by Peter Demetz
wherever I look, I see but kindness, mercy
in everything that fills the world for all
Why, right and proof, what are they but the crutches
that help all lame and crooked causes stand? (II,903—4, 910—11)
(trans. by Henry H. Stevens)
It is inevitable that in such a clash of feeling and reason, sympathy and the law, Primislaus’s ideas will prevail. He wants to rule by formal order, intends to found the city, cleverly manipulates the elders to agree with his plans as if it had been their idea, and demands of Libussa that she give her priestly blessing to his urban project and “perhaps” provide an artfully arranged prophecy for the astonished nation, to inspire it with “hope of triumph and success.”
Grillparzer’s productive perversion of the Czech myth keeps Libussa and Primislaus quarreling until she dies; though her husband is ready to cancel the ritual blessing of the future city, which she deeply resents, she insists on going through with it, stamping her priestly foot in a show of stubbornness and declaring that she will be “his obedient wife” again only after the rite. She makes it clear to him that it is his city, not hers; to build a city unfortunately means
to leave behind your goodly cottages
where each lived as a man, a son, a husband,
a being in himself, and self-sufficient. (V,2329—31)
(trans. by Henry H. Stevens)
Instead of independence and self-sufficiency in union, labor and society will be divided, people will be “only parts of some large whole” and crave “use and profit,” or even leave with greedy zeal to make “a home in alien countries, alien here.” Almost condescendingly, Libussa tells Primislaus that his city will, of course, “thrive and prosper,” creating a threshold to history—yet history, she feels, will be dark and bloody before the primal conditions of humanity can be restored. Her visions of the great nations of the world, including the Slavs, are melancholy and far from consoling; all “races dwelling on earth” will, in turn, dominate the scene of history—Romans, Gauls, the English, Germans, “that blue-eyed race o’erflowing with rude force: / blind when it acts, inactive when it thinks” (V,2416). The Slavs, “age-old servants,” will finally be masters, and their dominance will be “far and wide, yet never high nor deep” (V,2421), like the Vltava River, as Grillparzer had noted in his diary, in a last chapter in the development of a “weary world” far removed from its origins. Primislaus wants to push her from the altar because her words endanger his political intentions, but before dying, she completes her prophecy: history will come to an end, she says, only when the long-lost moment of feeling is renewed; “then will the days return that now are gone, / the days of prophets and of genius” (V,2482-83). Until then, everyone will be alienated from the essential nature of humanity.
Bedich Smetana’s Libuše, composed in 1869—72, incarnates, by intent and shape, the force of Czech national tradition without ever deteriorating into mere folklore. It is a festive opera, if not a national oratorio, which took as much of Richard Wagner as Smetana wanted to without being unduly Wagnerian; it was precisely Smetana’s attention to contemporary music abroad that made him unwelcome to the conservative “Old Czechs,” influential in politics and culture, and an ally to the more radical “Young Czechs,” who were to dominate Czech life in the later 1870s and the 1880s. The problem was that the story of Libuše did not yield sufficient drama for a complete opera, and the libretto, largely based on the fabricated fragment of “Libussa’s Judgment,” enhanced rather than diminished the problem of the plot. The libretto was first concocted by the Prague pedagogue and Czech patriot Josef Wenzig in his accustomed German, and then translated by Ervín Spindler, a journalist and civil servant, into Czech. In the opera, the litigants, appearing before Libuše, again are brothers, as in many younger versions of the story, but Wenzig and Spindler believed that a love intrigue was needed and introduced Krásava, a rich and somewhat flirtatious Czech maiden who, offended by the elder brother’s lack of response to her charms, decides to challenge him by pretending to feel something for the younger. Finally, all is well, the lovers have their happy end, and Libuše proceeds to her prophecy, the culminating scene.
In Smetana’s music, Pemysl’s arias have a particularly solemn and lyrical charm, and the famous finale for which the opera was written consists of a series of six “pictures” or presentations in which Libuše “shows,” as if in a laterna magica, the great heroes and two heroines of Czech history from the year 1034 to the sixteenth century (the nearly four hundred years of subsequent Hapsburg rule are simply eliminated). Libuše evokes the historical meaning of the figures briefly and with dignity—Duke Betislav I and his wife, Jitka, who won Moravia; Jaroslav of Šternberk, who, as it was believed, defeated the invading Tartars; King Otakar II, Eliška of the Pemyslids, and her son, the Emperor Charles IV, three towering figures of medieval imperial glory; the radical Hussites of the fifteen century, including their military leaders Jan Žižka and Prokop the Great, vivace con fuoco and with a strong allusion to the great Hussite Battle Hymn; George of Podbrad, king of peace, elected by his own people in 1458; and, finally, Prague Castle on the hill, “in magic illumination,” and a chorus who celebrate the proud nation that never will be defeated, not even by “the horrors of hell.”
