at the time, as well as a number of anonymous works. In accordance with the specific form of devotion of the Brno Augustinians, focused on reverence for the image of St. Mary and St. Thomas, these are mainly musical settings of the Loreto litanies. Hackenwälder's personal music collection includes a unique copy of a violin concerto by Carlo Zuccari, made in 1748.

The article deals with the letters of Václav Jan Křtitel Tomášek from the Morawetz Collection, housed in the National Museum - Czech Museum of Music. In a critical edition, it publishes and comments on the letters Tomášek addressed to the publishers Ambrosius Kühnel, Carl Friedrich Peters, and Immanuel Guttentag, as well as to the poet and editor Rudolph Hirsch, Tomášek's pupil Alexander Dreyschock and an unnamed (probably Amelia Illaire to Berlin). The edition also includes an appraisal of the compositions of Josef Zvonař and Tomášek's request for an increase in his annual rent, addressed to Count George Franz August Buquoy in 1829. For the first time, a letter by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, the original of which is considered lost by the current edition of Goethe's correspondence, is published here according to the original.

A chronologically arranged list of Jiří Sehnal's publications from 1952-2022, prepared on the occasion of his 90th birthday.

In the 1870s Eliška Krásnohorská wrote the libretto for the opera Blaník for Zdeněk Fibich. The author based her work on the legends about Mount Blaník, where an army is hiding but will come to the aid of the Czech nation when it is at its worst. These legends were updated in 19th-century Czech culture to meet contemporary national demands - Czech patriots transform themselves into the role of "Blaník knights", the saviours of the nation. Krásnohorská situated the opera's plot in 1623, when the Catholic party won. In her libretto, she made a strong appeal for national unity and a common love for the homeland. The critics of the time mostly praised her libretto, but there were also opinions that reproached her for shortcomings in the dramatic construction (e. g. from Otakar Hostinský). František Duchek's libretto entitled Ctibor Blanický was also written at the same time. This forgotten and unrealised curiosity shows what possibilities the theme of Blaník provided for contemporary opera.

On January 10, 1873, the journal Dalibor predicted for Zdeněk Fibich’s Meluzína that its success would help to spread Fibich’s name within the ‘wider circles of the artistic world’. In retrospect, this prediction might have been a little too optimistic, as, up until this day, Fibich has been acknowledged primarily for his innovative approach to music-dramatic genres. This paper aims to close this research lacuna by shedding light on both Meluzína’s reception and selected compositional-aesthetic features.

This study focuses on the work of the Czech singer Karel Burian at the National Theatre in Prague from 1899 to 1903. The first section deals with Burian’s singing repertoire at the Prague National Theatre and his further work during his stay in Prague. The second section considers musical reviews of Burian’s singing performances at the National Theatre in Prague. The following section is concerned with the income of Burian and his colleagues who worked at the National Theatre. The fourth section focuses on the relationship between Burian and the head of the National Theatre Opera, other artists and visitors to operatic performances during Burian’s work at the Prague National Theatre. The study concludes with the reasons for Burian’s departure from Prague.

In the 1890s, Zdeněk Fibich returned to smaller forms and chamber ensembles after a period in which he devoted himself mainly to symphonic works and opera. In the 1870s he completed two string quartets and a piano quartet, and in 1894 - after a 20-year break - a chamber work of unusual instrumentation was created: the Quintet for piano, violin, clarinet, horn and cello op. 42. This paper characterizes the situation for the creation of music for chamber ensembles in the given period and tries to justify in its context what led Fibich, after works for a large instrumental apparatus, to reduce to a chamber dimension and to choose a unique cast. It summarizes the critical response to the presentation of his work in Bohemia and in the German-speaking area with an emphasis on Vienna and by comparing the reaction there with the local acceptance of the works of some of Fibich's (not only Czech) contemporaries.

The Prague composer Erwin Schulhoff (1894-1942) is one of the most innovative musicians of the first half of the 20th century and was trained in Prague, Vienna, Leipzig, and Cologne. After the end of World War I, he dealt with Expressionism and Dadaism in his work. During his time in Dresden in 1919/20, he also sought contacts to the visual arts. In 1923 he returned to his hometown of Prague, found no permanent job and, in his unadjusted manner, got caught between the trenches of Czech and German culture. His increasing sympathy for communism brought with it the desire to emigrate to the Soviet Union after the German occupation of the Czech Republic in 1939, which was prevented by the German invasion in 1941. As a Soviet citizen, he and his son were arrested and interned in Wülzburg / Upper Bavaria. Schulhoff died there in 1942 as the son of a German mother and a Jewish father.

