Kelly St. Pierre: Smetana, Wagner, and the Music Battles of the 1870s

In the past, scholarly discussions of the “music battles” have focused on either disparaging Smetana’s opponents or rescuing him from the possibility of Wagner’s influence. In this paper, I want to shift from perpetuating the “battles” to investigating the propagandist strategies of Smetana’s supporters. Doing so opens up new understandings of Smetana and his compositions, especially concerning the composer’s fourth opera and most deliberately nationalistic work, Libuše.

Kelly St. Pierre (Wichita State University), která je mj. autorkou knihy Bedřich Smetana: Myth, Music, and Propaganda (University of Rochester Press 2017), bude na Ústavu hudební vědy FF UK v akademickém roce 2019/20 vyučovat jako stipendistka Fulbrigthovy nadace.