Charles IV
Holy Roman emperor
born May 14, 1316, Prague
died Nov. 29, 1378, Prague
German king and king of Bohemia (as Charles) from 1346 to 1378 and Holy Roman
emperor from 1355 to 1378, one of the most learned and diplomatically skillful sovereigns of
his time. He gained more through diplomacy than others did by war, and through purchases,
marriages, and inheritance he enlarged his dynastic power. Under Charles’s rule Prague
became the political, economic, and cultural centre—and eventually the capital—of the Holy
Roman Empire. Indeed, from his reign until the 18th century it was understood that the
German imperial crown was based on the crown of the king of Bohemia.
Early life.
Charles was the eldest son of the Bohemian king John of Luxembourg and Elizabeth,
the sister of the last native Bohemian king. In 1323 he joined the French court, where he
married Blanche, the sister of Philip VI of France. One of his teachers in Paris was the future
pope Clement VI. In 1330 Charles’s father summoned him to Luxembourg, and in 1331 he
headed the administration of his father’s provisional acquisitions in northern Italy. Two years
later his father appointed him margrave of Moravia and captain general of Bohemia. In his
autobiography Charles told of the difficulties he had in redeeming the pawned royal castles,
towns, and mansions, in building up an army, and in suppressing the influence of the nobility,
which had grown during his father’s absence. But Charles’s administrative ability only
aroused John’s suspicion, and he was dismissed in 1335. After a reconciliation Charles was
assigned to missions outside Bohemia, but his competence as a statesman and diplomat made
him increasingly indispensable to his father. In 1341 John, now blind, introduced him, as his
successor, to an assembly of prelates, nobility, and gentry, representatives of the royal towns,
and ambassadors of Breslau; in 1343 John entrusted him with the administration of the
country. One year later, due to Charles’s efforts, Pope Clement VI raised the bishopric of
Prague to an archbishopric, thus giving the Bohemian lands ecclesiastical autonomy. At the
same time, the foundation stone of St. Vitus’ Cathedral, built under the direction of Charles,
was laid on the Hradčany Hill in the Bohemian capital. Meanwhile, negotiations were
initiated to elect Charles German king in place of Louis IV, who had been excommunicated
by the Pope in 1324. Charles did not gain the throne until 1346, when he was elected by five
out of seven electors and had taken all the oaths the Pope had demanded. William of Ockham,
one of the greatest medieval theologians and scholars, called Charles rex clericorum (“the
priests’ king”). Louis, however, refused to acknowledge Charles and maintained that he was
the rightful king.
King of Bohemia.
At first the coexistence of two German kings had no bad consequences. But after
Charles took part in a war against England, in which his father died at the Battle of Crécy
(1346), he became king of Bohemia and prepared to attack Louis. Although Louis IV died in
the following year, his followers elected anti-kings until Charles won them over peaceably.
By granting privileges to the towns in southern Germany, he gained their support; and by
using diplomatic skill, he managed to make friends in the north as well. Soon he was
generally recognized as the only German king. His main concern, however, lay in the
Bohemian lands—his Luxembourgian dynastic power—which provided his greatest source of
strength.
In 1347 Charles was crowned king of Bohemia by the new archbishop in Prague.
Within a few months he issued a new law of coronation and defined the constitutional
position of the king in the state: Bohemia became a hereditary monarchy in which the law of
succession of the first-born son and his descendants was to be valid and binding; in case of the
extinction of the male lineage, the law of succession devolved upon the daughters. Later,
Charles’s succession treaties (1364) with the Habsburg family in Austria and the Árpáds in
Hungary were the bases on which the Austro-Hungarian monarchy was formed. In 1348
Charles founded the first university in central Europe to possess the same rights and liberties
as did the universities of Paris and Bologna. At the same time the foundation stone was laid
near Prague for another of Charles’s projects—Karlštejn castle, where the imperial crown
jewelry and the insignia of the crown of Bohemia were placed. In 1354 Charles led an army
into Italy to secure recognition of the authority of the House of Luxembourg and of the
patrimonial dominions of Bohemia. Early in 1355 he received the Iron Crown of Lombardy in
Milan, and that Easter he received the imperial crown in Rome. At that time a Florentine
contemporary described Charles as a medium-sized man, black-haired and broad-faced, with a
habitual stoop. Having thus acquired the imperial crown, he is said to have fetched it and then
returned to Prague, leaving the Italians embroiled in their own domestic problems. Petrarch
was very much disillusioned by Charles.
