No Vague Specters: Gender and the Operatic Village in the Czech Fin-De-Siècle

As elsewhere in Europe, the turn of the twentieth century in the Czech lands saw a profusion of new and contradictory cultural currents. Conservative assertions of an essentialist Czech identity, grounded in myths of idealized rural life, competed with new desires for art and music that shed such older forms in search of an ill-defined pan-European modernity. Operas like Antonín Dvořák’s The Devil and Kate (1899) and Leoš Janáček’s Jenůfa (1904) contributed to this cultural foment by centering village life and folk practices, albeit in very different ways.