Zdenek Nejedlý
Encyclopedia
Zdeněk Nejedlý was a Czech
musicologist
, music critic, author, and politician whose ideas dominated the cultural life of what is now the Czech Republic
for most of the twentieth century. Although he started out merely reviewing opera
s in Prague newspapers in 1901, by the interwar period his status had risen to an authoritative level, guided primarily by socialist political views. This combination of left wing politics and cultural leadership made him a central figure in the early years of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic
after 1948, where he became the communists' first Minister of Culture and Education. In this position he was responsible for creating a state-wide education curriculum based on his own biases, and has been strongly implicated in the so-called "show trials" of the early 1950s, especially those involving the purge of university professors at that time.
composer and pedagogue Roman Nejedlý (1844–1920), Zdeněk Nejedlý had the good fortune to be born in Litomyšl, the historic birthplace of the composer Bedřich Smetana
, the so-called "Father of Czech music" and a significant figurehead in the Czechs' nineteenth-century National Revival
movement. His formal education in music began with Josef Šťastný at the Litomyšl Gymnasium (1888–1896), alongside instruction in Czech history. In 1896 he moved to Prague to study at Charles University, where he attended lectures in positivist history with Jaroslav Goll and music aesthetics with Otakar Hostinský
, finally receiving his doctorate in 1900. Hostinský, a great proponent of Smetana's music, suggested that Nejedlý study composition and music theory
with his like-minded colleague, Zdeněk Fibich
, whose personality and tastes had a profound effect on his young student. Although his first publications were devoted to Czech history, after Fibich's death in 1900 Nejedlý devoted himself to musicology, authoring a monograph
entitled Zdenko Fibich, Founder of the Scenic Melodrama in 1901 as a first attempt at gaining greater recognition for his mentor. That these efforts were directed against the musical establishment of Prague (whom he felt had victimized Smetana, Fibich, and Hostinský) was made clear by his first foray into music criticism that same year, in an attack on Antonín Dvořák
's opera
Rusalka
shortly after its premiere.
These factional divisions were to inspire Nejedlý throughout his whole career; in many ways he was personally responsible for perpetuating them for future generations, long after their currency in Czech musical society. His 1903 History of Czech Music drew distinct battle lines between the Conservatory students of Dvořák and the supposed inheritors of Smetana, including the composers Josef Bohuslav Foerster
, Otakar Ostrčil
, and Otakar Zich
, all personal friends of Nejedlý's on the outs with the Prague establishment. Over the next decade he produced an extraordinary amount of writing on music, including monographs on pre-Hussite
song (1904, 1907, and 1913), Smetana's operas 1908, Czech Modern Opera Since Smetana (1911, notoriously excluding Dvořák), Hostinský (1907 and 1910), and Gustav Mahler
(1913). In 1908 he began to lecture in musicology at Charles University, forming a circle of devoted young colleagues that included Zich and Vladimír Helfert
.
in 1913, Nejedlý sought to end the careers of composers who did not conform to his pro-Smetana views of modern tradition and social responsibility: other notable targets included Josef Suk
. Meanwhile, these tactics came back to haunt Nejedlý's own protegés, especially Ostrčil as director of Prague's National Theatre
and Zich as a modernist opera composer.
After the legalization of the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1921, Nejedlý became one of its earliest and most outspoken members. With the exception of his Smetana journal, he turned away from mainstream journal publications, focusing on the Communist daily Rudé právo
and his own political journal, Var (Boiling, 1921–30). In these he chastised the interwar Czechoslovak Republic
, its president Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, and various other leaders; the last issue of Var was taken up with a detailed defense of Alban Berg
's opera Wozzeck
, which Ostrčil had produced in 1926. By this point, however, his many musicology students were among the main critics in Prague, carrying on his work on his behalf. After the close of Var, his main involvements in music included a short polemic with Novák
and monographs on Ostrčil (1935, to commemorate his friend's death), the National Theatre (1936), and Soviet music (1937).
