The special history of Bohemia and its polyphonic music

The musical tradition of the fifteenth-century Bohemian Lands had its own individual character, influenced by the specific political and religious situation in the country. After the death of Johannes Hus, a popular Czech preacher, university teacher and critic of the contemporary church, at the stake in Constance in 1415, the explosive atmosphere in Bohemia resulted in the Hussite wars (1419–1436). This development had considerable effects on sacred music. On the one hand, the institutional foundation of the Catholic church was broken; many clerics left the country and settled down in the neighbouring regions (i. e. Lusatia, Silesia, Hungary, Bavaria). In the second half of the century, the Catholic church was only partly reestablished as an institution. On the other hand, the ideology of the Hussite reformation supported the development of sacred songs (mostly monophonic in Czech), some of them surviving within the repertories of protestant churches even centuries later (» B. Geistliches Lied, Kap. Patris sapientia). Also, the creation of the liturgy in Czech based on the traditional Roman plainchant in the 1420s can be seen as a prelude to the activities of Martin Luther in the sixteenth century.

Abb. Prague (Schedel Weltchronik)

PRAGA. Coloured woodcut with a panorama of Prague (Michael Wolgemut and school) in Hartmann Schedel‘s Weltchronik (Nuremberg: Anton Koberger 1493).

Archives of the Capital City of Prague, Coll. iconographies, sign. G 3786 (with permission).

The cultivation of polyphony in the late medieval Bohemian Lands was closely connected to the existence of the University of Prague (founded 1348), where the knowledge of mensural theory is documented around 1370 at the latest by a treatise written there by an anonymous author.[1] This local creativity inspired by foreign impulses gave birth to a specific Central European variant of Ars nova music, represented by polytextual motets of the „Engelberg“ type. Among them, there is at least one preserved example of a local isorhythmic motet, Ave coronata/Ave spes.[2] There are several kinds of polyphonic song (cantio), which include a circle-canon called rotulum, pieces that imitate the performance on instruments (trumpetum, stampetum), and canon-like compositons inspired by the genre of the French or Italian chace/caccia (katchetum).[3] Because of a lack of fourteenth-century sources, we learn about this repertory only through late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century sources which document the musical tradition cultivated by the Utraquist Church (followers of the Hussites after 1436), which lasted until the recatholicization which started around 1620. The presence of „archaic“ pieces in those late manuscripts was one of the reasons why the musical culture of Bohemia was until recently thought to have resulted from cultural isolation caused by the Hussite wars, and by the political and religious instability following thereafter.[4]

The main Catholic institution was the St Vitus Cathedral in Prague, which had a large ensemble of singers before 1419; but its influence radically decreased after the war.[5] The institution‘s insufficient material background did not allow any other activities than those necessary to celebrate the liturgy.