Contemporary audiences understood very well why the final scene of the opera showed Hradany Castle, and they were thrilled by the recurrent fanfare signifying the power of the ancient Czech state. In 1867, the monarchy had been divided into Austrian and Hungarian parts; the claims of the Czechs, with their long tradition of power and autonomy, had been ignored; and the emperor in Vienna had not been crowned king of Bohemia at Prague Castle, as tradition required. Smetana had kept his composition in his desk for nine years to save it for the opening of the National Theater, but general enthusiasm at the opening night on June 11, 1881, was somewhat dampened by the official presence of the Hapsburg crown prince, Rudolf (actually of a progressive cast of mind, and a suicide at Mayerling later). Because of some “Old Czech” intrigue, Smetana had been denied a ticket to his own premiere, but Rudolf invited him to his little salon and there created another difficult situation, because, not knowing that Smetana was hard of hearing (due to a syphilitic infection), he tried to make himself understood by raising his voice. Libuše was again performed at the “new” National Theater on November 18, 1883—the original building had been destroyed by fire soon after its opening and rebuilt thanks to the spontaneous financial efforts of the entire nation—but it was a piece too monumental to be performed en suite. Smetana survived the opening of the new theater by only a year: he died in a Prague asylum for the insane in 1884. The famous Libuše fanfare endures at state ceremonies and on the Czech radio, formally announcing the presence of the president of the republic, though Václav Havel, shy of overstatement, does not always insist on its performance.
Grillparzer’s play and Smetana’s opera, with their final acts speaking of the glories and the vicissitudes of Prague, show how the ancient myth, first told to legitimize the Pemysl dynasty, was monumentalized or subverted in the nineteenth century. The Czechs used it to evoke national history and, ultimately, for ceremonial celebration of the nation itself. Czech tradition, in the age of emancipatory nationalism, culminated in Smetana’s oratorio and the attendant achievements of the great nineteenth-century artists and sculptors, yet the national celebration was only two steps away from the stony gesture, the museum, the patriotic postcard, and Alois Jrasek’s narrative, however poetic, for the schools. The German romantics had admired Libussa from a distance until Grillparzer turned his analytical mind to unmasking the implications of the ancient myth pertaining to men and women, male rule and gynocracy, the modern division of labor, and the relative, not absolute, value of nations. Strangely enough, it was this analytical and dyspeptic Viennese who fully revealed the bitter modernity of Prague’s ancient myth and, by asking corrosive questions, made it different from all other stories about the origins of
cities.
2
OTAKAR’S PRAGUE, 880—1278
From Trading Post to Royal Residence
In the four hundred years between Duke Boivoj’s decision to shift the seat of the Pemyslid family to the Hradany plateau and the rise of Bohemian royal power in the late thirteenth century, Prague or, rather, its constituent parts approached their modern shape by topographical expansion, social diversity, and architectural transformation, ecclesiastic and secular. The changes were most visible at the ever transformed castle, by the sudden rise and near-fall of the Vyšehrad as residence of the dynasty and, above all, by the new development of town life on the right bank of the river constituting the actual core of historical Prague as it appears to visitors today. The right-bank Old Town, as it is called now, was slowly settled in the eleventh century; it is certainly older than the New Town, founded by Emperor Charles IV in the mid-fourteenth century, though it is younger than the castle and the left-bank settlements in its shadow, or the Vyšehrad with its own small suburb to the south.
The richly structured Hradany Castle was, from the beginning, conceived as a late Slavic burg protecting, within its ample space, sacred and princely dwellings, constantly built and rebuilt, almost a little town in itself, like Kafka’s castle as seen by K. After Duke Boivoj had built a modest enough little church and his rough-hewn residence in the late ninth century, his sons and daughters in turn established churches and convents on the fortified plateau, especially after 973, when Prague’s first bishop was appointed and moved into his own house (a Chapel of St. Maurice, who is usually represented as a black knight, was later built close by); after many sieges by German, Polish, and Moravian armies, the dukes were not remiss in building more substantial fortifications, the white square stones of the walls shining in the light. As early as 920 Duke Boivoj’s son built a basilica dedicated to St. George, and a few years later his son, Duke Václav, the massive rotunda of St. Vitus (possibly employing artisans well informed about Dalmatian Romanesque architecture). Duke Václav—known as St. Wenceslas, patron saint of Bohemia—was later buried there according to his own wishes, and also the mortal remains of St. Vojtch. For more than a hundred and fifty years, the basilica and rotunda stood side by side; Princess Mlada, returning from Rome, had founded a Benedictine convent there in 973 affiliated with the basilica (to educate Pfemyslid princesses appropriately), and the rotunda attracted many pious pilgrims visiting the graves of the Czech martyrs. In 1060, Cosmas reports, the king decided to build another magnificent Romanesque basilica to replace the rotunda, with three naves, three towers, and all in white stone to dominate the castle from above; construction was completed a generation later.
All around the Hradany plateau, on the hills and also closer to the river, a constellation of new convents and churches emerged: in 993, the first monastery of Benedictine monks, who arrived from Monte Cassino, south of Rome, on Bevnov Hill; in 1140 the new convent of Praemonstratenses from the west of Germany on Mount Zion, later called Strahov; and a third monastery, that of the Knights of St. John, and their Church of St. Mary Under the Chain, closer to the river, in 1169. King Pemysl Otakar II’s royal imagination was more challenged than pleased, possibly for military and economic reasons, by the disorderly mosaic of churches, manors, miserable huts, and monastic enclaves on the left bank of the river, and he acted accordingly.
