Visions of the Village offers a nuanced account of the cultural history, political salience, and social resonances of Czech village operas, especially those by composers Bed%rich Smetana, Antonín Dvo%rák, and Leo%s Janá%cek. By examining music-critical writings, institutional and government records, letters, and other archival sources, Christopher Campo-Bowen examines how musical representations of the idealized village acquired and provided meaning for Czech audiences, serving as the basis for understandings of a wide range of sociocultural and political issues, including gender, class, nationalism, imperialism, ethnicity, and race.
This book explores how operas like Smetana's The Bartered Bride, Dvo%rák's The Devil and Kate, and Janá%cek's Jen@ufa served as focal points for the articulation of an essentialist sense of Czech identity. In addition to composers and their operas, Campo-Bowen investigates the output of critics, administrators, and other urban intellectuals like Otakar Hostinský, Franti%sek Adolf %Subert, and Zden%ek Nejedlý to understand the impact of village operas on public discourse. Through this in-depth analysis, this book uncovers how music functions at the nexus of the desire for politically resonant ethnoracial identities and the representation of ruralness, from the nineteenth century to the present.
Introduction Chapter 1: Building the Operatic Village: Composers, Ethnicity, and Czech Identity Chapter 2: The Village on Display: Opera and Exhibitions in the 1890s Chapter 3: Contesting the Village: Morality, Gender, and Village Opera at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Chapter 4: The Village as State: Smetana and Opera in the First Czechoslovak Republic Chapter 5: The Village and Modernity
Christopher Campo-Bowen is an Assistant Professor of Musicology at Virginia Tech. He holds a PhD in musicology from UNC Chapel Hill, and his academic research focuses on the relationships between opera, race/ethnicity, gender, and empire, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
