Abstract
The operas of Bedřich Smetana have mainly been associated with the Czech national revival in the second half of the nineteenth century. But they also played an important role in fostering national identity after the state of Czechoslovakia was formed in 1918, and they continued to be used for political purposes throughout the twentieth century.
I am particularly interested in the ways Smetana's operas were mobilized when the Czech nationhood appeared to be threatened. This was the case after the Munich Agreement of 1938 and the following Nazi occupation, and again after the Warsaw Pact invasion of 1968.
I will focus, specifically, on the use of The Bartered Bride in Czech narrative film made and screened during WWII, and the Prague National Theatre production of Libuše from 1968. In these key historical moments, Smetana's operas, and the Czech classics more generally, were employed as means of resistance, and both times, this approach was criticized by prominent cultural figures-first Zdeněk Nejedlý and then Václav Havel, who spoke of "yet another national revival" and questioned its political productivity.
I am also concerned with how aspects of the works perceived as topical in these times of crisis were naturalized, or neutralized, to serve the cultural politics of State Socialism in the decades that followed. I will pay special attention to the transformation of the works' interpretation in the period of "normalization" in the 1970s and 1980s, which was characterized by a generic form of nationalism and a sense of timelessness.
I will situate my discussion within the context of the recent scholarship that focuses on the relationship between opera and politics during and after WWII (Fulcher 2018, Boyd-Bennett 2018, Pollock 2019).