Back in Prague, Charles issued the decree known as the Golden Bull, a kind of
imperial constitution. It regulated the election of the German king by seven electors, who,
privileged with special rights, became domini terrae, real sovereigns; and above all stood the
king of Bohemia. Charles’s last wish was to secure the succession to the throne for his eldest
son, Wenceslas. After long and difficult negotiations, Wenceslas was elected the German
king. Charles died in 1378 and was buried in St. Vitus’ Cathedral.
Charles IV was a generous patron of arts and science, especially in Prague, and
ardently supported church building and the establishment of charitable institutions. He was
interested in the early Humanism, which especially came to influence his government, and
was also influential in the development of the German written language.
John Amos Comenius
Czech educator
born March 28, 1592, Nivnice, Moravia, Habsburg domain [now in Czech Republic]
died Nov. 14, 1670, Amsterdam, Neth.
Czech Jan Ámos Komenský Czech educational reformer and religious leader,
remembered mainly for his innovations in methods of teaching, especially languages. He
favoured the learning of Latin to facilitate the study of European culture. Janua Linguarum
Reserata (1632; The Gate of Tongues Unlocked) revolutionized Latin teaching and was
translated into 16 languages.
Life
Comenius was the only son of respected members of a Protestant group known as the
Bohemian Brethren. His parents died when he was age 10, and after four unhappy years spent
living with his aunt in Strážnice, he was sent to a secondary school at Přerov. Though the
teaching methods there were poor, he was befriended by a headmaster who recognized his
gifts and encouraged him to train for the ministry. Following two years at the Herborn
Gymnasium in the Nassau region (now part of Germany), he entered the University of
Heidelberg (1613). While there he came under the influence of Protestant millennialists, who
believed that men could achieve salvation on earth. He also read with enthusiasm the works of
Francis Bacon and returned home convinced that the millennium could be attained with the
aid of science.
As a young minister Comenius found life wholly satisfying, but the outbreak of the
Thirty Years’ War in 1618 and the emperor Ferdinand II’s determination to re-Catholicize
Bohemia forced him and other Protestant leaders to flee. While in hiding, he wrote an
allegory, The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart, in which he described
both his early despair and his sources of consolation. With a band of Brethren he escaped to
Poland and in 1628 settled in Leszno. Believing that the Protestants would eventually win and
liberate Bohemia, he began to prepare for the day when it would be possible to rebuild society
there through a reformed educational system. He wrote a “Brief Proposal” advocating fulltime schooling for all the youth of the nation and maintaining that they should be taught both
their native culture and the culture of Europe.
Educational reform
The reform of the educational system would require two things. First, a revolution in
methods of teaching was necessary so that learning might become rapid, pleasant, and
thorough. Teachers ought to “follow in the footsteps of nature,” meaning that they ought to
pay attention to the mind of the child and to the way the student learned. Comenius made this
the theme of The Great Didactic and also of The School of Infancy—a book for mothers on
the early years of childhood. Second, to make European culture accessible to all children, it
was necessary that they learn Latin. But Comenius was certain that there was a better way of
teaching Latin than by the inefficient and pedantic methods then in use; he advocated
“nature’s way,” that is, learning about things and not about grammar. To this end he wrote
Janua Linguarum Reserata, a textbook that described useful facts about the world in both
Latin and Czech, side by side; thus, the pupils could compare the two languages and identify
words with things. Translated into German, the Janua soon became famous throughout
Europe and was subsequently translated into a number of European and Asian languages.
Comenius wrote that he was “encouraged beyond expectation” by the book’s reception.