, where he supposedly helped Czech resistance activities from afar. At this time, his son Vít Nejedlý (1912–45), whose short career in Prague had focused on Communist agitprop
pieces and workers' choruses, was involved with a Czech brigade attached to the Red Army
, whose band he attempted to emulate. After the end of the war (and Vít's death of typhus after the battle of Dukla
, January 1945), Zdeněk Nejedlý returned to Prague to participate in the postwar government. Initially in Eduard Beneš's Third Republic he was made Minister of Education, Arts, and Sciences, but this was exchanged for Social Security by 1946. After the February Revolution of 1948 he returned to Culture and Education, a post he kept until 1953. These crucial years saw the implementation of a state-wide curriculum at all levels of education: his revisionist
stance toward Czech history included down-playing the achievements of interwar democracy as a series of bourgeois trends that were ultimately damaging to society. It was also Nejedlý's chance to promote his passion for Smetana and his "lineage", now enacted as state law. To this latter end he entered a new stage of retrospective publishing, with works like The History of My Smetanism, On Czech Culture, and especially The Communists—Inheritors of the Grand Progressive Tradition of the Czech Nation. These works and especially their ideology were retained, in some form or another, in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic all the way until the Velvet Revolution
in 1989. As such, Nejedlý's name was associated with totalitarian hegemony
by at least two generations of students, many of whom had no connection to his musicology.
and Milada Horáková
. For Nejedlý, this atmosphere provided an opportunity to settle old scores in the academic and musical community. Over ten years before, in the mid-1930s, Nejedlý's public attacks against artists such as Leoš Janáček
had turned many of his former adherents against him, most notably Vladimír Helfert, whose work as a musicologist had outstripped his teacher's, and Josef Hutter, who had published on Ostrčil and Zich. When Helfert published a landmark monograph, Czech Modern Music: A Study of Czech Musical Creativity (1936) that included a scathing attack on ideological bias in music criticism, Nejedlý expected his remaining followers to shun Helfert and condemn the publication. Hutter publicly sided with Helfert. During the Nazi occupation, both men were imprisoned by the Nazis: Helfert for Communist resistance (for which he was severely tortured, dying in May, 1945) and Hutter for pro-Democratic resistance. After the war, Hutter returned to Charles University, but was expelled in 1950 and arrested on trumped-up charges. He was sentenced to thirty-nine years imprisonment, but served only six, having been released during an amnesty. His health broken, Hutter died in 1959, three years before his former teacher.
Zdeněk Nejedlý died on March 9, 1962, and was buried in the Slavín
cemetery at Prague's Vyšehrad
castle, reseved for Czech heroes and significant representatives of Czech culture. His grave is near those of Smetana, Ostrčil, and his son, Vít.
Czech people
Czechs, or Czech people are a western Slavic people of Central Europe, living predominantly in the Czech Republic. Small populations of Czechs also live in Slovakia, Austria, the United States, the United Kingdom, Chile, Argentina, Canada, Germany, Russia and other countries...
musicologist
Musicology
Musicology is the scholarly study of music. The word is used in narrow, broad and intermediate senses. In the narrow sense, musicology is confined to the music history of Western culture...
, music critic, author, and politician whose ideas dominated the cultural life of what is now the Czech Republic
Czech Republic
The Czech Republic is a landlocked country in Central Europe. The country is bordered by Poland to the northeast, Slovakia to the east, Austria to the south, and Germany to the west and northwest....
for most of the twentieth century. Although he started out merely reviewing opera
Opera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
s in Prague newspapers in 1901, by the interwar period his status had risen to an authoritative level, guided primarily by socialist political views. This combination of left wing politics and cultural leadership made him a central figure in the early years of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic
Czechoslovak Socialist Republic
The Czechoslovak Socialist Republic was the official name of Czechoslovakia from 1960 until end of 1989 , a Soviet satellite state of the Eastern Bloc....
after 1948, where he became the communists' first Minister of Culture and Education. In this position he was responsible for creating a state-wide education curriculum based on his own biases, and has been strongly implicated in the so-called "show trials" of the early 1950s, especially those involving the purge of university professors at that time.
Early Life and Career
Son of the East BohemianPardubice Region
Pardubice Region is an administrative unit of the Czech Republic, located mainly in the eastern part of its historical region of Bohemia, with a small part in northwestern Moravia. It is named after its capital Pardubice. "There are a total of 452 municipalities in the region...
composer and pedagogue Roman Nejedlý (1844–1920), Zdeněk Nejedlý had the good fortune to be born in Litomyšl, the historic birthplace of the composer Bedřich Smetana
Bedrich Smetana
Bedřich Smetana was a Czech composer who pioneered the development of a musical style which became closely identified with his country's aspirations to independent statehood. He is thus widely regarded in his homeland as the father of Czech music...
