Visions of the Village

Ruralness, Identity, and Czech Opera

Bibliographic Data

ID23548740
AuthorsChristopher Campo-Bowen (0000-0002-1754-1255, Virginia Tech School of Performing Arts)
Year2025
Publication date2025-04-25
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueVisions of the Village (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherOxford University PressNew York, NY (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/9780197602065.001.0001
OpenAlexW4408128492
ISBN9780197602065
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited82

Visions of the Village: Ruralness, Identity, and Czech Opera provides a nuanced investigation into the cultural history, political salience, and social resonances of Czech village operas, especially those by composers Bedřich Smetana, Antonín Dvořák, and Leoš Janáček. By examining music-critical writings, institutional and government records, letters, and other archival sources, this book shows 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. Operas like Smetana’s The Bartered Bride, Dvořák’s The Devil and Kate, and Janáček’s Jenůfa served as focal points for the articulation of an essentialist sense of Czech identity, one deeply intertwined with the strictures and discourses of empire. Even after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, essentialist understandings of society continued to be expressed through reference to village operas and idealized rural life, a practice that persists, if in attenuated form, to this day. In addition to composers and their operas, Visions of the Village investigates the output of critics, administrators, and other urban intellectuals like Otakar Hostinský, František Adolf Šubert, and Zdeněk Nejedlý to understand the impact of village operas on public discourse. Thus, this book provides insight into 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.

Geography · Sociology · Vision · Anthropology · Central European national history · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies

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