Author details how Czechs overlaid politics onto Mozart
LAWRENCE – Even though Mozart lived mostly in Vienna and only visited Prague four times, German- and Czech-speaking residents of Prague have fought over his legacy ever since, trying to make it support their nationalistic beliefs.
Martin Nedbal demonstrates how it happened in his new book, “Mozart’s Operas and National Politics: Canon Formation in Prague from 1791 to the Present” (Cambridge University Press).
“The main point of the book is that art is always political,” said the University of Kansas associate professor of musicology. “A lot of the concepts that we believe are based on artistic merit, such as the idea that there is a group of masterpieces by master composers that are a part of the canon of Western art music, are actually grounded in political as opposed to aesthetic considerations.”
Mozart premiered his operas “Don Giovanni” in 1787 and “La clemenza di Tito” in 1791 in Prague’s Estates Theatre, and he stayed in the city for a few weeks during each of his visits.
Nedbal, a native of the Czech Republic, said Praguers have never forgotten.
“If you go to Prague and take any tour of the major sites, you will hear about Mozart frequently,” Nedbal said. “All the guides will tell you, ‘This is the house where Mozart lived. And this is the theatre where "Don Giovanni," his most famous opera, was performed.' And all of this is because Prague loved Mozart and Mozart loved Prague, and Prague is the most important Mozart city in the world.”
Nedbal wrote that Prague’s citizens issued varying claims to be the deepest and most authentic lovers of the great musical genius in to assert one of three main identities:
- Bohemian, seeing themselves as belonging to the historical territory that forms the western part of today’s Czech Republic
- Czech
- German
“It’s a form of cultural appropriation,” Nedbal said.
He wrote that it was part of a campaign by these factions to distinguish themselves as the preeminent national group at a time of shifting political power. For instance, two separate, monumental theatres — one dedicated to Czech repertoire (the National) and the other to German (New German) — were established in Prague in the 1880s, each using performances of Mozart’s operas to emphasize their group’s enlightenment and cultural superiority.
Both the National Theatre and the former New German theatre, now the State Opera, remain standing, as does the Estates Theatre. But all the originally German theatre institutions have long since been in Czech hands.
“I am constantly reminded of the history of 19th century Central Europe by what is now happening in Ukraine,” Nedbal said. “You have this mixture between Ukrainians and Russians, and for a long time many people residing in Ukraine were not really sure which nation they belonged to.
“That is very similar to how it was in Bohemia in the 18th and early 19th centuries, where you had people who spoke Czech and German, but it didn't really matter because most people viewed themselves as Bohemians. And all that changed in the 19th century, when it suddenly became important to decide whether someone is a Czech or a German. And then culture played a significant role in this identification.”
Nedbal said these tensions reached a peak in the aftermath of World War II, when hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans were expelled from what eventually became the Czech Republic.
And all the while, the forces behind this process of ethnic stratification used their love of Mozart to advance their causes, Nedbal wrote. The scholar said he used the COVID-19 lockdown to pore over the now digitized critical responses to Mozart’s premieres and productions in historical newspapers online. Nedbal compared production notes from different eras to see what sections of the operas were cut, how they were translated and how different generations of Czech and German critics explained the value of these works to their readers.
Not that Mozart intended any of this. But Nedbal said it’s less important, in many respects, what the composer intended than how his works were received.
“My claim,” Nedbal said, “is that this 'monumental-ization' and creating of the musical canon was related to nationalism, because in Central Europe these artworks of the past were important not just for their artistic merits but also because they somehow could be seen as connected to a national past and the cultural traditions of these ethnic groups that were being created in that time.”
Image: In January 2023, Martin Nedbal (far right) led a group of KU students on a tour of the Estates Theatre in Prague. Credit: Courtesy Martin Nedbal.
Inset: 1819 portrait of Mozart by Barbara Krafft, public domain.