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  • Vina. Opera in Three Acts Based on the Playby Jaroslav Hilbert and ed. by Brian S. Locke
  • John Tyrrell
Otakar Zich. Vina. Opera in Three Acts Based on the Play by Jaroslav Hilbert. Edited by Brian S. Locke. Part 1: Introductory Materials and Act 1. (Recent Researches in the Music of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, 61.) Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 2014. [Acknowledgments, p. vi; introd., p. vii–xiii; text and trans., p. xiv–xxx; 2 plates; characters, instruments, p. 2; score, p. 3–185. ISBN 978-0-89579-788-9. $325.]
Otakar Zich. Vina. Opera in Three Acts Based on the Play by Jaroslav Hilbert. Edited by Brian S. Locke. Part 2: Act 2. (Recent Researches in the Music of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, 62.) Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 2014. [Score, p. 187–454. ISBN 978-0-89579-789-6. $325.]
Otakar Zich. Vina. Opera in Three Acts Based on the Play by Jaroslav Hilbert. Edited by Brian S. Locke. Part 3: Act 3 and Critical Report. (Recent Researches in the Music of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, 63.) Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 2014. [Score, p. 455–586; crit. report, p. 587–88; glossary of Czech terms and phrases, p. 589. ISBN 978-0-89579-790-2. $375.]

“Neither during his lifetime nor later did his music gain public response and many of his compositions exist only in manuscript.” This is the verdict of Josef Bek, who wrote the article on Otakar Zich (1879–1934) for The New Grove. “Zich’s scholarly heritage,” Bek goes on to explain, “is much more important” (Josef Bek, “Zich, Otakar,” The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2d ed. [London: Macmillan, 2001], 27:817). This view is still the current one, as far as Czech musicology is concerned. Although Bek split his article evenly between Zich’s work as a composer and as an aesthetician (Zich was professor of aesthetics at Charles University in Prague, 1924–34), it is clear from the bibliography that musicologists have been more interested in [End Page 752]Zich the writer (nine items) than Zich the composer (one item, plus two general biographies). This is also overwhelmingly the view of the current online Český hudební slovník osob a institucí(Czech musical dictionary of people and institutions, http://www.ceskyhudebnislovnik.cz/slovnik/), whose entry on Zich (most recently revised, 2 February 2010) describes him, as “Aesthetician, musical aesthetician, composer and university teacher” (my translation).

So the surprise is that A-R Editions, Inc., has published three tall volumes (43 cm high) containing the full score of Zich’s opera Vina(Guilt). It is by far the longest and most expensive entry in the Recent Researches in the Music of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries series, and is the first publication of the opera in any form. Whereas most Czech operas staged in Prague during the earlier half of the twentieth century also were published in piano-vocal score, as were Zich’s two one-act operas, Malířský nápad(A painter’s whim) and Preciézky(after Molière’s Les précieuses ridicules), Vinaremained unpublished and sank more or less without trace. It received two productions at the Prague National Theatre in the 1920s: in 1922, where it achieved fifteen performances over two years; and in 1929, when it was taken off after four performances. It was not performed elsewhere. Zich’s other two operas did rather better, and both were revived in Prague after the war. An index of Zich’s waning currency as an opera composer can be seen by comparing articles in Czech opera guides. České umění dramatické: Zpěvohra(Czech dramatic art: opera [Prague: Šolc a Šimáček, 1941]) was published in desperate but highly patriotic times during the war. In it Josef Hutter, one of the two editors of the volume, and also the author of a long analysis of Vinapublished at the time of its premiere, provided a long biography of Zich, and substantial synopses of his three operas accompanied by several photographs and stage designs. Forty years later Ladislav Šíp’s Česká opera a...

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