With the liberation of Bohemia less certain than before, Comenius turned to an even
more ambitious project—the reform of human society through education. Others in Europe
shared his vision, among them a German merchant living in London, Samuel Hartlib, who
invited Comenius to England to establish a college of pansophic learning. With approval from
the Brethren, Comenius went to London in 1641, reporting back that he had been “fitted out
with new clothes befitting an English divine.” He met a number of influential men, engaged in
much discussion, and wrote essays of which the most notable was The Way of Light, which
set out his program. Parliament went so far as to consider setting up a college “for a number
of men from all nations.” This prospect was shattered by the outbreak of the English Civil
War, however, and Comenius was obliged to leave the country in 1642. He had been invited
to France by Cardinal Richelieu; and the American John Winthrop, Jr., who was in Europe
looking for an educator-theologian to become president of Harvard College, may have met
Comenius. Instead, Comenius accepted an offer from the government of Sweden to help
reform its schools by writing a series of textbooks modeled on his Janua.
He interpreted his agreement with the Swedish government as entitling him to base his
textbooks on a system of philosophy he had evolved called “pansophy” (see below). After
struggling hard to produce them, however, he found that they failed to satisfy anyone.
Nevertheless, in the course of his stay at Elbing, he tried to lay a philosophical foundation for
a science of pedagogy. In The Analytical Didactic, forming part of his Newest Method of
Languages, he reinterpreted the principle of nature that he had described in The Great
Didactic as a principle of logic. He put forward certain self-evident principles from which he
derived a number of maxims, some of them full of common sense and others rather
platitudinous. His chief attention was directed to his system of pansophy. Ever since his
student days he had been seeking a basic principle by which all knowledge could be
harmonized. He believed that men could be trained to see the underlying harmony of the
universe and thus to overcome its apparent disharmony. He wrote that:
pansophy propoundeth to itself so to expand and lay open to the eyes of all the wholeness of
things that everything might be pleasurable in itself and necessary for the expanding of the
appetite.
The “expanding of the appetite” for pansophic understanding became his great aim,
spelled out in “A General Consultation Concerning the Improvement of Human Affairs.”
Social reform
The Peace of Westphalia (1648), which ended the Thirty Years’ War, was a blow to
Comenius and other Czech exiles, who thereby lost their last hope of a restoration of ethnic
and religious liberty in their homeland. Few of them returned, since they would have been
required to recant their beliefs. Comenius left Elbing and returned to Poland, where the
Brethren at Leszno had been cast into despair. In 1648 he was consecrated presiding bishop of
the Moravians, the last of the Bohemian-Moravian clergy to hold this office.
His next invitation came from Hungary, where the young prince Zsigmond Rákóczi
wanted to establish a model pansophic school at Sárospatak. Comenius, arriving there in
1650, received a warm reception. The school opened with about 100 pupils, but it proved
unsuccessful. The students were ill-prepared to learn anything beyond the rudiments of
reading and writing, and the teachers soon lost interest in a scheme they could not understand.
The prince died in 1652, and at about the same time war broke out in Poland.
Comenius returned to Leszno, carrying with him the manuscript of a picture textbook
he had written for his pupils but for which he had not yet been able to obtain the necessary
woodcuts. He sent the manuscript to Nürnberg in Germany, where the cuts were made. The
resulting book, Orbis Sensualium Pictus (1658; The Visible World in Pictures), was popular
in Europe for two centuries and was the forerunner of the illustrated schoolbook of later
times. It consisted of pictures illustrating Latin sentences, accompanied by vernacular
translations. For example, the chapter “The Head and the Hand” began with a picture of a
head and two hands followed by sentences such as:
In the Head are, the Hair, 1. [which is Combed with a Comb, 2.] two Ears, 3. the
Temples, 4. and the Face, 5. . . . In Capite sunt Capillus, 1. [qui pectitur Pectine 2.] Aures 3.
binae, & Tempora, 4. Facies, 5.
Comenius had not been back in Leszno long before it was occupied and destroyed,
with the loss of many of his manuscripts. He escaped to Amsterdam, where he remained for
the rest of his life. In 1657 he gathered together most of his writings on education and
published them as a collection, Didactica Opera Omnia. He devoted his remaining years to
completing his great work, Consultation. He managed to get parts of it published, and when
he was dying in 1670 he begged his close associates to publish the rest of it after his death.
