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Visions of the Village offers a new look at the cultural, social, and political context of operas by some of the most famous Czech composers in history. Beginning the study in the works of the 1860s, author Christopher Campo-Bowen analyzes the work of Bed%rich Smetana, Antonín Dvo%rák, and Leoš Janá¿ek, among others, demonstrating how Czech identity was constructed through reference to operatic representations of idealized village life.
List of contents
- Introduction
- Chapter 1: Building the Operatic Village: Composers, Ethnicity, and Czech Identity
- Chapter 2: The Village on Display: Opera and Exhibitions in the 1890s
- Chapter 3: Contesting the Village: Morality, Gender, and Village Opera at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century
- Chapter 4: The Village as State: Smetana and Opera in the First Czechoslovak Republic
- Chapter 5: The Village and Modernity
About the author
Christopher Campo-Bowen is an Assistant Professor of Musicology at Virginia Tech. He holds a PhD in musicology from UNC Chapel Hill, and his academic research focuses on the relationships between opera, race/ethnicity, gender, and empire, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Summary
Visions of the Village offers a nuanced account of the cultural history, political salience, and social resonances of Czech village operas, especially those by composers Bed%rich Smetana, Antonín Dvo%rák, and Leoš Janáček. By examining music-critical writings, institutional and government records, letters, and other archival sources, Christopher Campo-Bowen examines how musical representations of the idealized village acquired and provided meaning for Czech audiences, serving as the basis for understandings of a wide range of sociocultural and political issues, including gender, class, nationalism, imperialism, ethnicity, and race.
This book explores how operas like Smetana's The Bartered Bride, Dvo%rák's The Devil and Kate, and Janáček's Jenůfa served as focal points for the articulation of an essentialist sense of Czech identity. In addition to composers and their operas, Campo-Bowen investigates the output of critics, administrators, and other urban intellectuals like Otakar Hostinský, František Adolf %Subert, and Zdeněk Nejedlý to understand the impact of village operas on public discourse. Through this in-depth analysis, this book uncovers how music functions at the nexus of the desire for politically resonant ethnoracial identities and the representation of ruralness, from the nineteenth century to the present.