, the so-called "Father of Czech music" and a significant figurehead in the Czechs' nineteenth-century National Revival
Czech National Revival
Czech National Revival was a cultural movement, which took part in the Czech lands during the 18th and 19th century. The purpose of this movement was to revive Czech language, culture and national identity...
movement. His formal education in music began with Josef Šťastný at the Litomyšl Gymnasium (1888–1896), alongside instruction in Czech history. In 1896 he moved to Prague to study at Charles University, where he attended lectures in positivist history with Jaroslav Goll and music aesthetics with Otakar Hostinský
Otakar Hostinský
Otakar Hostinský was a Czech historian, musicologist, and professor of musical aesthetics...
, finally receiving his doctorate in 1900. Hostinský, a great proponent of Smetana's music, suggested that Nejedlý study composition and music theory
Music theory
Music theory is the study of how music works. It examines the language and notation of music. It seeks to identify patterns and structures in composers' techniques across or within genres, styles, or historical periods...
with his like-minded colleague, Zdeněk Fibich
Zdenek Fibich
Zdeněk Fibich was a Czech composer of classical music. Among his compositions are chamber works , symphonic poems, three symphonies, at least seven operas , melodramas including the substantial trilogy Hippodamia,...
, whose personality and tastes had a profound effect on his young student. Although his first publications were devoted to Czech history, after Fibich's death in 1900 Nejedlý devoted himself to musicology, authoring a monograph
Monograph
A monograph is a work of writing upon a single subject, usually by a single author.It is often a scholarly essay or learned treatise, and may be released in the manner of a book or journal article. It is by definition a single document that forms a complete text in itself...
entitled Zdenko Fibich, Founder of the Scenic Melodrama in 1901 as a first attempt at gaining greater recognition for his mentor. That these efforts were directed against the musical establishment of Prague (whom he felt had victimized Smetana, Fibich, and Hostinský) was made clear by his first foray into music criticism that same year, in an attack on Antonín Dvořák
Antonín Dvorák
Antonín Leopold Dvořák was a Czech composer of late Romantic music, who employed the idioms of the folk music of Moravia and his native Bohemia. Dvořák’s own style is sometimes called "romantic-classicist synthesis". His works include symphonic, choral and chamber music, concerti, operas and many...
's opera
Opera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
Rusalka
Rusalka
In Slavic mythology, a rusalka was a female ghost, water nymph, succubus, or mermaid-like demon that dwelled in a waterway....
shortly after its premiere.
These factional divisions were to inspire Nejedlý throughout his whole career; in many ways he was personally responsible for perpetuating them for future generations, long after their currency in Czech musical society. His 1903 History of Czech Music drew distinct battle lines between the Conservatory students of Dvořák and the supposed inheritors of Smetana, including the composers Josef Bohuslav Foerster
Josef Bohuslav Foerster
Josef Bohuslav Foerster was a Czech composer of classical music. He is often referred to as J. B. Foerster. The surname is sometimes spelled Förster.- Life :...
, Otakar Ostrčil
Otakar Ostrcil
Otakar Ostrčil was a Czech composer and conductor. He is noted for symphonic works Impromptu, Suite in C Minor, and Symfonietta, and in his opera compositions Poupě and Honzovo království.-Compositional career:Ostrčil was born in Prague, where he spent his entire life, as it was the center of the...
, and Otakar Zich
Otakar Zich
Otakar Zich was a distinguished Czech composer and aesthetician.- Biography :...
, all personal friends of Nejedlý's on the outs with the Prague establishment. Over the next decade he produced an extraordinary amount of writing on music, including monographs on pre-Hussite
Hussite
The Hussites were a Christian movement following the teachings of Czech reformer Jan Hus , who became one of the forerunners of the Protestant Reformation...
song (1904, 1907, and 1913), Smetana's operas 1908, Czech Modern Opera Since Smetana (1911, notoriously excluding Dvořák), Hostinský (1907 and 1910), and Gustav Mahler
Gustav Mahler
Gustav Mahler was a late-Romantic Austrian composer and one of the leading conductors of his generation. He was born in the village of Kalischt, Bohemia, in what was then Austria-Hungary, now Kaliště in the Czech Republic...
