Bohemian sacred music

Abstract

On a cold January morning in 1612, just over 400 years ago, the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia, Rudolf II, died in Prague. During his long reign (1576–1612), as during the reign of Emperor Charles IV (1346–78), Bohemia was truly the centre of Europe. Its status as such was best emblematized by its appearance as a medallion on the chest of Europa Regina in the anthropomorphic maps of the continent that circulated widely in the 16th and 17th centuries. With Rudolf’s death, the imperial court moved from Prague to Vienna, and Bohemia was shunted to the periphery of a Central Europe organized around Austria. The music that sounded in the churches and squares of Bohemia’s towns and cities was likewise relegated to the periphery of Anglo-German histories of music that, for the medieval and early modern periods, focused on other regions of Europe. The two projects under review serve as timely reminders, in this anniversary year, that the rich corpus of sacred music composed and sung in Bohemia from the 12th until the 16th centuries was in fact an integral component of a broad network of music and musicians that extended across southern Germany, Austria and Poland. In her five-volume Repertorium troporum Bohemiae medii aevi project, Hana Vlhová-Wörner provides a critical edition of the remarkable repertory of Mass tropes copied and composed in Bohemia from the 12th to the 15th centuries. The three volumes that have appeared to date deal respectively with Mass Proper tropes (vol.i), tropes for the Kyrie and Gloria (vol.ii) and Sanctus tropes (vol.iii). Taken together, these volumes expose the significant textual and musical overlap among Central European liturgical sources. They also document the changes in doctrine and liturgical practice wrought by the reforms of Jan Hus, founder of the Utraquist Church, who was burned at the stake for heresy at the Council of Constance in 1415.