They failed to do so, and the manuscripts were lost until 1935, when they were found in an
orphanage in Halle, Ger.
Assessment
During his lifetime the fame of Comenius rested chiefly on his two popular textbooks,
the Janua and the Orbis Sensualium Pictus. He himself would have set more store by his
influence as a social reformer, which reached its peak during his visit to England. Men all
over Europe had looked to Comenius as a leader; his vision had impressed both those who
were seeking a more dynamic form of religion and those who looked to science as an avenue
of reform. His pansophism, on the other hand, was not influential either during his lifetime or
afterward. His dream of universal harmony was too vague and too grandiose for the mental
outlook of the 17th century, which was already shifting in a utilitarian and materialistic
direction; it has had even less appeal in modern times.
As a religious leader Comenius helped keep alive the faith of his church in its darkest
hour, and he provided the inspiration that led to its subsequent revival as the Moravian
Church under Nikolaus, Graf von Zinzendorf, in the 18th century. He was no sectarian but a
champion of the church universal. He was also, for all of his internationalism, a Czech patriot
at a time when the Czechs had been nearly crushed. He wrote: “I love my country and its
language, and my greatest wish is that it should be cultivated.”
In the 19th century Comenius’ reputation was revived by the increasing attention
given to the study of pedagogy, especially in Germany. At the present day he remains of
interest as a prototype of the international citizen. His patriotic feelings for Bohemia did not
prevent him from feeling himself a European and from believing profoundly in the unity of
mankind.
Jan Hus
born c. 1370, Husinec, Bohemia [now in Czech Republic]
died July 6, 1415, Konstanz [Germany]
the most important 15th-century Czech religious Reformer, whose work was
transitional between the medieval and the Reformation periods and anticipated the Lutheran
Reformation by a full century. He was embroiled in the bitter controversy of the Western
Schism (1378–1417) for his entire career, and he was convicted of heresy at the Council of
Constance and burned at the stake.
Early life and teaching career
Hus was born of poor parents in Husinec in southern Bohemia, from which he took his
name. About 1390 he enrolled in the University of Prague, and two years after his graduation
in 1394 he received a master’s degree and began teaching at the university. He became dean
of the philosophical faculty there in 1401.
At this time the University of Prague was undergoing a period of struggle against
foreign, chiefly German, influence as well as an intense rivalry between, on the one hand,
German masters who upheld nominalism and were regarded as enemies of church reform and,
on the other, the strongly nationalistic Czech masters, who were inclined to realist philosophy
and were enthusiastic readers of the philosophical writings of John Wycliffe, a bitter critic of
nominalism. Hus studied Wycliffe’s works and later his theological writings, which were
brought into Prague in 1401. Hus was influenced by Wycliffe’s underlying principles, though
he never accepted their extreme implications, and was particularly impressed by Wycliffe’s
proposals for reform of the Roman Catholic clergy. The clerical estate owned about one-half
of all the land in Bohemia, and the great wealth and simoniacal practices of the higher clergy
aroused jealousy and resentment among the poor priests. The Bohemian peasantry, too,
resented the church as one of the heaviest land taxers. There was thus a large potential base of
support for any church reform movement at a time when the authority of the papacy itself was
discredited by the Western Schism. Attempts at reform had been made by the Bohemian king
Charles IV, and Wycliffe’s works were the chosen weapon of the national reform movement
founded by Jan Milíč of Kroměříž (d. 1374).
Leader of Czech reform movement
In 1391 Milíč’s pupils founded the Bethlehem Chapel in Prague, where public sermons were
preached in Czech (rather than in Latin) in the spirit of Milíc̆’s teaching. From 1402 Hus was
in charge of the chapel, which had become the centre of the growing national reform
movement in Bohemia. He became increasingly absorbed in public preaching and eventually
emerged as the popular leader of the movement. Despite his extensive duties at the Bethlehem
Chapel, Hus continued to teach in the university faculty of arts and became a candidate for the
doctor’s degree in theology. Hus also became the adviser to the young nobleman Zbyněk
Zajíc of Hazmburk when Zbyněk was named archbishop of Prague in 1403, a move that
helped to give the reform movement a firmer foundation.
