This study reports on interesting holdings in the musical iconography collection of the Czech Museum of Music. Drawings by the sculptor Karel Otáhal (1901–1972) that are related to music and musicians were created for the most part at concerts of the Prague Spring festival between 1946 and 1969. He…

In June of 1892, Smetana’s Prodaná nevěsta (The Bartered Bride) was heard in Vienna for the first time as part of a guest appearance by the Czech National Theatre at the International Musical and Theatrical Exhibition. The clear success of the opera and of the performances of the National Theatre…

Bedřich Smetana made three lists of his own compositions. The first, dated 1841, presents a selection of compositions from the period of his grammar school studies in 1840–1841. The second was made in Sweden in late 1858 and early ’59, and it contains works composed in Prague and Gothenburg between…

The collection of the National Museum – Czech Museum of Music contains the largest set of harps built by Franz Brunner. This instrument maker was one of the most important builders of pedal harps in Vienna in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Brunner’s harps use a single-action pedal design,…

This study gives an overview of lute and guitar tablatures in the holdings of the National Museum (at the Czech Museum of Music and the National Museum Library), and it briefly characterizes them in the form of a catalogue. Since music from the Strahov and Lobkowicz collections, which also involve a…

In 1776, the convent of Elizabethan Nuns in Prague’s New Town was commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of two events: the profession of the former Mother Superior M. Deodata a Presentatione B. V. Mariae OSE (née Anna Justina von Klausniz) and the laying of the foundation stone of the convent…