Loutna česká . The Czech Lute

Of seventeenth-century Czech composers, Adam Michna z Otradovic is generally reckoned today ‘the most prolific, distinctive, and important’, as John Tyrrell put it in a recent review (Music & Letters, 98 (2017), 477–8), even though Michna spent his entire career in relative obscurity as an organist in the provincial Bohemian town of Jindřichův Hradec (Neuhaus) and much of his output is now lost. Even those of his works that have survived have been published only sporadically in modern editions, and there is still no comprehensive collected edition, largely because most of his output comprises Catholic sacred music with both Latin and Czech texts, and the publication of sacred music was often blocked during the post-war years of communism in Czechoslovakia. Among Michna’s works, two substantial published hymnals with vernacular Czech texts stand out for their remarkable originality: these are his Česká mariánská muzika (Prague, 1647, modern edition 1989)...

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