In 1403 a German university master, Johann Hübner, drew up a list of 45 articles, presumably
selected from Wycliffe’s writings, and had them condemned as heretical. Because the German
masters had three votes and the Czech masters only one, the Germans easily outvoted the
Czechs, and the 45 articles were henceforth regarded as a test of orthodoxy. The principal
charge against Wycliffe’s teaching was his tenet of remanence—i.e., that the bread and wine
in the Eucharist retain their material substance. Wycliffe also declared the Scriptures to be the
sole source of Christian doctrine. Hus did not share all of Wycliffe’s radical views, such as
that on remanence, but several members of the reform party did, among them Hus’s teacher,
Stanislav of Znojmo, and his fellow student, Štěpán Páleč.
During the first five years of Zbyněk’s reign as archbishop of Prague, his attitude
toward the “evangelical party” radically changed. The opponents of reform won him over to
their side and, in 1407, succeeded in charging Stanislav and Páleč with heresy, and they were
cited to the Roman Curia for examination. The two men returned completely changed in their
theological views and became the principal opponents of the Reformers. Thus, just when Hus
had emerged at the forefront of the reform movement, he came into conflict with his former
friends.
Hus and the Western Schism
Since 1378 the Roman Catholic Church had been split by the Western Schism, during
which the papal jurisdiction was divided between two popes. As the leader of reform, Hus
unhesitatingly quarreled with Archbishop Zbyněk when the latter opposed the Council of Pisa
(1409), which was called to dethrone the rival popes and to reform the church. The council
had the support of the Czech masters at the University of Prague, whereas the German
masters were opposed to it. The German masters, who carried a voting majority in university
affairs, supported the archbishop, which so enraged King Wenceslas that in January 1409 he
subverted the university constitution by granting the Czech masters three votes each and the
Germans only one; the result was a mass emigration of the Germans from Prague to several
German universities. In the fall of 1409 Hus was elected rector of the now Czech-dominated
university.
The final break between Archbishop Zbyněk and Hus occurred when the Council of
Pisa deposed both Pope Gregory XII, whose authority was recognized in Bohemia, and the
antipope Benedict XIII and in their place elected Alexander V. The deposed popes, however,
retained jurisdiction over portions of western Europe; thus, instead of two, there were three
popes. The archbishop and the higher clergy in Bohemia remained faithful to Gregory,
whereas Hus and the reform party acknowledged the new pope. After being forced by the
king’s punitive measures to recognize Alexander V as the legitimate pope, the archbishop,
through a large bribe, induced Alexander to prohibit preaching in private chapels, including
the Bethlehem Chapel. Hus refused to obey the pope’s order, whereupon Zbyněk
excommunicated him. Despite his condemnation, Hus continued to preach at the Bethlehem
Chapel and to teach at the University of Prague. Zbyněk was ultimately forced by the king to
promise Hus his support before the Roman Curia, but he then died suddenly in 1411, and the
leadership of Hus’s enemies passed to the Curia itself.
In 1412 the case of Hus’s heresy, which had been tacitly dropped, was revived because
of a new dispute over the sale of indulgences that had been issued by Alexander’s successor,
the antipope John XXIII, to finance his campaign against Gregory XII. Their sale in Bohemia
aroused general indignation but had been approved by King Wenceslas, who, as usual, shared
in the proceeds. Hus publicly denounced these indulgences before the university and, by so
doing, lost the support of Wenceslas. This was to prove fatal to him. Hus’s enemies then
renewed his trial at the Curia, where he was declared under major excommunication for
refusing to appear and an interdict was pronounced over Prague or any other place where Hus
might reside, thereby denying certain sacraments of the church to communicants in the
interdicted area. In order to spare the city the consequences, Hus voluntarily left Prague in
October 1412. He found refuge mostly in southern Bohemia in the castles of his friends, and
during the next two years he engaged in feverish literary activity. His enemies, particularly
Stanislav and Páleč, wrote a large number of polemical treatises against him, which he
answered in an equally vigorous manner. The most important of his treatises was De ecclesia
(The Church). He also wrote a large number of treatises in Czech and a collection of sermons
entitled Postilla.
