Czech Chamber Music Society • Kateřina Kněžíková

Soprano Kateřina Kněžíková is one of today’s most promising singers. Besides performing opera, she is increasingly devoting herself to the concert repertoire, collaborating with such ensembles as the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Bamberg Symphony, the Camerata Salzburg, or the Orchestra dellʼAccademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. Her core repertoire consists of works by Dvořák, Martinů, and Janáček and the song repertoire. She is a laureate of several vocal competitions and was honoured at the 2018 Classic Prague Awards for the best chamber music performance. She earned a Thalia Award for her outstanding performance in Julietta (Martinů) on the stage of the National Moravian-Silesian Theatre.

In 2006 she became a full-time opera ensemble member at the National Theatre, where she is now appearing in many productions including Rusalka, Così fan tutte, Carmen, The Magic Flute, The Bartered Bride, and The Jacobin. Nonetheless, she sees one of her greatest successes as having been the title role in Káťa Kabanová at the Glyndebourne Opera Festival in 2021. 

David Švec studied piano and conducting first at the České Budějovice Conservatoire and then at the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts in Brno. In February 2000 he took part at conducting masterclasses under Sir Colin Davis in Dresden, and in 2002 he completed a study visit at the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Vienna (under Leopold Hager). In 2004 he won the Bösendorfer Preis in the opera coaching category at the Belvedere International Competition in Vienna.

Although he also appears regularly in concert halls (Bamberg Symphony, Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra, Moravian Philharmonic in Olomouc), David Švec profiles himself mainly as an opera conductor. Already as a student he was active at the Janáček Opera in Berlin, then in September 2003 he began working at Prague’s National Theatre, where he has had a full-time conducting engagement since 2011. Last year he became the chief conductor of opera at the South Bohemia Theatre in České Budějovice. He also makes guest appearances abroad at opera houses (Barcelona, Paris, Vienna, Ljubljana) and festivals (Glyndebourne). In 2014 for the publisher Bärenreiter, he made the new piano vocal score for Janáček’s opera Věc Makropulos, which was used for the first time for the production of the opera at the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich.

He has been collaborating with the Prague Chamber Orchestra as a pianist since 1998, and he is in demand as an especially sensitive chamber music partner. He has also made many CD recordings for Czech Radio. He appears on stage regularly with leading Czech singers such as soprano Eva Urbanová, bass-baritone Adam Plachetka, and soprano Kateřina Kněžíková, with whom he has appeared, for example, at the Prague Spring Festival (2010 and 2015). 

The most beautiful of a rich treasure of song lyrics are the love songs, no matter in which time and country they were written. The French composer Gabriel Fauré created mainly sacred music and also worked as an organist. His vocal compositions form about a half of his total output. The poets whose verses he set to music in his secular songs include Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Lecont de Lisle, Armand Silvestre and others. Many songs were written individually and only later grouped together in collections. Rêve dʼamour (Dream of Love) on the poem by Victor Hugo (1802–1885) is one of Fauré’s early songs. Composed in 1864, it was not performed until ten years later, when the composer met the mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot-García (1821–1910), whose art inspired him to write a number of songs. The author of Après un rêve (After a Dream) from 1877 is Fauré’s friend Romain Bussine (1830–1899), opera singer and teacher. Chanson d’amour (Love Song) from 1884 is one of Fauré’s many songs on the poems by Armand Silvestre (1837–1901), writer and literary critic, employed as a civil servant at the Ministry of Finance. The lyrics of Les berceaux (The Cradles) was written by René-François-Armand Sully-Prudhomme (1839–1907), the first ever winner of the Nobel Prize in literature (1901). Fauré’s songs are characterized by attention to detail and highlighting the overall mood with the help of rich or, as the case may be, very simple harmony and phrasing, always in harmony with the original poetry.

Johannes Brahms composed almost two hundred songs. The first lieder, already having opus numbers, were created around 1853. In songwriting, Brahms followed in the footsteps of his friend and mentor Robert Schumann. Brahms composed songs steadily throughout his life. He produced about 30 collections, in addition to duets and numerous arrangements of folk songs. His selection of verses for songs includes the poets Heinrich Heine and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who were set to music most frequently at the time, but also a number of lesser-known names. The painter and poet Robert Reinick (1805–1852) belonged to the circle around Robert Schumann; his poem Liebestreu (Faithful Love) is a conversation between mother and daughter. The poem Am Sonntag Morgen (On Sunday Morning) by Paul Heyse (1830–1914) on Italian folk poetry uses simple verse to suggest the sad background of a love relationship. Brahms profoundly admired the prematurely deceased poet Ludwig Hölty (1748–1776), as expressed in the following quote: “…my dear Hölty, for whose beautiful warm words my music is not strong enough, otherwise you would see his verses more often in my works.” He need not have worried about that because the lament of the abandoned lover in An ein Veilchen (To the Violet), a song set to a Hölthy poem written in free verse, confirms that he was uniquely able to empathize with the spirit of his poetry. Of all the oeuvre by the once revered and now almost forgotten writer and poet Hermann Allmers (1821–1902), the poem Feldeinsamkeit (Solitude in the Field) is still remembered mainly thanks to Brahms’s masterful composition.

