Introduction

In 1897, the author Josef Vítězslav Šimák credited three women with initiating a grand and influential movement to better the place of women in Czech society: Karolina Světlá, Žofie Podlipská, and Eliška Pechová-Krásnohorská. ¹ Reflecting on their contributions to literature, he wrote, “in that field, where it was almost as though they had to kindle the first light themselves, just to cultivate the soil, indeed perhaps even just to drive the plow, they are the first without rivals, apostles of a brighter future.” ² Though Šimák writes about authors and poets, this quote, and the sentiment behind it, could easily be extended to those women who created, enabled, and made music in the Czech lands, and thus to many of the subjects of the present collection. Indeed, Krásnohorská herself features as a subject in several of the chapters in this collection, since she is known to the musical world as the first woman librettist in the history of Czech opera. Podlipská, too, was an influential figure for some of her acquaintances active in one way or the other in the musical world. The broader point here, however, still stands—in a time where musical women were almost always confined to the domestic sphere and functionally prohibited from obtaining the same level of education as men, those who would buck their society's gendered proscriptions had to be their own leading lights. In this they were also apostles of a brighter future, implicitly and explicitly working towards greater opportunities and equality for women.