The final trial
With the Western Schism continuing unabated, King Sigismund of Hungary, as the
newly elected (1411) king of Germany, saw an opportunity to gain prestige as the restorer of
the church’s unity. He forced John XXIII to call the Council of Constance to find a final
solution of the schism and to put an end to all the heresies. Sigismund, therefore, sent an
emissary to invite Hus to attend the council to explain his views—an invitation Hus naturally
was reluctant to accept. But when John threatened King Wenceslas for noncompliance with
the interdict, and after Sigismund had assured Hus of safe-conduct for the journey to
Constance and back (no matter what the decision might be), Hus finally consented to go.
He left for Constance but did not receive the safe-conduct until two days after his
arrival there, in November 1414. Shortly after arriving in Constance he was, with Sigismund’s
tacit consent, arrested and placed in close confinement, from which he never emerged. Hus’s
enemies succeeded in having him tried before the Council of Constance as a Wycliffite
heretic. All that the earnest intervention by the Bohemian nobles could obtain for him was
three public hearings, at which he was allowed to defend himself and succeeded in refuting
some of the charges against him. The council urged Hus to recant in order to save his life, but
to the majority of its members he was a dangerous heretic fit only for death. When he refused
to recant, he was solemnly sentenced on July 6, 1415, and burned at the stake.
Beliefs and writings
There has been much dispute over the extent to which Hus was indebted to Wycliffe
for his theological beliefs. At Constance he refused to submit to the council’s demand that he
disavow Wycliffe entirely, and he undoubtedly did support the doctrine of predestination and
advocate the supremacy of biblical authority over that of the Catholic church. Hus’s views can
also be interpreted as the culmination of the Czech national reform movement, however. His
followers and subsequent Bohemian religious Reformers adopted the name Hussites.
During his exile in 1412–14, Hus substituted for his popular preaching in Prague a
series of writings in Czech; these have since become classics of Czech literature and are
equally important in the history of the Czech language, because Hus developed a new and
simpler orthography. The most important of these works is his popular tract Vyklad viery,
desatera a patere (“Exposition of the Faith, of the Ten Commandments, and of the Lord’s
Prayer”). Hus’s writings in Czech and Latin include other religious tracts, learned treatises
and lectures, collections of his sermons, and personal letters.
Antonín Dvořák
Bohemian composer
born September 8, 1841, Nelahozeves, Bohemia, Austrian Empire [now in Czech
Republic]
died May 1, 1904, Prague
first Bohemian composer to achieve worldwide recognition, noted for turning folk
material into the language of 19th-century Romantic music.
Life
Dvořák was born in Nelahozeves, a Bohemian (now Czech) village on the Vltava
River north of Prague. He came to know music early, in and about his father’s inn, and as a
youngster became an accomplished violinist contributing to the amateur music-making that
accompanied the dances of the local couples. In 1857 a perceptive music teacher,
understanding that young Antonín had gone beyond his own modest abilities to teach him,
persuaded the elder Dvořák to enroll his son in an organ school in Prague. Later, without his
father’s financial assistance, Dvořák completed a two-year course and played the viola in
various inns and with theatre bands, augmenting his small salary with a few private pupils.
The 1860s were trying years for Dvořák, who was hard pressed for both time and the
means, even paper and a piano, to compose. In later years he said he had little recollection of
what he wrote in those days, but about 1864 two symphonies, an opera, chamber music, and
numerous songs lay unheard in his desk. The varied works of this period show, however, that
his earlier leanings toward the music of Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert were
becoming increasingly tinged with the influence of Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt. In
November 1873, at a time when a few successful concerts of his works had begun to make his
name well known in Prague, he married Anna Čermáková and began an unusually happy
family life.