(1913). In 1908 he began to lecture in musicology at Charles University, forming a circle of devoted young colleagues that included Zich and Vladimír Helfert
Vladimír Helfert
Vladimír Helfert was an important Czech musicologist in the interwar period. Although his early career as a music critic was clouded by the negative influence of his teacher, Zdeněk Nejedlý, with whom he studied at Charles University...
.
Polemics and the Interwar Years
When Nejedlý's music reviews for Prague's daily newspapers grew distasteful in their anti-Conservatory bias, he and his followers were precipitously banned from publication, forcing the group to found their own journal, Smetana, which ran for sixteen years, 1910-1927. From this vantage point Nejedlý launched the so-called "Dvořák Affair" (1911–1914), in which he sought to attack the legacy of the great composer; any contemporary artists who sided against him (especially the 31 musicians who signed a public petition in 1912) became the focus of fierce personal attacks. Beginning with Vítězslav NovákVítezslav Novák
Vítězslav Novák was one of the most well-respected Czech composers and pedagogues, almost singlehandedly founding a mid-century Czech school of composition...
in 1913, Nejedlý sought to end the careers of composers who did not conform to his pro-Smetana views of modern tradition and social responsibility: other notable targets included Josef Suk
Josef Suk
Josef Suk may refer to:*Josef Suk *Josef Suk , the elder composer's grandson...
. Meanwhile, these tactics came back to haunt Nejedlý's own protegés, especially Ostrčil as director of Prague's National Theatre
National Theatre (Prague)
The National Theatre in Prague is known as the Alma Mater of Czech opera, and as the national monument of Czech history and art.The National Theatre belongs to the most important Czech cultural institutions, with a rich artistic tradition which was created and maintained by the most distinguished...
and Zich as a modernist opera composer.
After the legalization of the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1921, Nejedlý became one of its earliest and most outspoken members. With the exception of his Smetana journal, he turned away from mainstream journal publications, focusing on the Communist daily Rudé právo
Rudé právo
Rudé právo was the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia....
and his own political journal, Var (Boiling, 1921–30). In these he chastised the interwar Czechoslovak Republic
Czechoslovak Republic
Czechoslovak Republic was the official name of Czechoslovakia between 1918 and 1938 and between 1945 and 1960. See*First Czechoslovak Republic*Second Czechoslovak Republic...
, its president Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, and various other leaders; the last issue of Var was taken up with a detailed defense of Alban Berg
Alban Berg
Alban Maria Johannes Berg was an Austrian composer. He was a member of the Second Viennese School with Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, and produced compositions that combined Mahlerian Romanticism with a personal adaptation of Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique.-Early life:Berg was born in...
's opera Wozzeck
Wozzeck
Wozzeck is the first opera by the Austrian composer Alban Berg. It was composed between 1914 and 1922 and first performed in 1925. The opera is based on the drama Woyzeck left incomplete by the German playwright Georg Büchner at his death. Berg attended the first production in Vienna of Büchner's...
, which Ostrčil had produced in 1926. By this point, however, his many musicology students were among the main critics in Prague, carrying on his work on his behalf. After the close of Var, his main involvements in music included a short polemic with Novák
Vítezslav Novák
Vítězslav Novák was one of the most well-respected Czech composers and pedagogues, almost singlehandedly founding a mid-century Czech school of composition...
and monographs on Ostrčil (1935, to commemorate his friend's death), the National Theatre (1936), and Soviet music (1937).
Wartime and Postwar Communism
During the Nazi occupation of the Czech Lands, the Nejedlý family fled to the Soviet UnionSoviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
, where he supposedly helped Czech resistance activities from afar. At this time, his son Vít Nejedlý (1912–45), whose short career in Prague had focused on Communist agitprop
Agitprop
Agitprop is derived from agitation and propaganda, and describes stage plays, pamphlets, motion pictures and other art forms with an explicitly political message....
pieces and workers' choruses, was involved with a Czech brigade attached to the Red Army
Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army started out as the Soviet Union's revolutionary communist combat groups during the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922. It grew into the national army of the Soviet Union. By the 1930s the Red Army was among the largest armies in history.The "Red Army" name refers to...
