By Brian S. Locke
“This piano score is swarming with mistakes” (“Tento klav. výtah hemží se chybami”). These six Czech words, scrawled on the title page of a then-eighty-year-old manuscript vocal score, greeted me on the day I chose to begin transcribing the three-act opera Vina (Guilt, composed 1911–15, premiered 1922), by Otakar Zich (1879–1934; right, photographer unknown), into Finale. I was at the crossroads of two very long journeys—first to find the manuscript at all, then to produce a critical edition of it—that together would end up charting the span of my early career as a musicologist. The fateful scribble, written in exasperation by a musician at the National Theatre of Prague in the early 1920s, decided part of that path for me: because of it, I closed my files of the vocal score (figure 1; caption & credit here) and opened those of the 987-page full score instead (figure 2; caption & credit here).
Though undoubtedly an enormous task from the outset, producing an edition of Vina was not at the forefront of my thoughts that day—nor could I have envisioned the ensuing nine-year path to publication. In the late summer of 2005, with a doctorate but no job, I simply needed a useful side project to work on in the mornings before caffeine and the demands of crafting musicological arguments kicked in later in the day. It was going to be something like data entry, I thought, with the added bonus that I could press “play” to hear portions of an opera about which I had already read and written a fair amount. Zich’s Vina had been a sort of holy grail for me, the most obscure of an already-arcane set of early twentieth-century Czech operas I had researched and analyzed during my doctoral studies. It was tantalizing for two reasons: unlike most major operas of interwar Prague, only three pages of it had ever been published; and the astounding furor it caused in 1922 (and long afterwards) reached across branches of contemporary culture, education, and politics. As one commentator summed it up, “. . . Zich’s work is certainly spoken about, whispered about, hyped up, and cast down, but in reality nobody knows his works, even down to the most minute fragments.” It was both a bellwether of modernist vs. conservative Czech tastes, and a sort of urban legend that barely anyone had experienced firsthand. (As it happens, Zich’s fame today rests not so much on his compositions but on his contributions to aesthetic theory—that of theater in particular.)
Finding Vina was itself a long journey with several surprising turns. Very few of Zich’s musical manuscripts are housed in any one place, and tracking them down brought me to many a dead end—not even the composer’s granddaughter, the linguist Dr. Marie Dohalská-Zichová, could untangle the complex family archives. Exhausting all other possibilities, I turned to the performance archive of the National Theatre—which, as it happens, contains the complete materials for all its historical productions since at least the early 1880s. In spring 2004, with the kind help of archive assistant Helena Čapková, I located the copyists’ manuscripts for Vina’s full score, two vocal scores, annotated librettos, and many other ancillary performance materials. Happily, this occurred at precisely the same time as the advent of digital photography and the upcoming release of Zich’s music into the public domain, seventy years after his death in 1934. The opera had not been performed since 1929; the only option for hearing it in the first years of the twenty-first century would have been through MIDI. The size of the orchestral manuscript was not just impressive in its page count: its massive orchestration included triple woodwinds (plus a fourth clarinetist); an oversized brass section with six horns, four trumpets, three trombones, and tuba; two harps, celesta, and piano among other percussion; strings that were often divisi in complex combinations; and five vocal soloists singing in Czech. Figure 3 and figure 4 show its first and last pages, respectively (captions & credits here).
Although the “swarm of mistakes” in the vocal score had guided my initial choice, the full score manuscript had its share of mistakes, as well as other idiosyncrasies. The various woodwind parts would jump staves, depending on how many alternate instruments were employed (e.g., two flutes with one piccolo becoming one flute with two piccolos). Bassoons received clef changes seemingly at random. Brass transpositions were done intervallically, sometimes with questionably polytonal outcomes. But it was the four clarinetists that consistently gave me the greatest challenge, playing a total of fourteen different instruments between them, in a variety of rare—and often incorrect—transpositions (including two ultra-rare bass clarinets in A). In resolving these, I continuously pushed my knowledge of manuscript studies, Czech historical handwriting, and Finale software hacks beyond their previous limits.
