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Article Excerpt
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The phrase "Czech music" or "Czech music culture" is rightly associated first and foremost with music written by composers on the territory of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia. Yet we need to remember that it has a wider range. In addition to Czech composers who spent some time of their life abroad, we might also mention Dvorak's "American period" (1892-1895) or Smetana's "Swedish period" (1856-1859), and as well as considering composers who migrated or emigrated, we must take into account the musical life of Czech minorities beyond the frontiers of the Czech Lands. Among the musicians of such minorities, the degree of identification with specifically Czech culture and background varied from individual to individual. Some identified with their "native" land very strongly and maintained contacts there, others were absorbed into the new environment, while yet others became part of the musical cultures of two or more nations. It is well known that not just Czechs but Americans too think of Antonin Dvorak as a founder of their modern national musical tradition.
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What do Czechs today associate with the phrase "The Czech minority abroad"? Probably mainly rather romantically coloured TV documentaries about the life of the Czechs in the Banat, in Rithenia (Sub-Carpathian Ukraine), in Volhynia, although we may perhaps also think of the charming old-fashioned Czech and well-ironed folk costumes of several generations of Czecho-Americans. At all events, in my experience modern Czechs rarely remember the Czech minority in Austria, even though at the turn of the 19th/20th century Vienna was the city with the greatest number of Czechs and Moravians (unofficial estimate--1/4 million) and with a highly developed structure of Czech associations and societies. These societies and clubs were, as they still are, a means of preserving original national/ethnic identity. In 1905 the Czech-Viennese historian and journalist Josef Karasek compared their role for the minority to that of the state or community for the nation, and added that all the progress made by Czechs as an ethnic group in Vienna had been achieved precisely thanks to the principle of association.
A decline in the sense of separate identity among Viennese Czechs occurred as a result of the Germanising measures associated with the mayoralty of Karl Lueger (1844-1910) and the period of the fascist regime, and subsequently also because after 1948 three different groups of Czechs lived side by side in Vienna, only one of which--the "old inhabitants" born in Vienna--systematically cultivated their identity in the tradition of the intense Czech patriotism of the national revival and Masarykian "Czechoslovakism". The emigrants who arrived after 1948 did not integrate with the original Czech minority fully, and after 1968 they tended to stress their difference from the new wave of immigrants following the Soviet invasion. More than a few of the latter were from the ranks of the communists, and while many of them "renounced" communism after the invasion, this did not bring them much closer or do much to endear them to Czechs who had emigrated in response to the original communist take-over. We can find all kinds of examples of the gradual assimilation and diminution of the Czech element in Vienna from 1918 to the present. The most marked is the drop in the number of Czech-Viennese societies, Czech religious services and the erosion to a mere remnant of the once laboriously created and excellent structure of the Czech education/school system in Vienna. Identification with Czech origins meant taking on oneself the social stigma of a nation that had voluntarily turned its back on the West and joined the Eastern bloc in 1948 and the stigma of a people traditionally regarded by the German population merely as a source of cheap labour and in its way inferior. To put it briefly, today only a few thousand people in Austria declare their nationality to be Czech, but the telephone directory or the nameplates on doorbells are more than eloquent testimony of the many waves of migration from Bohemia and Moravia. The identity of the remnant of the minority is today affected by various different factors: free cross-border movement between the Czech Republic and Austria, and free access to the media means that the previous barriers to communication with their original homeland have now fallen entirely, but bad Czech-Austrian relations have complicated the minority's life in Austria over the long term.
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Czech Vienna as a Musicological Theme
After this general introduction let us get straight to the question of what we actually know about the musical life of Viennese Czechs in the period 1840-1939. As yet musicology has provided us with no comprehensive account, beyond a basic framework, of this "golden age", its development curtailed by the 2nd World War and the subsequent closing of the frontiers of Czechoslovakia. Generally we can say that the Dictionary of Czech Music Culture (Prague 1995) has opened up a new view of Czech minorities abroad and contacts with the cultures of other nations. (1) This will be clear to any Czech reader who for example looks at the dictionary entries on "Luzice"/"Lusatia" (the region in Saxony and Germany settled by a Slav population) or indeed the entry on "Viden"/"Vienna". I choose these two examples deliberately, because years ago I started to work on these themes in the interests of overcoming the "backwardness" of research on the area. (2) There has been a comparable dearth of musicological research on other Czech minorities, for example in America, the Balkans, Poland, Germany, the Ukraine, Russia, Australia, South America and elsewhere. The long-term failure of Czech musicology to take up the subject of Czech minorities abroad is evident from just a brief glance at the content of various works on the history of Czech music. The theme of minorities is entirely overlooked in them, while the long out-dated concept of the "Czech musical emigration" (the term for the migration of Czech musicians in the 18th and earlier 19th century), relates to the subject of minorities only on a superficial view. This obsolete concept is problematic in a number of ways: it concentrated on individuals, it involved little attention to the real national identity of the people concerned, and even the term "emigration" was incorrectly employed in many cases since in the 19th century no Czech could be said to be "emigrating" from e.g. Prague to the capital of the Habsburg monarchy, but only to have migrated from one territory of the same state to another.
Let us immediately pose the question of the causes of this unsatisfactory state of musicological research, bearing in mind that many "Czecho-Viennese" patterns can usefully be applied to Czech minorities in other states as well. The main reason lies in complications caused by the political-social conditions. Czech musicology never comprehensively addressed the subject of Czech musical Vienna: in the inter-war period the discipline set itself other goals, and after 1948 there was no political interest in the theme. Only a few contributions on subsidiary themes were produced in Vienna itself. These were a matter of ventures into as it were amateur lexicography (e.g. Jan Heyer's series Czech musical viennensia in the Czech minority's Dunaj Review Vienna 1940, 1941), descriptions of certain periods (e.g. the famous Slav balls around 1848), (3) profiles of distinguished figures, and some valuable information contained in chapters on musicians in the literature about Czech Vienna. I emphasise that the great majority of these contributions came from the period before the 2nd World War and that none of the authors had a musicological education! The activity of these "enthusiasts", some of whom moved to Czechoslovakia after 1918 and promoted the idea of Czech Vienna, has left us a kind of fragment. Another reason for the earlier lack of interest on the part of Czech musicologists was that they had other priorities and the scholars concerned probably did not consider the theme to be purely Czech. The musical life of Vienna was in their eyes like an "adopted child" or an orphan left by relatives, to whom we have a moral duty to provide basic care, but not to do anything more. Here it seems obvious to ask how the theme appears in Austrian musicology. In fact, the musical life of the Czech minority does not appear at all as a theme in itself in the literature...
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