Zdenek Nejedly

Early Life and Career

Son of the East Bohemian composer and pedagogue Roman Nejedly (1844–1920), Zdenek Nejedly had the good fortune to be born in Litomysl, the historic birthplace of the composer Bedrich Smetana, the so-called "Father of Czech music" and a significant figurehead in the Czechs' nineteenth-century National Revival movement. His formal education in music began with Josef Stastny at the Litomysl Gymnasium (1888–1896), alongside instruction in Czech history. In 1896 he moved to Prague to study at Charles University, where he attended lectures in positivist history with Jaroslav Goll and music aesthetics with Otakar Hostinsky, finally receiving his doctorate in 1900. Hostinsky, a great proponent of Smetana's music, suggested that Nejedly study composition and music theory with his like-minded colleague, Zdenek Fibich, whose personality and tastes had a profound effect on his young student. Although his first publications were devoted to Czech history, after Fibich's death in 1900 Nejedly devoted himself to musicology, authoring a monograph entitled Zdenko Fibich, Founder of the Scenic Melodrama in 1901 as a first attempt at gaining greater recognition for his mentor. That these efforts were directed against the musical establishment of Prague (who he felt had victimized Smetana, Fibich, and Hostinsky) was made clear by his first foray into music criticism that same year, in an attack on Antonin Dvorak's opera Rusalka shortly after its premiere.

These factional divisions were to inspire Nejedly throughout his whole career; in many ways he was personally responsible for perpetuating them for future generations, long after their currency in Czech musical society. His 1903 History of Czech Music drew distinct battle lines between the Conservatory students of Dvorak and the supposed inheritors of Smetana, including the composers Josef Bohuslav Foerster, Otakar Ostrcil, and Otakar Zich, all personal friends of Nejedly's on the outs with the Prague establishment. Over the next decade he produced an extraordinary amount of writing on music, including monographs on pre-Hussite song (1904, 1907, and 1913), Smetana's operas 1908, Czech Modern Opera Since Smetana (1911, notoriously excluding Dvorak), Hostinsky (1907 and 1910), and Gustav Mahler (1913). In 1908 he began to lecture in musicology at Charles University, forming a circle of devoted young colleagues that included Zich and Vladimir Helfert.

Polemics and the Interwar Years

When Nejedly's music reviews for Prague's daily newspapers grew distasteful in their anti-Conservatory bias, he and his followers were precipitously banned from publication, forcing the group to found their own journal, Smetana, which ran for sixteen years, 1910–1927. From this vantage point Nejedly launched the so-called "Dvorak Affair" (1911–1914), in which he sought to attack the legacy of the great composer; any contemporary artists who sided against him (especially the 31 musicians who signed a public petition in 1912) became the focus of fierce personal attacks. Beginning with Vitezslav Novak in 1913, Nejedly sought to end the careers of composers who did not conform to his pro-Smetana views of modern tradition and social responsibility: other notable targets included Josef Suk. Meanwhile, these tactics came back to haunt Nejedly's own proteges, especially Ostrcil as director of Prague's National Theatre and Zich as a modernist opera composer.

After the legalization of the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1921, Nejedly became one of its earliest and most outspoken members. With the exception of his Smetana journal, he turned away from mainstream journal publications, focusing on the Communist daily Rude pravo and his own political journal, Var (Boiling, 1921–30). In these he chastised the interwar Czechoslovak Republic, its president Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, and various other leaders; the last issue of Var was taken up with a detailed defense of Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck, which Ostrcil had produced in 1926. By this point, however, his many musicology students were among the main critics in Prague, carrying on his work on his behalf. After the close of Var, his main involvements in music included a short polemic with Novak and monographs on Ostrcil (1935, to commemorate his friend's death), the National Theatre (1936), and Soviet music (1937).

Wartime and Postwar Communism

During the Nazi occupation of the Czech Lands, the Nejedly family fled to the Soviet Union, where he supposedly helped Czech resistance activities from afar. At this time, his son Vit Nejedly (1912–45), whose short career in Prague had focused on Communist agitprop pieces and workers' choruses, was involved with a Czech brigade attached to the Red Army, whose band he attempted to emulate. After the end of the war (and Vit's death of typhus after the battle of Dukla, January 1945), Zdenek Nejedly returned to Prague to participate in the postwar government. Initially in Eduard Benes's Third Republic he was made Minister of Education, Arts, and Sciences, but this was exchanged for Social Security by 1946. After the February Revolution of 1948 he returned to Culture and Education, a post he kept until 1953. These crucial years saw the implementation of a statewide curriculum at all levels of education: his revisionist stance toward Czech history included down-playing the achievements of interwar democracy as a series of bourgeois trends that were ultimately damaging to society. It was also Nejedly's chance to promote his passion for Smetana and his "lineage", now enacted as state law. To this latter end he entered a new stage of retrospective publishing, with works like The History of My Smetanism, On Czech Culture, and especially The Communists—Inheritors of the Grand Progressive Tradition of the Czech Nation. These works and especially their ideology were retained, in some form or another, in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic all the way until the Velvet Revolution in 1989. As such, Nejedly's name was associated with totalitarian hegemony by at least two generations of students, many of whom had no connection to his musicology.

The Show Trials and Josef Hutter

After approximately two years of Communist dictatorship, the Czechoslovak Communist Party began a purge of its own party, most notoriously manifested in the arrest and execution of Rudolf Slansky and Milada Horakova. For Nejedly, this atmosphere provided an opportunity to settle old scores in the academic and musical community. Over ten years before, in the mid-1930s, Nejedly's public attacks against artists such as Leos Janacek had turned many of his former adherents against him, most notably Vladimir Helfert, whose work as a musicologist had outstripped his teacher's, and Josef Hutter, who had published on Ostrcil and Zich. When Helfert published a landmark monograph, Czech Modern Music: A Study of Czech Musical Creativity (1936) that included a scathing attack on ideological bias in music criticism, Nejedly expected his remaining followers to shun Helfert and condemn the publication. Hutter publicly sided with Helfert. During the Nazi occupation, both men were imprisoned by the Nazis: Helfert for Communist resistance (for which he was severely tortured, dying in May, 1945) and Hutter for pro-Democratic resistance. After the war, Hutter returned to Charles University, but was expelled in 1950 and arrested on trumped-up charges. He was sentenced to thirty-nine years imprisonment, but served only six, having been released during an amnesty. His health broken, Hutter died in 1959, three years before his former teacher.

Zdenek Nejedly died on March 9, 1962, and was buried in the Vysehrad cemetery at Prague's Vysehrad castle, reserved for Czech heroes and significant representatives of Czech culture. His grave is near those of Smetana, Ostrcil, and his son, Vit.