Dvořák's "Dimitrij" from the 2017 Bard Music Festival

[Collrec]

No sooner than mentioning a couple of days ago that the Bard College Video of Dvorak's "Dimitrij" would soon be available online, here it is now, just posted today for all to watch, listen and enjoy at <https://americansymphony.org/online/>. I just watched it earlier and enjoyed it immensely It's just a few minutes longer than the 3 CD Supraphon set (SU 3793-2) which
incidentally contains a complete multi-lingual libretto and is something that rarely exists on today's CD 0pera releases.

The only other Bard Festival Opera I can think of that met our UC requirements was Meyerbeer's "Les Huguenots" in 2009. I don't know, however, if was videotaped back then. Does anyone know?

Thank you Mark for your much appreciated conversion of the two previous Bard Festival Operas ("Le Roi Malgré Lui" and "The Wreckers") from online to download and thank you in advance for hopefully doing the same for "Dimitrij".

[Kevin]

Klaus Doge- late Dvorak expert - called Dimitrij ," his most important stage work after Rusalka"

Zdenk Nejedly, who despised Dvorak's music and fulminated all his life about his operas, thought Dimitrij his best work.(he was very nutty though, banned the work for 12 years when he become communist minister of education, he actually had the power to write Dvorak out of the history books - he tried and failed of course)

[Christopher]

Zdenk Nejedly, who despised Dvorak's music and fulminated all his life about his operas, thought Dimitrij his best work.(he was very nutty though, banned the work for 12 years when he become communist minister of education, he actually had the power to write Dvorak out of the history books - he tried and failed of course)

I admit I had never heard of ZN before I read your post.  On the basis of what you wrote, and subsequent reading, I would say he does not deserve any mention on fora such as ours, and that his views on music and culture generally should count for nothing.  The paragraph below is admittedly from Wikipedia, but (if true) tells you all you need to know about his ilk - toadies serving odious totalitarian regimes while also pursuing their own agendas, and profoundly damaging the culture they should be upholding.  See also any number of Soviet cultural commissars and their Nazi equivalents.

After approximately two years of Communist dictatorship, the Czechoslovak Communist Party began a purge of its own party or former non-communist opponents, most notoriously manifested in the arrest and execution of Rudolf Slánský and Milada Horáková. For Nejedlý, this atmosphere provided an opportunity to settle old scores in the academic and musical community. Over ten years before, in the mid-1930s, Nejedlý's public attacks against artists such as Leoš Janáček had turned many of his former adherents against him, most notably Vladimír Helfert, whose work as a musicologist had outstripped his teacher's, and Josef Hutter, who had published on Ostrčil 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, Nejedlý 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.

And with that, back to Dvorak and his wonderful music.

[Kevin]

Oh it's all true. [John Tyrell New Grove -Nejedlý, Zdeněk ]

He saw the evolution of Czech music in the line Smetana–Fibich–Foerster–Ostrčil and publicized this view, notably in the periodical Smetana (1910–26), which he and his adherents founded for the purpose. His attitude to other figures in Czech music – Dvořák, Janáček, Suk and Novák – who did not belong to this succession was wholly negative. Dvořák, for example, the major Czech composer of operas between Smetana and Janáček, was omitted from his book on Czech opera after Smetana (1911) except for a few dismissive comments. Such an attitude might have been considered merely eccentric and ultimately irrelevant (public opinion has gone in a different direction) were it not for the immense power that Nejedlý wielded. In the early 1950s he had become the object of a cult, exemplified by the periodical Hudební rozhledy, which in 1953 ran a regular feature entitled 'We will learn from the works of Zdeněk Nejedlý', and by the foundation that year of the 'Cabinet of Zdeněk Nejedlý', whose object was to 'research the rich materials about [Nejedlý's] life and work so as to acquaint all Czech and Slovak people still further with his great personality and work' (ČSHS); dogmatic opinion had now become state dogma. .

This whole sad episode BTW in Czech history is called ''The Dvorak Affair''

[Mark Thomas]

A copy of the video is now available in our Downloads Board here.

[eschiss1]

thanks!