The date 1900 is not widely held to be a significant point of division in the musical history of Prague. The previous decade had witnessed a spectacular flowering of compositional activity, including Dvořák's “American” period, Fibich's late operas, and the first publications and performances of the new generation of Novák, Nedbal, and Suk. Between 1890 and 1910, much of the musical life of the city had continued on course since the opening of the National Theater in 1883, with the addition of a new German opera house in 1886, chamber concerts at the Conservatory, orchestral concerts with the Czech Philharmonic after 1901, and ongoing lectures in music history at the University. Various journals that had existed for decades continued a modest existence, while others came and went without much impact. Amid these outwardly serene activities, one seemingly insignificant event proved enough to trigger a series of artistic and aesthetic debates, as well as to initiate one man's long career in the field of musical and social criticism. When Zdeněk Fibich died at the age of fifty in 1900, his twenty-two-year-old theory student Zdeněk Nejedlý resolved to settle old scores—to put all his energies into shifting the balance of power in musical Prague—and so to alter the course of music history in that city.

From the early years of the century, the most important ideology surrounding music making in Prague was nationalism, a factor that affected all the arts, and more directly, politics.