Women in Nineteenth-Century Czech Musical Culture: Apostles of a Brighter Future

This volume focuses on the circumstances of women's music-making in the vibrant and diverse environment of the Czech lands during the nineteenth century. It sheds light on little-known women musicians, while also considering more well-known works and composers from new woman-centric perspectives. It shows how the unique environment of Habsburg Central Europe, especially Bohemia and Lower Austria, intersects with gender to reveal hitherto unexplored networks that challenge the methodological nationalism of music studies as well as the discipline's continued emphasis on singular canonical figures. The main areas of enquiry address aspects of performance and identity both within the Czech lands and abroad; women's impact on social life with a view to different private, semiprivate, and public contexts and networks; and compositional aesthetics in musical works by and about women, analysed through the lens of piano works, song, choir music, and opera, always with the reception of these works in mind.

Author: Anja Bunzel
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 02/23/2024
Pages: 252
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.22lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.63d
ISBN: 9781032206592

About the Author

Anja Bunzel works at the Institute of Art History, Czech Academy of Sciences, where she researches (semi-)private musical culture in nineteenth-century Prague within a European context. She is co-editor of Musical Salon Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century (Boydell, 2019), and author of The Songs of Johanna Kinkel: Genesis, Reception, Context (Boydell, 2020).

Christopher Campo-Bowen is Assistant Professor of Musicology in the School of Performing Arts at Virginia Tech. He holds a PhD in musicology from UNC Chapel Hill. His research focuses on music in the Habsburg monarchy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially through topics like opera, ethnicity, gender, and empire.