Beethoven and Bohemia

In 1977 the Czech musicologist Oldřich Pulkert discovered a manuscript score of Beethoven’s 1806 Leonore, the second version of what became Fidelio in 1814. The score’s pre-1977 history is mysterious, with the exception of 1870, when Bedřich Smetana clearly used it for a production of the 1814 Fidelio in Czech. Pulkert and Helga Lühning assumed, based on questionable evidence about early nineteenth-century plans for a Prague production of the 1806 Leonore under Beethoven’s supervision, that the score reached Bohemia around 1807. This article uses previously overlooked archival documents to show that the score may have been brought to Prague only in the late 1860s, possibly from Leipzig, and that nineteenth-century Prague theatres never performed the 1806 Leonore. The narratives Pulkert and others produced about the score’s history also illustrate the politicization of Viennese classicism in post-Second World War Czech musicology, especially the widespread view that Bohemia had a unique relationship to Mozart and Beethoven

Art · Classicism · Czech · Literature · MOZART · Musicology · Narrative · Political science · Politics · History · Law · Musicology and Musical Analysis · Philosophy