The Prague Spring is phenomenal. It has survived all the twists and turns of history and politics, changes in taste, and cultural storms. It has survived them because in every period there have remained enough concert-goers ready to appreciate and savour true artistic quality.
Václav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic
Founding of the festival
In 1946 Prague and the whole Czechoslovak Republic celebrated the first
anniversary of the end of the Second World War. At the same time, the Czech
Philharmonic was celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of its founding, and
the Prague Spring International Music Festival was born.
It was the result of almost seventy years of endeavours by people involved in music in Prague, including the German-speaking population, to organize annual music festivals with the participation of top soloists and orchestras from all over the world.
Those endeavours go back to the 1880s and opera series of works of individual
composers, held at the Neues Deutsches
Theater, Prague. From 1900 till the outbreak of the First World War,
fourteen years later, they were held under the name Mai-Festspiele, in which
plays and concerts were added to otherwise solely operatic productions. In the
meantime, this initiative was joined by the National Theatre, Prague, with its
own series of operas by Czech composers, and, in spring 1904, the memorable
Czech Festival of Music, with the Czech Philharmonic, first took place.
In the interwar years, 1918 to 1939, similarly ambitious music festivals, with musicians from all over the world, were held in Prague three times under the auspices of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM). In the difficult years of the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia the conductor Václav Talich revived endeavours to hold a regular festival called Pražské hudební máje.
Present at the birth of the Prague Spring was another great conductor, Rafael
Kubelík, the Artistic Director of the Czech Philharmonic. From the very
beginning, this initiative was favourably received by Czech music-lovers and
politicians. The patron of the new festival was the Czechoslovak President,
Edvard Beneš. In his official greetings to the Festival he stated:
I welcome the idea of organizing an international music festival, which, after the difficult years of war, will bring to Prague the best composers and performers from the countries of our allies and friends, and I wish this important artistic event much success.
From its inauguration right up to the present day, the Prague Spring Festival has taken place every year with the support of the top institutions of the state.
The world at the Prague Spring
The first years of the Festival put the emphasis not only on Czech
music and its leading composers, like Bedřich Smetana, Antonín Dvořák,
Leoš Janáček, and Bohuslav Martinů, but naturally also on the music and musicians of the four great
powers of the victorious anti-Hitler coalition. Together with musicians from the
USA (for example, the conductor Leonard Bernstein made his
international debut at the 1946 and 1947 Prague Spring Festival), Great
Britain, and France, top soloists, singers, and conductors from the Soviet Union
also participated from the inception of the Festival.
Famous debutants and the Prague Spring Competition
Apart from the virtuoso violinist David Oistrakh,
who was already established in the world of music, members of the up-and-coming
generation of musicians in Russia also used to come to Prague every year. In
competition with their colleagues from other countries they underwent their
rites of initiation at the Prague Spring Festival. Among the most famous are the
phenomenal pianist Sviatoslav
Richter and the cellist Mstislav
Rostropovich, the winner of the international competition of young talents.
This competition has been part of the Festival since its second year, 1947.
Ten years later, the Prague Spring became a founding member of the World Federation of International Music Competitions, Geneva. The successes achieved by dozens of these young musicians in the Prague Spring Competition were the touchstone of their maturity as artists, and usually launched their careers in other countries around the world.
Antonín Matzner
For more information about famous artists who performed at the festival
please see Famous guests page.
