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Article Excerpt
According to a Czech proverb, it is better to see something once than to hear about it twice. In that spirit, and with the holiday season in the offing, we are providing you with this small "tourist" guide to the "musical monuments" of the Czech Republic. We have tried to choose the most interesting and the most famous, but of course ours is inevitably a very limited sample. On the other hand, regardless of their importance for the past or present of music, all the places chosen have the extra advantage of being simply beautiful, and in many of them you will find live music--often as part of various summer festivals.
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The Bedrich Smetana Museum
The Bedrich Smetana Museum has been housed since 1936 in the Neo-Renaissance building of the former Old Town Waterworks built in the 1890s on the embankment of the River Vltava close to Charles Bridge. The current permanent exhibition, opened in 1998, provides a comprehensive picture of the life and work of the composer Bedrich Smetana. Here you can learn about his childhood and his first steps towards a career in music, his studies, first successes as a pianist and composer, his teaching activities (thanks to which he met his future first wife Katerina Kolarova), his five years in Goteborg in Sweden, his work in music societies, his role as a conductor of revived philharmonic concerts and at the then new Provisional Theatre, and of course the period of his full maturity and ripening as a composer, when he created the founding works of modern Czech music and continued to write masterpieces even when afflicted with complete deafness from 1874. If you are prepared to go further afield, you can still see the place where he wrote the works--in many respects innovative--of his last creative period (including the four symphonic poems of the My Country cycle, the operas The Dove, The Secret and the Devil's Wall, both string quartets and From the Homeland for violin and piano). This is the Smetana's son-in-law Josef Schwarz's gamekeeper's lodge in Jabkenice (between the cities Nymburk and Mlada Boleslav), now the Bedrich Smetana Monument, where the composer lived from 1875 (www.nm.cz/jabkenice).
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The Bedrich Smetana Museum
Part of the National Museum, The Czech Museum of Music (see CM 2/06)
Novotneho lavka 1
11000 Prague 1
tel.+ fax: +420 222 220 082, e-mail: b_smetana_muzeum@nm.cz
Internet: www.nm.cz/english/info.php#mbs
Open daily except Tuesdays, 10.00-12:00 a.m. and 12.30-5.00 p.m.
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The Antonin Dvorak Museum
The Antonin Dvorak Museum has been housed since its founding in 1932 in a Baroque summer house known as Amerika which was built at the beginning of the 18th century to a design by the most distinguished architect of the day, Kilian Ignac Dientzenhofer. In the garden there are the remains of Baroque statues by Matyas Braun. Antonin Dvorak lived here with his family following his return from New York in 1895, and it is the place where he composed the works of his last creative period: the String Quartets in A flat major and D major, the symphonic poems based on the Erben's ballads the Watergoblin, the Noon Witch, the Golden Spinning Wheel and the Wild Dove, the symphonic poem A Hero's Song, The Festival Song, and the operas The Devil and Kate, Rusalka and Armida. The museum was founded by the Society for the Erection of a Monument to Maestro Antonin Dvorak in Prague. The aim expressed in the society's title was in fact only achieved in the year 2000, when a rather problematic statue of the composer was unveiled in front of the Rudolfinum concert hall. The museum honours and cultivates Dvorak's legacy by keeping most of his literary estate, including the manuscripts of his pieces, by carrying out and encouraging archival and research work and by holding concerts not only of the works of Antonin Dvorak, but also of music by the youngest generation of composers. The house where Dvorak was born, in Nelahozeves, has been converted into a memorial to him, and a festival matinee called "Dvorak's Nelahozeves" is held there every year just before his birthday (the beginning of September). The museum also looks after the Josef Suk Memorial (Suk was Dvorak's son-in-law) in the house where Suk was born in Krecovice near Sedlcany, and a spring festival is organised there in his honour.
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The Antonin Dvorak Museum
Part of the National Museum, Czech Museum of Music
Ke Karlovu 20, 12000 Praha 2
tel.+ fax: +420 224 923 363, e-mail: a_dvorak_muzeum@nm.cz
Internet: www.nm.cz/english/into.php#mad
Open: Jan.-March, Oct.-Dec.: Tues.-Sun. 9.30 a.m.-1.30 p.m., 2.00-5.00 p.m., April-Sept.: Tues.-Sun. 10.00 a.m.-1.30 p.m. 2.00-5.30 p.m.
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Bertramka--The Museum of W.A. Mozart and the Duseks
The Bertramka Villa, which is now the Museum of W.A. Mozart and the Duseks, is located to the south west of the former Prague City Walls in what is now the Smichov District, close to the Andel intersection. In the later Middle Ages there were vineyards there, and in one of them, on the slopes of Cerny Hill, the Baroque villa was built around 1700 on the site of a 16th-century vineyard cottage. It got its name from one former owner, but in the years 1784-99 it was the property of the famous soprano Josefina Duskova, wife of the teacher and composer Frantisek Xaver Dusek, who was her former teacher and elder by 23 years. At the Bertramka, their summer residence, they would play host to celebrated musicians and young unknowns, and...
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