New Paths in Opera

Helena Spurná is a Czech theatre studies scholar and musicologist. She works as an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Arts of the University in Ostrava and at the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague (Department of Musicology). She focuses on the opera and theatre of the interwar avant-garde, with special attention to the works of one of the most distinguished personalities of the Czech culture of the twentieth century, Emil FrantiSek Burian, cf. the monograph Emil FrantiSek Burian a jeho cesty za operou (Emil FrantiSek Burian and His Path to Opera) (Prague: KLP, 2014). Kelly St. Pierre works as an Associate Professor of Musicology at Wichita State University, Kansas, USA. Her research examines the roles of propaganda in shaping Czech music and its reception through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cf. monograph Bedrich Smetana: Myth, Music, and Propaganda (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press / Boydell & Brewer, 2017). She also works in Prague as a researcher on the project The Second Sense: Sound, Hearing and Nature in the Czech Modernity at the Center for Theoretical Study, which is a joint program of Charles University and the Czech Academy of Sciences.