In 1875 Dvořák was awarded a state grant by the Austrian government, and this award
brought him into contact with Johannes Brahms, with whom he formed a close and fruitful
friendship. Brahms not only gave him valuable technical advice but also found him an
influential publisher in Fritz Simrock, and it was with his firm’s publication of the Moravian
Duets (composed 1876) for soprano and contralto and the Slavonic Dances (1878) for piano
duet that Dvořák first attracted worldwide attention to himself and to his country’s music. The
admiration of the leading critics, instrumentalists, and conductors of the day continued to
spread his fame abroad, which led naturally to even greater triumphs in his own country. In
1884 he made the first of 10 visits to England, where the success of his works, especially his
choral works, was a source of constant pride to him, although only the Stabat Mater (1877)
and Te Deum (1892) continue to hold a position among the finer works of their kind. In 1890
he enjoyed a personal triumph in Moscow, where two concerts were arranged for him by his
friend Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The following year he was made an honorary doctor of
music of the University of Cambridge.
Dvořák accepted the post of director of the newly established National Conservatory
of Music in New York in 1892, and, during his years in the United States, he traveled as far
west as Iowa. Though he found much to interest and stimulate him in the New World
environment, he soon came to miss his own country, and he returned to Bohemia in 1895. The
final years of his life saw the composition of several string quartets and symphonic poems and
his last three operas.
Works
Bedřich Smetana, Dvořák’s senior by 17 years, had already laid the foundations of the
Czech nationalist movement in music, but it was left to Dvořák to develop and extend this in
an impressive series of works that quickly came to rank in popularity with those of his great
German contemporaries. The reasons for Dvořák’s popularity lie in his great talent for melody
and in the delightfully fresh Czech character of his music, which offered a welcome contrast
to the heavier fare of some of his contemporaries.
Dvořák’s technical fluency and abundant melodic inspiration helped him to create a
large and varied output. He composed in all the musical genres and left works that are
regarded as classics in all of them, with the possible exception of opera. All Dvořák’s mature
symphonies are of high quality, though only the sombre Symphony No. 7 in D Minor (1885)
is as satisfactory in its symphonic structure as it is musically. (It should be explained that
Dvořák’s mature symphonies were long known as No. 1 to 5, even though he had written four
earlier [and unnumbered] ones. All nine of his symphonies have since been renumbered from
the traditional order to their actual order of composition.) Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 in E
Minor (From the New World; 1893) remains his best-known work, partly, no doubt, because
it was thought to be based on African American spirituals and other influences gained during
his years in the United States. Although this may be true to some extent, the music is also
characteristically Bohemian in its themes. However, the Symphony No. 9 is in no way
superior to the Symphony No. 6 in D Major (1880) or the Symphony No. 8 in G Major (1889)
and is actually less characteristic of the composer than these other works. Of the four concerti
Dvořák wrote, only the Cello Concerto in B Minor (1895) can safely be called a classic.
In spite of the fact that his work in the medium is sometimes overstrained, Dvořák’s
chamber music is also of high quality. The Piano Quintet in A Major (1887) is one of the
glories of chamber music, and the string quartets, Opuses 51 (1879), 105 (1895), and 106
(1895), the String Sextet, Opus 48 (1878), and the Dumky Trio, Opus 90 (1891), also rank
high. The choral works, so popular when they first appeared, have suffered the fate of most
late 19th-century choral music, yet the Stabat Mater (1877) and Te Deum (1892) are among
the better examples of their kind. Opera remained the one medium that proved recalcitrant to
Dvořák’s genius, though he wrote 10 of them, notably Rusalka (1900). Many of Dvořák’s
most attractive works are among his miscellaneous, less-ambitious ones—the Slavonic
Dances (1878, 1886) and other piano duets, the Symphonic Variations (1877), the Bagatelles
(1878), the Gypsy Songs (1880), and the Scherzo Capriccioso (1883).
Dvořák’s chief faults are his overdiscursive and repetitive manner, occasional lapses in
taste, and the weakness of design of his larger works. Such shortcomings, however, amount to
little in the light of the astonishing fertility of his melody and the simplicity and directness
with which he achieves his ends. As might be gathered from his music, Dvořák had an
attractive personality; he was a humble and deeply religious family man of simple tastes and a
great lover of nature.
Jaroslav Seifert
Czech author
born Sept. 23, 1901, Prague, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary [now in Czech Republic]
died Jan. 10, 1986, Prague, Czech.
poet and journalist who in 1984 became the first Czech to win the Nobel Prize for
Literature.
