Overview

An insightful and engaging biography of Czech composer Bedřich Smetana, originally written in the 1940s and meticulously reconstructed and updated for twenty-first-century readers. Czech-Jewish lawyer and music historian Jan Löwenbach (1880–1972) wrote this biography of nineteenth-century Czech composer Bedřich Smetana (1824–1884) while living in New York in the 1940s, after fleeing the Nazi occupation of his homeland. Intended to highlight Czech cultural achievements and promote national independence, the book remained unpublished following the 1948 Communist coup in Czechoslovakia. Unlike later English-language biographies of Smetana, Löwenbach's work explicitly engages major early twentieth-century Czech scholarship on the composer and offers a uniquely informed perspective. As a ""native informant,"" Löwenbach dispels long-standing nationalistic myths, while providing insightful commentary on Smetana's complete oeuvre, an engaging narrative of his life, and a thoughtful account of the broader social and cultural context. This edition, based on several Czech and English typescripts preserved at San Diego State University, presents a meticulous reconstruction and new translation of Löwenbach's text. With added references to recent scholarship, it stands as both an essential primary document and a rich resource for anyone interested in Czech music—scholars and general readers alike.

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9781648251214

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JAN LÖWENBACH (1880-1972) was a lawyer involved in the establishment of Czechoslovak copyright law as well as a music critic and writer and a translator of Rilke's works into Czech and Dvorak's songs into German. MARTIN NEDBAL is Professor of Musicology at the University of Kansas. MAREK PECHAČis a musicologist on the staff of the Bohuslav Martinů Institute in Prague. RUTH MARTIN is a freelance German-to-English book translator. She has a PhD in German from Birbeck, University of London.

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