Antonin Dvorak made his famous trip to the United States one hundred years ago, but despite an enormous amount of attention from scholars and critics since that time, he remains an elusive figure. Comprising both interpretive essays and a selection of fascinating documents that bear on Dvorak's career and music, this volume addresses fundamental questions about the composer while presenting an argument for a radical reappraisal.

The essays, which make up the first part of the book, begin with Leon Botstein's inquiry into the reception of Dvorak's work in German-speaking Europe, in England, and in America. Commenting on the relationship between Dvorak and Brahms, David Beveridge offers the first detailed portrait of perhaps the most interesting artistic friendship of the era. Joseph Horowitz explores the context in which the "New World" Symphony was premiered a century ago, offering an absorbing account of New York musical life at that time. In discussing Dvorak as a composer of operas, Jan Smaczny provides an unexpected slant on the widely held view of him as a "nationalist" composer. Michael Beckerman further investigates this view of Dvorak by raising the question of the role nationalism played in music of the nineteenth century.

The second part of this volume presents Dvorak's correspondence and reminiscences as well as unpublished reviews and criticism from the Czech press. It includes a series of documents from the composer's American years, a translation of the review of "Rusalka"'s premiere with the photographs that accompanied the article, and Janacek's analyses of the symphonic poems. Many of these documents are published in English for the first time."

Once thought to be a provincial composer of only passing interest to eccentrics, Leos Janacek (1854-1928) is now widely acknowledged as one of the most powerful and original creative figures of his time. Banned for all purposes from the Prague stage until the age of 62, and unable to make it even out of the provincial capital of Brno, his operas are now performed in dynamic productions throughout the globe. This volume brings together some of the world's foremost Janacek scholars to look closely at a broad range of issues surrounding his life and work. Representing the latest in Janacek scholarship, the essays are accompanied by newly translated writings by the composer himself.

The collection opens with an essay by Leon Botstein who clarifies and amplifies how Max Brod contributed to Janacek 's international success by serving as "point man" between Czechs and Germans, Jews and non-Jews. John Tyrrell, the dean of Janacek scholars, distills more than thirty years of research in "How Janacek Composed Operas," while Diane Paige considers Janacek's liason with a married woman and the question of the artist's muse. Geoffrey Chew places the idea of the adulterous muse in the larger context of Czech fin de siecle decadence in his thoroughgoing consideration of Janacek's problematic opera Osud. Derek Katz examines the problems encountered by Janacek's satirically patriotic "Excursions of Mr. Broucek" in the post-World War I era of Czechoslovak nationalism, while Paul Wingfield mounts a defense of Janacek against allegations of cruelty in his wife's memoirs. In the final essay, Michael Beckerman asks how much true history can be culled from one of Janacek's business cards.

The book then turns to writings by Janacek previously unpublished in English. These not only include fascinating essays on Naturalism, opera direction, and Tristan and Isolde, but four impressionistic chronicles of the "speech melodies" of daily life. They provide insight into Janacek's revolutionary method of composition, and give us the closest thing we will ever have to the "heard" record of a Czech pre-war past-or any past, for that matter."

From My Life, the autobiography of the famed music critic Eduard Hanslick, appeared toward the end of his life, in 1894, when it went through three printings. It was republished in 1911, and again, more recently, in 1987, by Bärenreiter, and in 2011, by Taschenbuch. Born in Prague, Hanslick studied piano with Tomaschek, and though, like other compatriots and contemporaries, he studied law and became a government functionary, he went on to become the most noted and honored music critic in nineteenth-century Vienna, making his mark with his relatively brief disquisition On the Musically Beautiful, first issued in 1854. In the Brahms-Wagner controversy, he was on the side of the former, and was the target of Wagner’s vicious anti-semitism, even though he had been among the first to champion Wagner’s work in Vienna. His long and informative autobiography has never appeared in complete translation to English or any other language.

The Kapralova Companion, edited by Karla Hartl and Erik Entwistle, is a collection of biographical and analytical essays on Czech composer Vitezslava Kapralova 1915--1940]. Accompanied by an annotated catalog of works, annotated chronology of life events, bibliography, discography, and a list of published works, The Kapralova Companion is an essential, comprehensive guide to the composer's life and music. It is also the first book published on Kapralova in English. As readers will discover, the work of Vitezslava Kapralova represents a progressive and distinctive voice in inter-war Czech musical culture. Despite her untimely death at the age of twenty-five, Kapralova created an impressive body of work that has earned her the distinction of being considered the most important woman composer in the history of Czech music. Editors Hartl and Entwistle have gathered a roster of scholars from the United States, Canada, and the Czech Republic, whose contributions to The Kapralova Companion cover a variety of topics relevant to Kapralova and her times. It is not only be a welcome starting point for scholars and music lovers, but its critical essays also advance thought-provoking assessments of her music, engender further inquiries into aspects of her life and work, and inspire a new generation of performers.

The grand narratives of European music history are informed by the dichotomy of placements and displacements. Yet musicology has thus far largely ignored the phenomenon of displacement and underestimated its significance for musical landscapes and music history. Music and Displacement: Diasporas, Mobilities, and Dislocations in Europe and Beyond constitutes a pioneering volume that aims to fill this gap as it explores the interactions between music and displacement in theoretical and practical terms. Contributions by distinguished international scholars address the theme through a wide range of case studies, incorporating art, popular, folk, and jazz music and interacting with areas, such as gender and post-colonial studies, critical theory, migration, and diaspora. The book is structured in three stages silence, acculturation, and theory that move from silence to sound and from displacement to placement. The range of subject matter within these sections is deliberately hybrid and mirrors the eclectic nature of displacement itself, with case studies exploring Nazi Anti-Semitism in musical displacement; musical life in the Jewish community of Palestine; Mahler, Jewishness, and Jazz; the Irish Diaspora in England; and German Exile studies, among others. Featuring articles from such scholars as Ruth F. Davis, Sean Campbell, Jim Samson, Sydney Hutchinson, and Europea series co-editor Philip V. Bohlman, the volume exerts an appeal reaching beyond music and musicology to embrace all areas in the humanities concerned with notions of displacement, migration, and diaspora."