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Vitezslav Novak: 5th December 1870-18th July 1949.

Article Excerpt
Life and Work

Following the founding generation of composers of new Czech music (Bedrich Smetana, 1824-1884; Antonin Dvorak, 1841-1904) a group of other important composers came to the fore in the last decade of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. Throughout Europe programmes and individuals were emerging all loosely linked by various concepts of modernity, involving reflection on all areas of life--politics, economics, technology, science, the position of man, culture and art--and critical reaction to change in the past century. In the Czech Lands one aspect of the new wave was a new philosophy among poets and writers (known as the Manifesto of the Czech Modern Movement, 1895), who believed that the main imperative of their art should be to overcome traditional idyllism and narrow patriarchal nationalism through freedom of creation, critical thinking and stress on individualism: "artist, give your work your blood, your brain, your whole self--you, your brain, your blood will live and breath in it, and it will live through them ..." The idea of constant progress, expressing itself in the conquest of ever new areas of subject-matter and spirited innovation in technique, was also elevated to a principle by the aesthetician and musicologist Otakar Hostinsky (1894).

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In this process of reorientation Vitezslav Novak was in his way a central and (together with Josef Suk, 1874-1935) leading figure. It also, of course, involved the older composers Josef Bohuslav Foerster (1859-1951), who joined the movement in a rather more traditionalist spirit, and Leos Janacek (1854-1928), who at a late age (essentially not until after 1916) surprisingly became a trailbreaker in 20th-century Czech music. (The younger Otakar Ostrcil (1879-1935) only matured in the years after the 1st World War). Nonetheless, at the very least up to the end of the 1930s it was Novak who fulfilled the special function of "axial personality" of the Czech modern movement in music in the sense that it was he who was the meaningful epicentre of the polarisation of the Czech composers of the day. To put it in simplified terms, we might say that Novak's friendly rivalry with J. Suk, "friendly antagonism" with L. Janacek and persevering parallel efforts in the field of vocal music with J. B. Foerstr etc. has deeper meaning for the three-dimensional relief and dynamics of the music of the time. By comparison, the Suk--Janacek--Foerster relationships are mutually tangential and tell us little.

Novak's biography is not particularly dramatic in any way, and perhaps we can simply note that his path to music and musical education was rather more complicated than that of Suk or Foerster, whose own father was a musician and a composer.

Vitezslav Novak was born on the 5th if December 1870 in Kamenice nad Lipou in South Bohemia. He was christened Viktor (Augustin Rudolf), and only later adopted the name Vitezslav as a professional "pseudonym". He grew up in the not very affluent family of a small-town doctor (his father Jakub Novak died in 1882). He attended academic high school 1881-1889 in...

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