Year: 2020
Type: article
Abstract: 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.On September 4, 1945, a performance of Bedřich Smetana's opera The Brandenburgers in Bohemia inaugurated the first post-WWII season in the building in central Prague that, until a few months earlier, had been commonly referred to as the New German Theater (Neues deutsches Theater).Completed in 1888 in part thanks to donations by Prague's German elites, the building was appropriated by a group of Czech artists during the uprising of Prague's Czechs against the Nazi occupation in early May 1945.In commemoration of the uprising, the building was then renamed as the Fifth of May Theater ("Divadlo pátého května").Amidst mass deportations of German Bohemians out of Czechoslovakia on the principle of collective guilt for Nazi atrocities, the reopening of the former German Theater acquired a symbolic significance.1 As Kelly St. Pierre has pointed out, post-WWII performances of Smetana's works operated "as symbols of endurance . . .[and] took place against the violent backdrop of ethnic 'cleansing' ('očista')."2The 1945 Brandenburgers emphasized recent events by using an elevated stage in the shape of a swastika that disintegrated at the end of the opera.3 The symbolic importance of this particular production was 1 Throughout this article I use the term German Bohemians to refer to those inhabitants of Bohemia who identified as German."German Bohemian" corresponds to the concept of "Deutschböhme" that often appears in German-Bohemian writings especially throughout the nineteenth century, The nineteenth-century history of the distinction between the adjectives "Bohemian" and "Czech" is explained in Jeremy King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of
Source: Music and Politics
Author: Martin Nedbal
Institution: University of Rochester
Language: English
Subfield: Music
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W3013685764