Smetana’s The Brandenburgers in Bohemia and Czech Nationalism

Post-WWII studies of Smetana's The Brandenburgers in Bohemia view the work as an expression of the Czechs' resistance to various kinds of national oppression, by the Austrian Empire, and by Austrian and Bohemian Germans. This article shows that these views emerged only long after the opera was written in 1862-3 and premiered in 1866. An exploration of Czech political debates in the early 1860s, contemporaneous historical accounts of the thirteenthcentury events the opera depicts, Smetana's sketches, censorship practices and records, and reviews of The Brandenburgers from the months after the premiere illustrates that the mid-nineteenth-century conceptualization of the Czechs' position within the Austrian Empire and their relationship to Germans and German Bohemians was less oppositional and binary than in later decades. This context in fact clarifies numerous ambiguous aspects of Smetana's opera, such as the main villain's characterization and the ambiguous depiction of the Brandenburgers. A brief survey of the opera's reception history shows, furthermore, that the intensely nationalistic, anti-German, and anti-Austrian perspective on The Brandenburgers, still accepted nowadays, became particularly prominent in reaction to various twentieth-century totalitarian ideologies and were strongly influenced by the opera's first post-WWII production at the former New German Theater in September 1945

Czech · Linguistics · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Central European national history · European Cultural and National Identity · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · History · Law · Philosophy

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