Throughout the early twentieth century, the musical community of Prague was the site of intense artistic creativity and aesthetic debates that both reflected and helped shape the cultural life of Czechoslovakia at the time. As Europe entered the twentieth century, profound social changes affected the course of its history, in the realms of politics, culture, and both collective and personal identity. These changes were greatly influenced by ideologies, some held over from the nineteenth century, others transformed by the new era. In the artistic sphere, the new possibilities of cultural interaction forced a confrontation between traditional aesthetic views and the threat of cosmopolitanism. In the years between the turn of the century and the collapse of the First Czechoslovak Republic in 1938, the predominant issues that affected the discourse of music in Prague were nationalism, modernism, and the social responsibility of art.

After 298 years of somewhat parochial existence under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, citizens of the five provinces that became an independent Czechoslovakia on October 28, 1918, experienced twenty years of the most idealistic and Western-oriented democracy in interwar Central Europe. Although not without serious internal problems, this oasis of free thought and cultural endeavor came to an end on September 30, 1938, with the Munich Accord, in which the powers of Europe signed over the country's border regions in order to appease Nazi Germany. Just five and a half months later, the Czechoslovak Republic ceased to exist when Hitler's armies occupied Bohemia and Moravia, leaving Slovakia as a puppet state.