Vortrag zu Opernkultur im Sozialismus von Tereza Havelková

Vortrag zu Opernkultur im Sozialismus

In Zusammenarbeit mit der Musikwissenschaft der LMU München findet am 14. Januar 2026 um 18 Uhr im Hörsaal B 206 im Hauptgebäude ein Vortrag mit Diskussion von Tereza Havelková von der Charles University, Prague statt. Der Vortrag wird in englischer Sprache gehalten:

Postcolonial Perspectives on Czech Opera Culture under State Socialism

What insights can post- and decolonial theory offer to the study of operatic cultures in East Central Europe? And what ramifications does this perspective have for opera studies more generally? In the past two decades, opera studies has grown more transnational, and it has gradually recognized opera’s entanglement in coloniality. Yet, opera from East Central Europe has remained a blind spot in these considerations.

In this talk, I will introduce four interrelated aspects of ECE opera cultures that may productively be approached through post- and decolonial theory, as it has been developed for the study of socialist and post-socialist East Central Europe (e.g. Huigen and Kołodziejczyk 2023; Pucherová and Gáfrik 2015). First, the use of opera as a tool of Soviet cultural hegemony; second, operatic representations of and relations with the Global South; third, operatic negotiations of belonging to the West; and fourth, opera as a means of (re)articulating national identity, especially in times of threat to state sovereignty. Acknowledging the differences in historical experiences of specific East Central European nations, I will primarily focus on examples from the Czech part of the former Czechoslovakia, paying special attention to operatic representations of the racialized Other.

My approach is based on recognition of the double bind specific to the region’s (post)colonial condition. On the one hand, the region has experienced the coloniality of power through various structures of dependence. On the other hand, it cannot claim “colonial innocence” (Rampley 2021) or “colonial exceptionalism” (Herza 2020), as it participated, in various ways, in both intra-European domination and overseas colonial projects. I will suggest that a postcolonial perspective on opera from East Central Europe fosters a decentered and multidirectional approach to opera more generally, beyond the binary of metropolis and (post)colony.

Tereza Havelková is Assistant Professor of Musicology at Charles University in Prague. Her research concentrates on contemporary relationships between opera and the media, and the intersection of aesthetics and politics in music and theatre. She is the author of Opera as Hypermedium: Meaning-Making, Immediacy, and the Politics of Perception (Oxford University Press 2021), and co-editor of the special issue “Sounding Corporeality” of Theatre Research International (46.2; 2021). Her most recent publications include Sound, Gender, Identity: Studies in Cultural Analysis of Music (in Czech, co-edited with Vít Zdrálek, Karolinum 2024), and Music Theater and Politics: (Re)thinking Histories, Decentering Perspectives (co-edited with Marcus Tan, Oxford University Press, forthcoming). She is the convenor of the Music Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research.