, whose band he attempted to emulate. After the end of the war (and Vít's death of typhus after the battle of Dukla
Dukla
Dukla ; , Duklya] is a town and an eponymous municipality in southeastern Poland, in the Subcarpathian Voivodship. The town is populated by 2,127 people . while the total population of the commune containing the town and the villages surrounding it is 16,640...
, January 1945), Zdeněk Nejedlý returned to Prague to participate in the postwar government. Initially in Eduard Beneš's Third Republic he was made Minister of Education, Arts, and Sciences, but this was exchanged for Social Security by 1946. After the February Revolution of 1948 he returned to Culture and Education, a post he kept until 1953. These crucial years saw the implementation of a state-wide curriculum at all levels of education: his revisionist
Historical revisionism
In historiography, historical revisionism is the reinterpretation of orthodox views on evidence, motivations, and decision-making processes surrounding a historical event...
stance toward Czech history included down-playing the achievements of interwar democracy as a series of bourgeois trends that were ultimately damaging to society. It was also Nejedlý's chance to promote his passion for Smetana and his "lineage", now enacted as state law. To this latter end he entered a new stage of retrospective publishing, with works like The History of My Smetanism, On Czech Culture, and especially The Communists—Inheritors of the Grand Progressive Tradition of the Czech Nation. These works and especially their ideology were retained, in some form or another, in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic all the way until the Velvet Revolution
Velvet Revolution
The Velvet Revolution or Gentle Revolution was a non-violent revolution in Czechoslovakia that took place from November 17 – December 29, 1989...
in 1989. As such, Nejedlý's name was associated with totalitarian hegemony
Hegemony
Hegemony is an indirect form of imperial dominance in which the hegemon rules sub-ordinate states by the implied means of power rather than direct military force. In Ancient Greece , hegemony denoted the politico–military dominance of a city-state over other city-states...
by at least two generations of students, many of whom had no connection to his musicology.
The Show Trials and Josef Hutter
After approximately two years of Communist dictatorship, the Czechoslovak Communist Party began a purge of its own party, most notoriously manifested in the arrest and execution of Rudolf SlánskýRudolf Slánský
Rudolf Slánský was a Czech Communist politician. Holding the post of the party's General Secretary after World War II, he was one of the leading creators and organizers of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia...
and Milada Horáková
Milada Horáková
Dr. Milada Horáková was a Czech politician executed by Communists on charges of conspiracy and treason.- Biography :...
. For Nejedlý, this atmosphere provided an opportunity to settle old scores in the academic and musical community. Over ten years before, in the mid-1930s, Nejedlý's public attacks against artists such as Leoš Janáček
Leoš Janácek
Leoš Janáček was a Czech composer, musical theorist, folklorist, publicist and teacher. He was inspired by Moravian and all Slavic folk music to create an original, modern musical style. Until 1895 he devoted himself mainly to folkloristic research and his early musical output was influenced by...
had turned many of his former adherents against him, most notably Vladimír Helfert, whose work as a musicologist had outstripped his teacher's, and Josef Hutter, who had published on Ostrčil and Zich. When Helfert published a landmark monograph, Czech Modern Music: A Study of Czech Musical Creativity (1936) that included a scathing attack on ideological bias in music criticism, Nejedlý expected his remaining followers to shun Helfert and condemn the publication. Hutter publicly sided with Helfert. During the Nazi occupation, both men were imprisoned by the Nazis: Helfert for Communist resistance (for which he was severely tortured, dying in May, 1945) and Hutter for pro-Democratic resistance. After the war, Hutter returned to Charles University, but was expelled in 1950 and arrested on trumped-up charges. He was sentenced to thirty-nine years imprisonment, but served only six, having been released during an amnesty. His health broken, Hutter died in 1959, three years before his former teacher.
Zdeněk Nejedlý died on March 9, 1962, and was buried in the Slavín
Vyšehrad cemetery
Established in 1869 on the grounds of Vyšehrad Castle in Prague, Czech Republic, the Vyšehrad cemetery is the final resting place of many composers, artists, sculptors, writers, and those from the world of science and politics...
cemetery at Prague's Vyšehrad
Vyšehrad
Vyšehrad is a castle located in the city of Prague, Czech Republic. It was probably built in the 10th century, on a hill over the Vltava River...
castle, reseved for Czech heroes and significant representatives of Czech culture. His grave is near those of Smetana, Ostrčil, and his son, Vít.