Zich’s Vina, for much of my time with it, continued to occupy the place of an interesting side project, even once I had found my career job at Western Illinois University in 2006. Transcribing a few pages of score was a mindful way to start or end my day, offsetting the tensions I would often internalize during the tenure-track process. Unlike other projects, this one had no deadline and would be complete in its own time. But around 100 pages into the project, I began to feel that I should have a greater goal.
And so, I came to the A-R Editions booth at AMS in Québec City, 2007, where I met then-managing editor Pamela Whitcomb (now president and Director of Music Publications) and first discussed the feasibility of this project as a critical edition. Submission was still years away, but by the time act 1 was complete, newer versions of Finale allowed for faster input. We knew that the size of my prospective edition, when ready, would necessitate new approaches from both me and the house editors. Zich’s orchestration alone would push the time-honored boundaries of A-R Editions’ page format, and Vina would be the first twentieth-century opera in the series Recent Researches in the Music of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Once act 2 was fully transcribed, I submitted my proposal in August 2008.
When I received my contract the following February, I read with immense pride that Vina was the largest project contracted to date in the history of A-R Editions, and my edition would pave the way for other large-format scores. But the work was far from over! Further trips to the National Theatre performance archive in Prague yielded the second, more reliable vocal score—this one, as I was able to establish, was in the composer’s hand, with his own interlinear singing translation of the libretto into German—and, most importantly, the complete orchestral parts. The project had grown to become my main musicological endeavor during these years, but alas, my tenure-track responsibilities left me very little time for it. Thus it wasn’t until 2012 that I finally submitted all my materials, and the edition was placed in the queue for publication.
Through the remainder of that year and the next, I had the pleasure of working alongside house editor (now managing editor) Alexander Dean, who dealt with my many questions, concerns, and slip-ups with professionalism and aplomb. I also worked closely with Bohumil Fořt of Masaryk University in Brno on refining my translation and implementing a systematic approach to Czech syllabification across the entire opera. The three-volume edition of Otakar Zich’s Vina was finally published in March 2014, almost nine years in the making (and, as I write this blog post in March 2024, exactly ten years ago). At more than 650 pages over three volumes in 11” × 17” format, what was once a side project now towers over all my other achievements in musicology to date.
I presented many of my authorial copies to libraries and archives in the Czech Republic, since my intent was always to restore this opera to its place among the flagship works of its time. In 2017 I was approached by the Theatre Studies department of Masaryk University, inquiring about the rumor that a Canadian living in Illinois had published an edition of Zich’s legendary opera. Our discussions bore fruit: in 2018, I delivered the keynote address at a Brno conference devoted to Zich studies, where the ensemble Opera Diversa performed excerpts from Vina in a two-piano concert reduction I had prepared for the occasion. Thus, it came about that Dr. Dohalská-Zichová and I were able to hear her grandfather’s opera in live performance for the very first time—an experience that neither of us will ever forget. And for my part, I shall always remember the humble beginnings of this “useful side project” from an uncertain time in the early days of my musicological career.
Captions and Credits:
Figure 1. Otakar Zich, Vina (autograph vocal score), first page of act 1, showing the composer’s interlinear German translation in red pencil. Courtesy of the Music Archive of the National Theatre, Prague.
Figure 2. Otakar Zich, Vina (fair-copy full score), title page. Courtesy of the Music Archive of the National Theatre, Prague.
Figure 3. Otakar Zich, Vina (fair-copy full score), first page of act 1. Courtesy of the Music Archive of the National Theatre, Prague.
Figure 4. Otakar Zich, Vina (fair-copy full score), last page of act 3. Courtesy of the Music Archive of the National Theatre, Prague.
Brian S. Locke, a native of North York, Ontario, Canada, received his doctorate in Musicology from Stony Brook University in 2002. Since 2006 he has been on the Musicology faculty of Western Illinois University, where he currently holds the rank of Professor. His research focuses on opera, musical theater, and popular culture in Prague from the late nineteenth century through the Communist coup in 1948. Alongside the edition of Vina, he has published a book, Opera and Ideology in Prague: Polemics and Practice at the National Theatre, 1900–1938 (University of Rochester Press, 2006), and several articles and book chapters on Czech opera and popular music, including two recent publications on the librettist Eliška Krásnohorská.