Seifert made a living as a journalist until 1950, but his first book of poetry, Město v
slzách (“Town in Tears”), was published in 1920. His early proletarian poetry reflects his
youthful expectations for the future of communism in the Soviet Union. As he matured,
however, Seifert became less enchanted with that system of government, and his poetic
themes began to evolve. In Na vlnách T.S.F. (1925; “On the Waves of T.S.F.”) and Slavík
zpívá špatně (1926; “The Nightingale Sings Badly”), more lyrical elements of so-called pure
poetry were evident. In 1929 Seifert broke with the Communist Party.
The history and other aspects of Czechoslovakia were the most common subjects of
his poetry. In Zhasněte světla (1938; “Put Out the Lights”) he wrote about the Munich
agreement by which part of Czechoslovakia was annexed to Germany. Prague was the subject
of Světlem oděná (1940; “Robed in Light”), and the Prague uprising of 1945 provided the
focus of Přílba hlíny (1945; “A Helmetful of Earth”). In addition to writing about 30 volumes
of poetry, Seifert contributed to several journals and wrote children’s literature. In 1966 he
was named Poet of the Nation, and he was one of several writers, later silenced, who
condemned the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. In January 1977 he was among
the first to sign a petition, Charter 77, drawn up to protest the rule of Czech leader Gustav
Husak. His memoirs were published in 1981.
Václav Havel
president of Czech Republic
born October 5, 1936, Prague, Czechoslovakia [now in Czech Republic]
Czech playwright, poet, and political dissident, who, after the fall of communism, was
president of Czechoslovakia (1989–92) and of the Czech Republic (1993–2003).
Havel was the son of a wealthy restaurateur whose property was confiscated by the
communist government of Czechoslovakia in 1948. As the son of bourgeois parents, Havel
was denied easy access to education but managed to finish high school and study on the
university level. He found work as a stagehand in a Prague theatrical company in 1959 and
soon began writing plays with Ivan Vyskočil. By 1968 Havel had progressed to the position
of resident playwright of the Theatre of the Balustrade company. He was a prominent
participant in the liberal reforms of 1968 (known as the Prague Spring), and, after the Soviet
clampdown on Czechoslovakia that year, his plays were banned and his passport was
confiscated. During the 1970s and ’80s he was repeatedly arrested and served four years in
prison (1979–83) for his activities on behalf of human rights in Czechoslovakia. After his
release from prison Havel remained in his homeland.
Havel’s first solo play, Zahradní slavnost (1963; The Garden Party), typified his work
in its absurdist, satirical examination of bureaucratic routines and their dehumanizing effects.
In his best-known play, Vyrozumění (1965; The Memorandum), an incomprehensible
artificial language is imposed on a large bureaucratic enterprise, causing the breakdown of
human relationships and their replacement by unscrupulous struggles for power. In these and
subsequent works Havel explored the self-deluding rationalizations and moral compromises
that characterize life under a totalitarian political system. Havel continued to write plays
steadily until the late 1980s; these works include Ztížená možnost soustředění (1968; The
Increased Difficulty of Concentration); the three one-act plays Audience (1975), Vernisáž
(1975; Private View), and Protest (1978); Largo Desolato (1985); and Zítra to Spustíme
(1988; Tomorrow).
When massive antigovernment demonstrations erupted in Prague in November 1989,
Havel became the leading figure in the Civic Forum, a new coalition of noncommunist
opposition groups pressing for democratic reforms. In early December the Communist Party
capitulated and formed a coalition government with the Civic Forum. As a result of an
agreement between the partners in this bloodless “Velvet Revolution,” Havel was elected to
the post of interim president of Czechoslovakia on December 29, 1989, and he was reelected
to the presidency in July 1990, becoming the country’s first noncommunist leader since 1948.
As the Czechoslovak union faced dissolution in 1992, Havel, who opposed the division,
resigned from office. The following year he was elected president of the new Czech Republic.
His political role, however, was limited, as Prime Minister Václav Klaus (1993–97)
commanded much of the power. In 1998 Havel was reelected by a narrow margin, and, under
his presidency, the Czech Republic joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in
1999. Barred constitutionally from seeking a third term, he stepped down as president in
2003.