Brahms, himself a pianist, greatly enriched the piano repertoire of Romanticism. In 1892 he composed Three Intermezzi, Op. 117. His collection Six Piano Pieces, Op. 118 from 1893, dedicated to Clara Schumann, also contains four pieces called Intermezzo, and another three Intermezzo pieces are included in his collection Four Piano Pieces, Op. 119 from the same year; these are Brahms’s last compositions for piano.

Franz Schubert by his music opened the way for the song, hitherto written mostly by untrained enthusiastic dilettantes, to get into the repertoire of professional composers. Schubert arrived at the concept in which the two components – vocal and instrumental – form a unity, which became a model for future generations. In his strophic songs, he abandoned simple repetition in many cases and varied the individual strophes based on the content of the text. His followers were particularly inspired by his complex song formations. Schubert also employed different approaches to piano accompaniment – from simple harmonic support through color characterization and illustration to the organic combination of vocal and instrumental lines. Schubert used a wide variety of texts for his music, including the poetry of his close friends. The author of the poem Nacht und Träume (Night and Dreams) was Matthäus von Collin, younger brother of the writer and playwright Heinrich von Collin, the author of the drama Coriolan, for which Ludwig van Beethoven composed the overture. The song Rastlose Liebe (Restless Love) dates from 1815 and Schubert dedicated it to his teacher Antonio Salieri. It was written only a few months after Schubert set to music a scene from J. W. Goethe’s Faust, Gretchen am Spinnrade (Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel), which marked the beginning of the composer’s fame as a songwriter.

Klement Slavický’s oeuvre is one of the most valuable legacies of Czech music of the late 20th century. He was born in Tovačov in the district of Přerov and often returned in his work to his native region for the inspiration. During the Second World War he composed Moravian Songs for tenor and piano, after the end of the war, a suite of love songs to Moravian folk poetry called Šohajé, and in 1951, Moravian Dance Fantasies for orchestra. While many composers of the time used folk sources in a defense (self-defense) against the dictates of the aesthetics of Socialist Realism, for Slavický the influences of folk music formed a natural part of his musical thought. In 1951 he had to leave his post of the music director and conductor of Czechoslovak Radio because he was accused of being a “formalist”. The song cycle Ej, srdénko moje (Oh, My Heart So Wretched) on the words of Moravian folk poetry was written in 1954 and ranks among the similarly inspired works of Leoš Janáček and Bohuslav Martinů.

Antonín Dvořák was also often inspired by folk art and utilized its elements in sophisticated stylization. He used the folk dance furiant several times in the scherzo movement of his symphonies. The furiant is a Bohemian couple dance with a characteristic rhythmic component. It is in 3/4 time, but the placement of accents gives the impression of a simultaneous progression of 2/4 (trochaic) and 3/4 (dactylic) meters. Therefore it is not a dance with a variable beat in the true sense, but a transitional type resembling “mateník” (folk dances of the late 17th and 18th century with alternating time signatures and step variations). The term “furiant” [overly confident fellow] once characterized a rebellious peasant. In 1878 Dvořák composed two dazzling pieces for piano and entitled them Furiant, although they are not constructed upon the characteristic irregular rhythm mentioned above and are more like free fantasies. They were first performed on 17 November 1878 in Prague by Karel Slavkovský, to whom they are dedicated.

In 1859, Adolf Heyduk (1835–1923) published Gypsy Melodies, a collection of poems belonging to the wave of poetry deliberately imitating folk texts. Dvořák was asked to set them to music by the tenor Gustav Walter (1835–1910), a native of Bílina in North Bohemia and a member of the Vienna Court Opera. For this purpose, Adolf Heyduk translated his verses into German and Dvořák composed to the German text. Interpreted by Gustav Walter, the first and fourth songs were performed in Vienna on 4 February 1881; the fourth song – the deeply emotional Když mne stará matka (Songs My Mother Taught Me) – eventually became the best known of this song cycle.