The Czech and Ukrainian Musical Responses to the Threat to National Sovereignty: A Decolonial Perspective

• In Event: Subalterns That Sing: Fighting the War, Overcoming Peripheriality in Central Europe

Abstract

The Czech Republic has been one of the biggest supporters of Ukraine in the region. Since
the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Czech Republic has received more than 300 000
Ukrainian refugees and provided extensive military aid. The Czechs’ official and popular
responses to the Russian invasion have been informed by their own historical experience,
and especially the trauma of the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion. Both Czech and Ukrainian
politicians have also evoked the Munich Agreement of 1938 to advocate for Ukraine. This
paper seeks to offer a comparative perspective on the Czech and Ukrainian musical
responses to the threat to national sovereignty, primarily focusing on opera. I will start by
examining the Czech Republic’s entry to last year’s Eurovision Song Contest (My Sister’s
Crown) to point out some of the common threads of these responses, before moving to the
operatic case studies, namely the contemporary opera Ukraine—Terra Incognita, and the
1968 production of Bedřich Smetana’s Czech canonical opera Libuše. These diverse case
studies will allow me to address the recourse to Slavic folklore and myth in these musical
responses, which has generally been approached through the reductive concept of
nationalism. Within the Czech context, for example, it was criticized by figures such as
Václav Havel for being “yet another national revival” with limited political productivity. I
propose to rethink these musical responses from a decolonial perspective developed for the
study of socialist and post-socialist East-Central Europe (Pucherová and Gráfik 2015;
Kołodziejczyk and Huigen 2023).

Author

• Tereza Havelková, Charles U in Prague (Czech Republic)