During recent decades historians and musicologists have devoted major attention to the harsh judgments of Zdeněk Nejedlý regarding Antonín Dvořák, devoting even one whole book to this topic. They have engaged in speculations about the causes of these judgments in the aesthetic, social, and political context of the time. It seems, however, that one of these causes, evidently the original cause and perhaps the main cause, has not yet been identified as such. To recognize it we must be aware that although Nejedlý's best-known condemnations of Dvořák come from the time of the "Battles over Dvořák" that broke out in 1912, his positions in this matter were essentially fully developed already much earlier, at the very beginning of his career. For example, in 1903 he wrote: "Dvořák lacked the artistic intelligence to create new forms." Critical is the fact that Nejedlý denigrated Dvořák even earlier, in his book about Zdeněk Fibich published in 1901, where many passages surprise us with assertions that in harmony, in subtle rhythms, in polyphony, in melody, in "musical technique," and in orchestration, inferior to Fibich was not only Dvořák but also the composer best known as Nejedlý's hero: Smetana. Nejedlý had published part of this book in advance in instalments in a periodical, late in 1900 shortly after Fibich's death, with an introduction that makes even clearer his adoration of this composer not only as an artist (with whom he himself had studied composition) but as a human being, and his bitter conviction that Fibich had not received the recognition he deserved. Later in the book he attempts to explain Dvořák's greater career success by the assertion that his music is "much simpler" and that England, which conferred such glory on him, was an "unmusical" country. From these observations and others we may conclude that Nejedlý felt the need to criticize Dvořák as the one who had received recognition that rightly belonged to Fibich. And in part Nejedlý was correct: even if we perhaps think Dvořák was a greater composer, it is indisputable that at the end of the nineteenth century his fame unjustly left Fibich in the shadow-which today is even more the case than then.

In nineteenth-century Belgium the port city of Antwerp was the epicentre of the Flemish musical national movement that took a stand against the francophone dominance in the Belgian music scene and advocated a return to the roots of Flemish music. This movement of music nationalism was initiated and given a theoretical base by composer and conductor Peter Benoit (1834-1901), the founder and first director of the Royal Flemish Conservatory in Antwerp. The Flemish musical movement sympathised with Czech musical nationalism because of the common struggle for a recognition of their language and for emancipation. Benoit would incorporate 'Bohemian' music in his plans as the organizer of the music and concert scene and as the head of the Conservatory, just like he did with the musical culture of other cultural regions which were fighting a linguistic battle and trying to achieve emancipation. The interest in Czech music and the belief in music drama as an innovative operatic genre led Benoit and especially his student and assistant Edward Keurvels (1853-1916) to perform Zdeněk Fibich's trilogy Hippodamia in Antwerp, a plan that was not completely successful. In addition, Keurvels often performed orchestral works by Fibich and Bedřich Smetana, and also the latter's The Bartered Bride. The great interest that Antwerp musical life showed at the turn of the century for Czech national music would disappear after the First World War because of Keurvels' death.

The study examines the forms of institutionalized popularization of Anglo-American rock in the context of Brno music clubs at the time of normalization (1969-1989). Based on unpublished sources and oral historical research, the text shows the specifics of the rock scene in the south Moravian region, while contradicting the dominant interpretation of the history of rock music behind the Iron Curtain primarily as a political force.

For historical reasons, one could only speak of "Sudeten German composers" in relation to a narrow period from the end of the 19th up to and including the first half of the 20th century. But even then, the term is problematic because on the one hand it is highly politicized, i.e. inevitably projected onto the conflicts between Germans and Czechs, more precisely on the crimes of the National Socialists and their supporters in the 1930s and during the Second World War, and on the other hand, there seems to be no homogeneous group of "Sudeten German composers" that justifies this collective term. Based on the short portraits of five composer - Heinrich Rietsch (1860-1927), Rudolf Leberl (1884-1952), Hans Winterberg (1901-1991), Heinrich Simbriger (1903-1976) and Roland Leistner-Mayer (born 1945) - individual creative concepts outlined with their different tangents to the idea and milieu of Sudeten Germanism.