Exhibition “Czech Prima Donnas at the Met”
Czech Center New York prepared an exhibition in collaboration with the Metropolitan Opera and the National Museum of the Czech Republic about Czech female opera singers whose careers brought them onto the stage of one of the world’s most prestigious opera houses — the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
The exhibition is curated by Dr. Veronika Vejvodová, head of the Antonín Dvořák Museum — Czech Museum of Music — National Museum of the Czech Republic in Prague.
Some of these artists starred in the Met’s first productions of major Czech operas. Emmy Destinn, for example, appeared as Mařenka in the first Met performance of Smetana’s Bartered Bride (1909) conducted by Gustav Mahler, while Maria Jeritza starred in the US premiere of Janáček’s Jenůfa (1924) and was the first artist in the Met Opera’s history to perform the title role in Puccini’s Turandot (1926). Emmy Destinn also sang for Puccini: she and Enrico Caruso created the lead roles in the world premiere of his opera La Fanciulla del West (1910). Maria Müller starred in the premiere of the Czech opera Schwanda the Bagpiper by Jaromír Weinberger (1931) and several other premieres of world-class operas at the Met. Another distinguished prima donna, Jarmila Novotná, wore a costume of her own, made at Hana Podolská’s atelier in Prague, to perform at the Met as Violetta in Verdi’s La Traviata (1940).
Some of the Czech singers presented here were engaged at the Met before the fall of the Iron Curtain: Ludmila Dvořáková during the 1960s, largely in Wagnerian roles, and Eva Randová during the 1980s and late 1990s, who likewise starred in Wagner operas as well as in the role of Kabanicha (1999). No list of Czech opera greats in New York would be complete without Gabriela Beňačková, who was the first to perform at the Met in the title roles of both Dvořák’s Rusalka (1993) and Janáček’s Káťa Kabanová (1991).
Among the Czech singers still active on the opera stage today, both Eva Urbanová and most recently Magdalena Kožená have performed at the Met; Urbanová’s roles have included the foreign princess in Dvořák’s Rusalka (2004), and Kožená’s e.g. Varvara in Káťa Kabanová (2004).
These Czech prima donnas performed under the batons of world-famous conductors (such as Gustav Mahler, Arturo Toscanini, Artur Bodanzky, Bruno Walter, Sir Charles Mackerras, James Levine, Jiří Bělohlávek, Sir Simon Rattle), and alongside other renowned opera stars (including Enrico Caruso, Karel Burian, Leo Slezak, Pavel Ludikar, Leonie Rysanek, Karita Mattila).
The exhibition presents unique costumes worn by Maria Jeritza and Jarmila Novotná, from the Metropolitan Opera Archives. Exceptionally, Emmy Destiny’s costumes from the collections of the National Museum of the Czech Republic are also on display. The costumes are complemented by video screening of interviews with current opera singers, archival images from the Czech National Film Archive’s collections, and panels providing explanatory texts and reproductions of period photographs.
Dr. Veronika Vejvodová studied musicology and history at Masaryk University in Brno, where she also earned her doctorate with the thesis Dvořák’s last opera Armida, Op. 115: Genesis and Reception. After her studies she worked as a curator of the Janáček Archive in the Department of Music History at the Moravian Museum in Brno and since 2013 as a curator and later as head of the Antonín Dvořák Museum — Czech Museum of Music — National Museum of the Czech Republic in Prague. She is the author of editions of works by L. Janáček and A. Dvořák. She has participated in projects of processing the online catalog of Leoš Janáček’s speech melodies and Janáček’s correspondence. Together with Kateřina Nová, she published the recollections on Dvořák by Josef J. Kovařík, composer’s collaborator Three Years with the Maestro: An American Remembers Antonín Dvořák (2016). She is the author of the online catalog of Dvořák’s correspondence (https://antonindvorak.nm.cz) and catalogs for the exhibitions Famous Czech Composers (together with S. Bergmannová, 2020) and Antonín Dvořák: My life and work (editor, 2023), an exhibit prepared on the occasion of the inscription of the Archive of Antonín Dvořák to the UNESCO International Memory of the World Register.
Time: 6:00-9:00 pm EDT
Free!
