The Kaprálová Companion, edited by Karla Hartl and Erik Entwistle, is a collection of biographical and analytical essays on Czech composer Vítezslava Kaprálová [1915–1940]. Accompanied by an annotated catalog of works, annotated chronology of life events, bibliography, discography, and a list of published works, The Kaprálová Companion is an essential, comprehensive guide to the composer's life and music. It is also the first book published on Kaprálová in English. As readers will discover, the work of Vítezslava Kaprálová represents a progressive and distinctive voice in inter-war Czech musical culture. Despite her untimely death at the age of twenty-five, Kaprálová created an impressive body of work that has earned her the distinction of being considered the most important woman composer in the history of Czech music. Editors Hartl and Entwistle have gathered a roster of scholars from the United States, Canada, and the Czech Republic, whose contributions to The Kaprálová Companion cover a variety of topics relevant to Kaprálová and her times. It is not only be a welcome starting point for scholars and music lovers, but its critical essays also advance thought-provoking assessments of her music, engender further inquiries into aspects of her life and work, and inspire a new generation of performers.

As readers will discover, the work of Vítêzslava Kaprálová represents a progressive and distinctive voice in interwar Czech musical culture. Despite her untimely death at the age of twenty-five, Kaprálová created an impressive body of work that has earned her the distinction of being considered the most important woman composer in the history of Czech music.

Timothy Cheek’s revised edition of Singing in Czech: A Guide to Czech Lyric Diction and Vocal Repertoire, with its accompanying audio accessible online, builds on the original pioneering work of 2001 that set “a new and very welcome high standard for teaching lyric diction,” according to Notes: The Journal of the Music Library Association. It offers users updated information, important clarifications, and expanded repertoire in a more accessible, easier to use format. Singing in Czech is divided into two parts. Using IPA, the first part takes the reader systematically through each sound of the Czech language, enhanced by recordings of native Czech opera singers. Chapters cover the Czech vowels, consonants, rules of assimilation, approaches to singing double consonants, stress and length, Moravian dialect, and an introduction to singing in Slovak. Fine points of formal pronunciation have been clarified in this revised edition. In the second part, Cheek offers a thorough overview of Czech art song, expanded from the first edition. Texts to major song literature and opera excerpts by Smetana, Dvořák, Janáček, Martinů, and Haas, with timings, editions, word-for-word translations, idiomatic translations, and IPA transcriptions follow. In this revision, Cheek has included additional cycles by Dvořák and Martinů, and two new chapters on Czech female composers Vítězslava Kaprálová and Sylvie Bodorová. This revised edition of Singing in Czech is useful for all those who are interested and engaged in the performance of the rich Czech vocal repertoire.

This annotated bibliography uncovers the wealth of resources available to prospective researchers and supports emerging scholarship and inquiry into the life and music of this Czech composer. It includes all secondary sources on Martinu and his music, as well as chronology of his life and a complete list of works.

A sweeping history of a twentieth-century Prague torn between fascism, communism, and democracy—with lessons for a world again threatened by dictatorship Postcards from Absurdistan is a cultural and political history of Prague from 1938, when the Nazis destroyed Czechoslovakia’s artistically vibrant liberal democracy, to 1989, when the country’s socialist regime collapsed after more than four decades of communist dictatorship. Derek Sayer shows that Prague’s twentieth century, far from being a story of inexorable progress toward some “end of history,” whether fascist, communist, or democratic, was a tragicomedy of recurring nightmares played out in a land Czech dissidents dubbed Absurdistan. Situated in the eye of the storms that shaped the modern world, Prague holds up an unsettling mirror to the absurdities and dangers of our own times. In a brilliant narrative, Sayer weaves a vivid montage of the lives of individual Praguers—poets and politicians, architects and athletes, journalists and filmmakers, artists, musicians, and comedians—caught up in the crosscurrents of the turbulent half century following the Nazi invasion. This is the territory of the ideologist, the collaborator, the informer, the apparatchik, the dissident, the outsider, the torturer, and the refugee—not to mention the innocent bystander who is always looking the other way and Václav Havel’s greengrocer whose knowing complicity allows the show to go on. Over and over, Prague exposes modernity’s dreamworlds of progress as confections of kitsch. In a time when democracy is once again under global assault, Postcards from Absurdistan is an unforgettable portrait of a city that illuminates the predicaments of the modern world.

The mention of the term "melodrama" is likely to evoke a response from laymen and musicians alike that betrays an acquaintance only with the popular form of the genre and its greatly heightened drama, exaggerated often to the point of the ridiculous. Few are aware that there exists a type of melodrama that contains in its smaller forms the beauty of the sung ballad and, in the larger-scale works, the appeal of the spoken play. This category of melodrama is one that surfaced in many cultures but was perhaps never so enthusiastically cultivated as in the Czech lands. The melodrama varied greatly at the hands of its Czech advocates. While the works of Zdeněk Fibich and his contemporary Josef Bohuslav Foerster, a composer best known for his songs, remained closely bound to the text, those of conductor/composer Otakar Ostrčil reveal a stance that privileged the music and, given their creator’s orchestral experience, are more reminiscent of the symphonic poem. Fibich in his staged works and Josef Suk (composer/violinist and Dvořák’s son-in-law), in his incidental music reflect variously late nineteenth-century Romanticism, the influence of Wagner, and early manifestations of Impressionism. In its more recent guise, the principles of the staged melodrama reside quite comfortably in the film score. Judith A. Mabary’s important volume will be of interest not only to musicologists, but those working in Central and East European studies, voice studies, European theatre, and those studying music and nationalism.