GUIDE
7. Arts
Music
In the 19th century there was the rise of several great composers during the National Revival. Bedřich Smetana (1824-84), the first great Czech composer, incorporated folk melodies into his classical compositions. His best-known works are Prodaná Nevěsta (The Bartered Bride) and Má vlast (My Country). Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904) spent four years in the USA where he composed the symphony From the New World. Among his other well known works are the two Slovanská tance (Slavonic Dances), the opera Rusalka and his religious masterpiece Stabat Mater. Moravian-born Leoš Janáček (1854-1928), who also incorporated folk elements into his heavier music, is a leading 20th-century Czech composer. Other well known composers are Josef Suk (1874-1935) and Bohuslav Martinů (1890-1959).
Jazz has a grip on Czech cultural life that is unmatched almost anywhere else in Europe. It was already being played in the mid-1930s, mostly for dancing. One of the most outstanding musicians in today’s jazz scene are Jiří Stivín and Emil Viklický who also still performs in many of Prague’s jazz clubs.
Literature
The earliest literary works were hymns and religious text in Old Church Slavonic in the late 11th century. Karel Hynek Mácha, possibly the greatest of all Czech poets, was leading representative of Romanticism in the early 19th century, his most famous lyrical work is Máj (May). At the end of the 19th century Alois Jirásek wrote Staré pověsti české (Old Czech Legends), a compendium of stories from the arrival of the Czechs in Bohemia to the Middle Ages. One of the best-known Czech writers of all is Franz Kafka. Along with a circle of other German-speaking Jewish writers in Prague, he played a major role at the beginning of the 20th century. His two complex and claustrophobic masterpieces are The Trial and The Castle. The post-WWI Czech author Karel Čapek is famous for a science-fiction drama, RUR (Rossum’s Universal Robot), from which the word ‘robot’ entered the English language. Well known poet of the interwar years is Jaroslav Seifert, awarded the Nobel Prize in 1984. Writers such as Václav Havel, Josef Škvorecký, Milan Kundera produced their first works in the years preceding the 1968 Soviet-led invasion. Until his death in 1997, the Czech Republic’s leading novelist was Bohumil Hrabal.
Painting
The luminously realistic, 14th- century paintings of Magister Theodoricus (Master Theodoric) influenced art throughout Central Europe. The Baroque era saw a surge of Catholic religious art, dominated in Bohemia by Petr Brandl. The Czech National Revival in the late 18th and early 19th centuries witnessed the appearance of a Czech style of realism, in particular by Mikuláš Aleš and the father and son Antonín and Josef Mánes. Alfons Mucha is well known for his late- 19th- century Art Nouveau posters. Czech. Czech landscape art developed in the works of Anton Kosárek, followed by a wave of Impressionism and Symbolism at the hands of Antonín Slavíček, Max Švabinsky. In the early 20th century, Prague developed as a centre of avant-garde art. Prague was also a focus for Cubist painters, including Josef Čapek. Surrealists followed, including Zdeněk Rykr and Josef Šíma.
Charles Bridge and Castle District