Music History and Czech Composers Review

Vocabulary flashcards covering key Czech composers, musical eras, forms, and historical concepts from the HV4 music exam review.

Petr Eben

A major 20th-century Czech composer who wrote music for children, created the Czech adaptation of Schulwerk, and whose middle son received an honorary doctorate at PedF UHK in 2022.

Symphonic Poem

A musical form newly created during Romanticism that is composed based on an extra-musical subject or program.

Terrace Dynamics

A dynamic style featuring sudden shifts between loud and soft volume, characteristic of the Baroque era.

Late Romanticism

A period at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, also known as the crisis of Romanticism, represented by Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler.

Operetta

A light or theatrical musical genre described as a small opera.

Impressionism (Music)

An artistic movement that captures a fleeting moment, represented in music by composers such as Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel.

Bohuslav Martinů

A world-renowned Czech composer inspired by Neoclassicism and jazz who lived in France, the USA, and Switzerland, and whose remains were returned to his family tomb in Czechia after 20 years.

The Mighty Handful

A group of 19th-century Russian composers that Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was not a member of.

Second Viennese School

A group of Expressionist composers centered in Vienna, comprising Arnold Schönberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern.

Bedřich Smetana

The founder of Czech national music who spent time in Sweden, lived in Jabkenice, suffered from deafness, and composed the opera Libuše.

Antonín Dvořák

A world-famous composer, founder of modern Czech sacred music, creator of the Slavonic Dances, and recipient of an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University.

Zdeněk Fibich

A Czech composer known as the creator of fully-composed melodramas.

Vítězslav Novák

A professor at the Prague Conservatory, representative of Czech Modernism, and collector and arranger of folk songs.

Leoš Janáček

A Czech composer who created the speech-melody method.

Carl Maria von Weber

The composer who wrote the first Romantic opera, Der Freischütz (Čarostřelec).

Libuše

The opera composed by Bedřich Smetana used to open the National Theatre.

Carmina Burana

A famous scenic cantata composed by Carl Orff.

Swan Lake

A famous ballet composed by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

Salome

An opera composed by Richard Strauss.

Dodecaphony

A twelve-tone compositional method developed by Arnold Schönberg, characteristic of Expressionism.

20th-Century Music

A musical era defined not by a single unified style, but by a wide variety of compositional techniques, artistic movements, and directions.

Opera Reformers

Composers who reformed opera across major historical periods: Claudio Monteverdi (Baroque), Christoph Willibald Gluck (Classicism), and Richard Wagner (Romanticism).