This collection of essays, edited by musicologists Anja Bunzel (Institute of Art History, Czech Academy of Sciences) and Christopher Campo-Bowen (School of Performing Arts, Virginia Tech), represents the first solo volume in English to address the musical agency of Czech women in the nineteenth century. As such, it fills a lacuna in scholarship, where such individuals have been limited to scholarly attention as part of a broader emphasis, as in A History of Music in the Czech Lands, edited by Martin Nedbal, Kelly St. Pierre, and Hana Vlhová-Wörner (Cambridge, 2025), or devoted to a single individual, such as Jean-Paul C. Montagnier’s recent book Julie Reisserová (1888–1938): Czech Composer and Feminist (Cambridge, 2025) and the tireless efforts of founder and chair of the Kaprálová Society, Karla Hartl, with publications such as The Kaprálová Companion, coedited with Erik Entwistle (Lanham, 2011) and articles about numerous women in the Society’s newsletters and on its website. Submissions to various scholarly journals round out the available sources.

Bunzel and Campo-Bowen have collected 15 essays for the present volume from as many authors—representing scholarship in Austria, Australia, Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Slovak Republic, and the United States—to consider Czech women practicing music in some way, from the already well-known (such as Eliška Krásnohorská, librettist to Smetana and Bendl, and Anežka Schulzová, librettist to Fibich) to the obscure (notably the severely disabled Anna Balcarová, a licensed barrel-organ player in the Poděbrady region). With the breadth of occupations and social levels of the women discussed, the reader has a splendid overview of a rich and diverse public, private, and semi-private musical culture. In this way, each essay contributes to a more-or-less comprehensive description of how Czech identity was represented in an era of nation-building. As the editors reveal in the introduction, “The creation, negotiation, and contestation of cultural identity is perhaps the most salient theme of the book” (3).

The edited volume originated in October 2020, during the pandemic, with a scholarly gathering via Zoom hosted by the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences to discuss “women’s agency, impact, and creativity in nineteenth-century Czech musical culture” (xv). The lasting result is contained in this collection along with several commissioned chapters and divided into three parts: “Performance and Identity,” “Institutional Structures and Networks,” and “Reception and Analysis.”

Individual authors adopt varying methodologies for their contributions, ranging from biographical to analytical and interpretative to tracing concert and opera performances, investigating pedagogical environments, whether private or institutional, and disclosing amateur versus professional opportunities and restrictions. While all the essays are well researched and revealing, some contributions warrant special mention for the musical practices they discuss. The first is Risto Pekka Pennanen’s on “Sweet Street Music for Petty Alms: The Barrel-Organ Career of Anna Balcarová in the Poděbrady Region, 1889–1905.” In this inquiry, Pennanen uses archival and press materials to construct the narrative of a disabled female organ-grinder engaged in the practice of licensed begging in the 1890s and 1900s. The case study focuses on Anna Balcarová, whose family’s financial difficulties prompted her to apply for and receive a barrel-organ license, which would allow her to operate in a specific geographical region for one year. Anna was representative of those engaged in busking in that “the license system for injured veterans and other disabled persons functioned as poor relief” (33). At age 41, she is described as “crippled to the point of not being able to walk” (35), making it necessary for her husband to accompany her. Through her story, the reader is introduced to a social level of musical culture rarely discussed: that of the lower class and amateur performer.

The second essay selected for special attention is that of Henrike Rost on “Reminiscences of Past Sounds: The Musical Autograph Album (1813–1852) of Elise Gräfin von Schlik.” Rost investigates the tradition of musical autograph albums via one maintained by a member of a noble family and her mother. Elise Gräfin von Schlik was an influential patron of the arts and a poet, composer, and pianist. Her salon represented “art-related sociability in Prague” (138) at the highest level, attended by both professional musicians and aristocrats. The author describes the tradition of keeping guest books that in time led to collecting musical autographs, then analyzes the contents of the album. A very useful table lists the names of the volume’s 88 contributors, the date and place (most entries were made in Prague), whether text or music, the scoring, and the page numbers. A sampling of those represented reveals the types of visitors to the salon. Many names are familiar, notably Johann Friedrich Kittl, Ignaz Moscheles, Johann Nostitz-Rieneck, Wenzel Johann Tomaschek, Louis Spohr, Ole Bull, even Robert and Clara Schumann. Artists living in Prague interacted with those traveling through, their names reflecting the prestige of the salon. Most of the “signatures” are musical, for piano or voice and piano, many seemingly written specifically for the album. As with the essay by Pennanen, this one provides a glimpse into another layer of musical culture.

Focus on these two contributions is not to ignore the fine scholarship in the others and the many layers they add to our understanding of nineteenth-century society. The editors are to be highly commended, and the individual authors thanked profusely for opening these windows into the activities of women in Czech musical culture to English readers. The final essay is an afterword written by renowned Czech scholar Michael Beckerman. Although the title is “Dvořák’s Women” and the majority of the essay concerns just that, the final word is that the role of women in the region has been “profoundly undervalued and misrepresented and is in need of serious rethinking” (235). This collection of essays is a much-needed beginning to this end.