Thanks to a highly successful nation-branding campaign in the aftermath of the dissolution of Austria-Hungary in 1918, Mozart has been a firm icon for Austria and Austrian culture for more than a century. From Mozartkugeln to the Salzburger Festspiele, the composer’s publicized Austrianness makes it all too easy to overlook his deep links to other parts of the former empire. Martin Nedbal’s most recent book helpfully throws the spotlight on the composer’s ties to Bohemia and the parallel political campaigns fought over Mozart’s biographical connection to Prague, his musical works (specifically his operatic repertoire), and his symbolic clout.
As the foremost expert on Bohemia in Mozart studies, Nedbal presents a wealth of primary historical sources to immerse his readers in the fraught political dynamics surrounding Mozart reception in the nineteenth and, to a lesser extent, twentieth centuries. The book’s main claims do not tread new ground as much as bring a new focus to an underrepresented region in Mozart scholarship for area specialists. Nedbal argues that Mozart reception in its various forms (musical, literary, and monumental) was shaped by shifting political dynamics in Bohemia around ethno-linguistic ideology. In his words, “the reception of Mozart’s operas in Bohemia between Mozart’s death and the middle of the twentieth century was closely linked to various social, cultural, and political identities and agendas” (259). Nedbal sets out to demonstrate that the “canon’s social functions are dynamic and dialogic” (261) and that the “processes of canonization are fluid and can produce surprising meanings and associations” (270). The “canon” Nedbal analyzes is impressively wide and includes not only the history of performance, translation, and reception of La Clemenza di Tito, Don Giovanni, and Die Zauberflöte, but also Mozart-related monuments, literary and filmic adaptations, and press articles.
The great strength of Nedbal’s approach is that his arguments are widely applicable to other regions and periods of nationalist tensions within and after Austria-Hungary. The Bohemian disputes over Mozart’s “Germanness” and the purported universality of his music closely mirror debates that took place in Vienna and Salzburg throughout the 1920s and 1930s, for instance. Although the Bohemian focus of Nedbal’s study does not allow space for such interregional comparisons, readers familiar with these other moments in Mozart reception history will recognize that “the views and interpretations of the composer’s music have … remained surprisingly consistent, with recurring narrative tropes” not only within Bohemia, as Nedbal argues, but across the wider empire (4).
Revealing this cyclical pattern of (re)appropriation by various political forces is compelling and makes Nedbal’s work all the more valuable to researchers working in adjacent areas, but it also occasionally obscures what is distinctly Bohemian about the political discourses he documents. Nedbal sets out to document the heterogeneity of empire but often stops short of crystallizing that heterogeneity in relation to the concepts that guide his analysis. Chapter 1, for example, looks at how the concept of Werktreue operated in various Bohemian circles, but it relies on a somewhat nebulous definition that does not specify whether these intellectuals ultimately forged a Bohemia-specific notion of “authenticity.” Nedbal impresses readers with his vast and meticulous knowledge of historical sources without, however, nuancing our understanding of critical concepts like identity politics, ethnicity, foreignness, cosmopolitanism, and nationalism. Several historical examples feel urgently relevant but are not mined for their contemporary implications. In Chapter 6, Nedbal unearths a fascinating short story written in 1837 by Josef Kajetàn Tyl that equates Czechness with Blackness and opens up a radical and distinctly Czech interpretation of the Moor character of Monostatos in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (233). This example is ripe for a more expansive and theorized exploration of identity, ethnicity, and race in nineteenth-century Bohemia (and its relevance to contemporary scholarship).
In Chapter 2, “Mozart and Ethnic Identity,” the book again confronts the issue of imperial heterogeneity, this time in relation to nationalist arguments simultaneously laying claim to ethnic distinctiveness and to universality. A quote from Franz Ulm’s 1940 review of a Czech performance of Don Giovanni exemplifies this contradictory discourse: “In [Mozart] you can recognize the character of Czech music, in him Czech music is concentrated like the sun’s rays focused through a burning glass, in him resides the consecration of this great musical nation. … Oh madness! Mozartian music is the property of all nations!” (71). Nedbal’s cursory comments on the idea of Mozart’s “universality” hint at the fraught dynamics underlying identity discourse but eschew any theorized discussion of nationalism’s use of universalizing language or of the paradoxical argument promoting Bohemian culture as distinctively Czech but also universal.
In his bid to broaden the geographical scope of Mozart scholarship, Nedbal mostly frames the heterogeneity of the Austro-Hungarian empire as a tension between “conflicting ideological interpretations”: on the one hand, “Habsburg self-representation and celebration,” and, on the other hand, “specifically Bohemian patriotic sensibilities, which often pointed to a more ambiguous stance toward the Habsburg dynasty” (143). Nedbal is right that it is in this “ambiguous stance” that we can appreciate the political intricacies of transporting cultural symbolism within and across the empire’s diverse and often contested linguistic, ethnic, and regional divisions borders.
