What is the role of media, especially the news media, in influencing citizens’ political beliefs, values, and political or civic action?

Clearly, many people for several hundred years have believed the media to be powerful agents of political persuasion and instruments of political action. In the early United States, both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson wrote scathingly of the press because they thought it caused harm to government (Schudson 1998). In Europe as in North America, individuals founded news organizations to influence political outcomes.

IN THE BEGINNING

In the beginning and the end was … the battle. This book opens with the word “convulsions” in its first sentence and closes with a chapter on conflict. In between we get a fascinating kaleidoscope of insights, stories, viewpoints, and yes, confrontations around the question of Czech music by some of the leading scholars in the field, much of which has never before been available in English. These approaches not only involve local concerns, but raise significant questions about the nature of music and its relationship to the rest of the world.

AESTHETIC WARS AND THEIR POSSIBLE CONSEQUENCES

In the final chapter, Lenka Křupková outlines the differing viewpoints of two leading musicologists from the period, Zdeněk Nejedlý and Vladimir Helfert. Nejedlý, she writes, insisted that “only through knowledge of an author's inspirations was it possible to fully understand that author's work”; Helfert, in her words, was equally certain that the history of music was “the history of musical thinking,” and thus what is important is “knowledge of the structure of a musical work, not its extra-musical background.” Because such questions have no right and wrong answers, and because such expressions as “author's inspirations” and “musical thinking” may suggest so many things, these viewpoints concerning musical meaning and value are an invitation to endless polemics, and that is precisely what happened in the Czech lands at the turn of the century. Except for the most deranged conspiracy types, people who believe the Earth is flat may eventually retreat from the main stage as more evidence against them comes in; such a surrender has never happened and will never happen in the subjective world of musical aesthetics.

One could easily take a negative view of all this, and conclude that Czech-speaking composers for twenty-five years on either side of 1900 were enervated, undone, undermined, and fundamentally distracted by overheated arguments, which rose to almost unsurpassed heights of nastiness (see the aforementioned last chapter for some choice examples). You have already encountered the expression, “The graveyard of the hopes of Czech music” in the Introductory Remarks, used by one commentator to describe the period covered by this book. And indeed, one could also point to these verbal wars as an explanation for why so few compositions and composers from that period have gained any notice on the world stage.

In 1892 Arthur Sullivan without Gilbert, and with Sydney Grundy, offered the English public an ‘Original Light English Opera’, entitled Haddon Hall. Although its eventual run of 214 performances at the Savoy Theatre was far less spectacular than that of HMS Pinafore, Patience or The Mikado, the work must be counted a popular and critical success which was attested by more than twenty reviews of the production. Notwithstanding such critical acclaim, however, Haddon Hall has failed to recapture the stage in spite of several revivals. Most simply blame Grundy's libretto. Jane Stedman has criticised Grundy's style in comparison with Gilbert's and has claimed that, although some of Sullivan's librettists were ‘markedly successful in writing non-musical plays, none gave Sullivan what Gilbert's librettos gave him’. From the very beginning The Daily Telegraph, which had praised Sullivan's music highly, took Grundy to task: ‘The great weakness of the libretto … is the dramatic insignificance of the main characters’ (26 September 1892), while the Pall Mall Budget on 29 September insisted that the work had ‘a want of balance in the idea – a structural deficiency which it is very hard to forgive’. Bernard Shaw made his Haddon Hall review a vehicle to derogate the absent Gilbert, ‘whose great fault was that he began and ended with himself’; however, though he attributed the work's success to ‘the critical insight of Mr Grundy’, even he found segments of the libretto quite clumsy.

It is well known and will doubtless become part of operatic lore that there was a real live death at the 1996 Metropolitan Opera premiere of Janáček's Věc Makropulos (The Makropulos Affair; 1923–5). The tenor playing the lawyer's clerk Vítek, Richard Versalle, fell off the ten-foot ladder on to the Met stage after singing the words ‘One should not live so long’. Actually the Czech ‘Nic netrvá věcně’ is better translated as ‘Nothing lasts for ever’. The response of the audience, of course, was a kind of hushed disbelief and shock. I received many telephone calls in the following days from people who had been completely traumatised by the event. Some blamed the Met for having the actor up so high, others simply shuddered.

Nothing could more easily illustrate the line between illusion and harsh enactment, or between realism and reality, making it abundantly clear that it is the former audiences wish to see, never the latter. The reasons for this are not necessarily self-evident. After all, Janáček's Makropulos deals quite specifically with issues of life and death. Could it not be argued that such an unpredictable event allows the spectator to have an even deeper experience, to reflect more profoundly on the transitory nature of existence? Would it be heartless for even a Janáček lover to say: ‘The death of the tenor moved me even more deeply than any performance of the opera’? No one has come forward and suggested either in this case.

There was another striking phenomenon.