An ‘Execution’ at the Hofoper: Czech Perspectives on the Viennese Premiere of Dvořák's The Cunning Peasant

Abstract

Abstract On the score of his St Ludmila oratorio, Dvořák scribbled: ‘completed in the days when The Cunning Peasant was executed in Vienna’. Indeed, Dvořák's comic opera sparked a riot at its Hofoper premiere in 1885 and was met with harsh criticism in the Viennese press. David Brodbeck argues that the rioters were motivated to action not by The Cunning Peasant itself, but by the composer's nationality. Likewise, Brodbeck shows that the opera's harshest Viennese critics belonged to a new generation of German liberals, who subscribed to an increasingly ethnic, rather than civic, view of nationalism and were thus predisposed to disapprove of any Dvořák opera because it was not German. Based on this analysis, it would appear that Dvořák's fate was sealed long before the first notes of The Cunning Peasant were sounded at the Vienna Hofoper. This article builds on Brodbeck's claims, by exploring the Viennese scandal from the perspective of Czech critics, many of whom remained unconvinced that all Czech operas – whether by Dvořák or by another composer – would have been greeted with the same kind of disdain. In their view, The Cunning Peasant failed because it was too overtly Czech for Vienna, having been designed for Prague's Provisional Theatre, and because it was insufficiently representative of Czech achievement in the genre, paling in comparison with the operas of Smetana. Rather than offering a more plausible explanation for the riot, the opinions articulated in the Prague press reveal much about the biases and motivations of the Czech critics themselves.