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Max Dvořák and Turn of Art (History) to Work of Art
Murár, Tomáš
In the last years of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, it is possible to observe in literature and the visual arts the destabilisation of previously valid values in relation to tradition, which was no longer able to sufficiently express the world in its completeness. This process can also be observed in art historical research, in its shift away from research into the autonomous development of art towards defining a work of art by thinking about the time of its creation. This transformation is identified in particular with the influence of the spiritual sciences (Geisteswissenschaften), which were also developed by the Czech-born art historian Max Dvořák. In this paper it will be shown, using his thought as an example, how the art historical definition of the work of art can be related to the art of the early 20th century, i.e. as defining itself against the hitherto valid thought concepts of the late 19th century.
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The Prager musikalisches Album (1838) and the nineteenth-century salon as cultural practice
Bunzel, Anja
This article deals with a collection of songs and piano pieces, the Prager musikalisches Album, published in 1838, asking two central questions. Drawing on different concepts of the musical work (Werkbegriff), I explore whether the album can be considered a work rather than a loose collection of multiple works. Within the musicological discourse there have been many attempts at defining these terms, ranging from quite narrow categorisations based on aspects of instrumentation, musical form, or stylistic matters to more open approaches encompassing the communicative process and viewing the history of genre as cultural history. Drawing on the latter, I suggest that the Prager musikalisches Album is a prime example of collective authorship, which opens up a second question, namely that of authorship. Authorship may embrace aspects of agency that exceed the realms of the person who penned a musical, literary, or artistic work. Indeed, it may be shaped by performers, audiences, presses/ salespeople, dedicatees, critics, patrons, and anyone else who has an impact on any given work at the time of its creation and/or publicization. By taking this perspective, I suggest that the Prager musikalisches Album is both reflective and representative of nineteenth-century salon culture, within whose context the album was embedded. Offering a holistic analysis of the album and its context, I use this article as a springboard to advocate for a musical historiography that takes into account the full breadth of musical culture, and which embraces, besides composers and poets, a number of other cultural agents that are often overlooked within more traditional music-historical considerations.
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19th Century Methodology of Art History and Research from the Perspective of Progress
Petrasová, Taťána
The paper analyses the possibilities that opened up in the period 1981–1990 for the interdisciplinary research of Historicism in the former Czechoslovakia, given by the founding tradition of the Pilsen symposia. On the one hand, the researchers followed the current ideas of “art and progress” dealt with Ernst Gombrich (1971). From the opposite side came supporters of the idea of “rationality and irrationality” of development as a source of intellectual and aesthetic authenticity of 19th century works, such as jako Rudolf Chadraba, Jiří Ševčík, Helena Lorenzová a Vladimír Macura.
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Once More on Voltaire’s “Work” in Bohemia, or Why Dobrovský Postponed Reading It
Madl, Claire
The definition of a work as an event is apt for characterising Voltaire’s writings. For not only do we record their impact on historical events, but we also consider Voltaire himself one of the first intellectuals to step out into the public arena to change the “state of affairs”. However, this topicality of his work is certainly a difficulty when examining its reception in the Czech Lands in the generations of his contemporaries, i.e. the actors of the “Czech Enlightenment” and the first Czech National Revival. A more thorough analysis of this matter (Minař, Kopal, Vodička 1964) not only observed the popularity of Voltaire’s plays and hints of “Voltairianism” as a critical or even ironic approach towards monasticism, superstition, clericalism and fatalism, but also noted that local authors only claimed allegiance to Voltaire in order to explicitly reject a figure that embodied theism and free-thinking. Dobrovsky’s often commented hesitation to read Voltaire’s work seems particularly enigmatic. Thanks to the now more accessible knowledge about book imports to the Czech Lands and using two conceptual approaches, we will try to contribute to this discussion and, subsequently, to the definition of a work and its impact on society. First, we will take into account the material nature of a work, whose dissemination depends on its physical characteristics. In the case of Voltaire, the language of dissemination of his writings and the nature of the book market in the second half of the 18th century seem to be crucial for the Czech Lands. Furthermore, the angle of viewing Voltaire’s work was strongly influenced by the social context of his reputation. Finally, censorship practices were an inevitable but ambiguous obstacle. This approach can situate the moments of reception of a work in the temporality of its never-finished construction, which, following Pierre-Michel Menger, we will conceive as a process of its “rarefaction, consolidation and growth”.
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