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Tomislav Volek | |
|---|---|
| Born | October 11, 1931 Prague |
| Occupation | Musicologist |
| Education | PhD University of Prague |
| Subject | Music, Mozart |
Tomislav Volek, is a Czech musicologist who is best known for his research on the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Spending much of his career in Prague, Volek made a virtue of necessity by exploring the musical life of eighteenth-century Bohemia, with particular emphasis on Mozart’s activities in Prague. Meticulous archival research combined with a willingness to advance daring new hypotheses led to a series of pathbreaking articles, one of which, “Über den Ursprung von Mozarts Oper La clemenza di Tito” (Mozart-Jahrbuch, 1959), contributed to a fundamental reassessment of one of Mozart’s late operas, although some of his theories, especially the claim that Mozart began work on the opera much earlier than the summer of 1791, have been thoroughly refuted in English-language musicological literature. [1]
His work on Don Giovanni and its Bohemian context is also of crucial importance, as is his edition of Mozart documents, “The Mozartiana of Czech and Moravian Archives” (Prague, 1991).
Volek is President of the Czech Mozart Society and a member of the Czech Academy of Sciences.
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Josef Mysliveček was a Czech composer who contributed to the formation of late eighteenth-century classicism in music. Mysliveček provided his younger friend Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with significant compositional models in the genres of symphony, Italian serious opera, and violin concerto; both Wolfgang and his father Leopold Mozart considered him an intimate friend from the time of their first meetings in Bologna in 1770 until he betrayed their trust over the promise of an operatic commission for Wolfgang to be arranged with the management of the Teatro San Carlo in Naples. His closeness to the Mozart family resulted in frequent references to him in the Mozart correspondence.
La clemenza di Tito, K. 621, is an opera seria in two acts composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to an Italian libretto by Caterino Mazzolà, after Pietro Metastasio. It was started after most of Die Zauberflöte, the last of Mozart's principal operas, had already been written. The work premiered on 6 September 1791 at the Estates Theatre in Prague.
Amadeus is a 1984 American period biographical drama film directed by Miloš Forman and adapted by Peter Shaffer from his 1979 stage play Amadeus. Set in Vienna, Austria, during the latter half of the 18th century, the film is a fictionalized story of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart from the time he left Salzburg, described by its writer as a "fantasia on the theme of Mozart and Salieri". Mozart's music is heard extensively in the soundtrack. The film follows a fictional rivalry between Mozart and Italian composer Antonio Salieri at the court of Emperor Joseph II. The film stars F. Murray Abraham as Salieri and Tom Hulce as Mozart. Abraham and Hulce were both nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor, with Abraham winning.
The Estates Theatre or Stavovské divadlo is a historic theater in Prague, Czech Republic. The Estates Theatre was annexed to the National Theatre in 1948 and currently draws on three artistic ensembles, opera, ballet, and drama, which perform at the Estates Theatre, the National Theatre, and the Kolowrat Theatre.
The Czech Academy of Sciences was established in 1992 by the Czech National Council as the Czech successor of the former Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and its tradition goes back to the Royal Bohemian Society of Sciences and the Emperor Franz Joseph Czech Academy for Sciences, Literature and Arts. The academy is the leading non-university public research institution in the Czech Republic. It conducts both fundamental and strategic applied research.
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The Academy of Performing Arts in Prague is a university in the centre of Prague, Czech Republic, specialising in the study of music, dance, drama, film, television and multi-media. It is the largest art school in the Czech Republic, with more than 350 educators and researchers, and 1500 students.
There is no question that the Praguers of the late eighteenth century exhibited a special appreciation for the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, even though, as recently pointed out by Daniel E. Freeman, confirmations of this fact attributed to Mozart himself in sayings such as "Meine Prager verstehen mich" have only come down to posterity second or third hand. Perhaps the most valuable direct testimony that attests to the discernment of the musical public in Prague with regard to Mozart's music comes from Lorenzo Da Ponte, the librettist of Mozart's opera Don Giovanni, which was first performed in Prague:
It is not easy to convey an adequate conception of the enthusiasm of the Bohemians for [Mozart's] music. The pieces which were admired least of all in other countries were regarded by those people as things divine; and, more wonderful still, the great beauties which other nations discovered in the music of that rare genius only after many, many performances, were perfectly appreciated by the Bohemians on the very first evening.
Zdeněk Košler was a Czechoslovak conductor, who played an important role in Czechoslovak musical life of the second half of 20th century, notably during the 1960s and 1980s. He was particularly well known as an opera conductor.
Karel Fiala was a Czech operatic tenor and film actor. He was known for his work in operettas and musicals, but received worldwide attention for his portrayal of Mozart's Don Giovanni in the film Amadeus.
Jana Jonášová is a Czech opera singer. One of the most important Czech coloratura sopranos of her generation, she has had an active international career at the world's major opera houses and concert stages for roughly four decades. As an opera singer she performed a varied repertoire from a variety of musical periods and in many languages. She drew particular acclaim for her portrayal of Mozart heroines and roles from the standard Czech repertory. In 1970 she joined the National Theatre in Prague where she was a member for more than three decades.
David Joseph Buch is an American musicologist.
Daniel Evan Freeman is an American musicologist who specializes in European art music of the eighteenth century, in particular the musical culture of eighteenth-century Prague and the Bohemian lands. He is also active as a pianist and music editor.
Per la ricuperata salute di Ofelia, K. 477a, is a solo cantata for soprano and fortepiano composed in 1785 by Antonio Salieri and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and a third, unknown composer, Cornetti, to a libretto written by the Vienna court poet Lorenzo Da Ponte. It is speculated that "Cornetti" may refer to Alessandro Cornetti, a vocal teacher and composer active in Vienna at the time, or that it is a pseudonym of either Salieri or Stephen Storace, a composer who organized the collaborative work to honor his famous sister. The music had been considered lost until November 2015, when German musicologist and composer Timo Jouko Herrmann identified the score while searching for music by one of Salieri's ostensible pupils, Antonio Casimir Cartellieri, in the archives of the Czech Museum of Music in Prague.