Old chronicles sometimes suggest that the Vyšehrad was fortified earlier than Prague Castle (some assume that Libussa actually resided at the Vyšehrad), but archaeologists assert that this place, on a right-bank cliff where the Boti brook flows into the Vltava, emerged as a fortified place of secular and ecclesiastical eminence only sixty or seventy years after Prague Castle. It grew rapidly for some time when Pfemyslid princes quarreled with members of their family residing downstream. A ducal mint was working on the Vyšehrad late in the tenth century, and scholars believed that a ducal residence and a few early chapels were built there and endured the Polish siege of the region in 1000. It was Vratislav II (1061—92), duke and later king, who formally shifted the Pemyslid residence to the Vyšehrad, built there a dwelling for himself and a chapter for his clerics, a Romanesque rotunda of St. Martin (now completely restored) and, close to older church buildings, a Basilica of St. Peter and St. Paul, extended and adorned by his successors and later reshaped in Gothic style. Yet, after this moment of splendor and hope, the Vyšehrad lost its political importance in the later reign of Sobslav I (1125—40), who decided to move to Prague Castle again, and from his time on the Pemyslids and the other dynasties following them resided there. King Pemysl Otakar II did not do anything to revive the royal splendor, and it was only Emperor Charles IV who, in his desire to claim the glories of the Pemyslid dynasty for himself and his house, rebuilt the Vyšehrad to serve as a place of memory and respect for the past, and so it has remained, or what is left of it after the Hussite revolution, until today.
It was advantageous to dwell and do business in the shadow of Prague Castle, but for the humble people life was made more difficult by recurrent sieges, often by stubborn Polish and Moravian princes, as in 1105 and 1142, and by the conflagrations devastating the castle and its suburbium. In the late eleventh and the twelfth centuries, as if driven by the impulse of colonization felt in Bohemia if not in Europe in general, people shifted from the left to the right bank more rapidly, particularly after the fire on the left bank in 1142 and the completion of Queen Judith’s Bridge in 1172, a structure of red sandstone comfortably crossing the river on twenty pillars, somewhat north of the later Charles Bridge. A number of settlements of Czechs, Germans, Jews, and even Italians emerged on the right bank, only sporadically inhabited before; by 1230 there were eight churches on the left bank in addition to those at the castle and those affiliated with the monasteries, while the right bank and its hamlets had twenty-two places of worship, including the Jewish “Old Synagogue,” which, unfortunately, has disappeared without a trace, and the residence of the Knights Templars, who came in 1223. The mendicant friars came early: the Franciscans in the 1220s, during the lifetime of St. Francis, and the Dominicans in 1226, only ten years after the rules of their order had been confirmed by the pope. A marketplace was established as early as 1105, according to Cosmas, as the center of this new settlement, goods were regularly offered and sold on Saturdays, and for the protection of foreign merchants a manor house was built close to the market where they could feel safe. A little later, the dukes or the kings demanded that they stay there at the Týn (a word etymologically close to “fence” or “town”), open their wares for inspection, and pay a market fee, or Ungelt, to the authorities. There is documentary evidence that by 1212 a certain Blažej was appointed to supervise market affairs in the name of the king, and he functioned as the first town judge or, perhaps, royal sheriff in the urban history of Prague.
Landmarks of Pemyslid Prague
Not far from this marketplace, which is Staromstský Square today, rich merchants built elaborate and massive Romanesque stone houses; recent archaeological research has unearthed nearly seventy of these buildings, rare in Central Europe, which were hidden behind later Gothic and even classicist facades. These houses, most of them on Celetná, Jilská. Husova, and nearby streets, were two stories high, the lower floor being reserved for business, the upper as private space; though there was no heating and the windows were covered in winter with heavy leather, the columns and ceilings were finely structured. The richest of these Romanesque houses, later ascribed to a clan of the Czech gentry, can still be found at etzová Street. On the north side of the market, closer to the river, Jewish and German merchants were settling in rather close proximity: the Germans before the end of the eleventh century at the Po and around the Church of St. Peter, which they yielded briefly to the Teutonic Knights; and the Jews possibly after fires had destroyed their left-bank neighborhood.
These different settlements were far from constituting a unified city; there was Prague Castle and its suburbium, the Vyšehrad and its vicus
, the new market settlement, nearby the Jewish and German neighborhoods, and all around hamlets and villages. In some Hebrew documents the settlements between the two castles at Prague and the Vyšehrad were called Mezigrady (Between-the-Castles), and it was only during the thirteenth century that the name Prague, first reserved for the castle or marketplace below, began to refer to the settlement(s) on the right side of the river too. About 3,500 people lived here on a stretch of land close to the size of Nuremberg, Ghent, or Bruges at that time.
The Rise of a King
The biographer who wants to know more about Pemysl Otakar II, fifth king of Bohemia and the most powerful ruler of the dynasty, hears conflicting voices among his contemporaries and Otakar’s almost condescending silence. He left us not a single line in his own hand, and remains hidden behind the elaborate allusions of Middle High German knightly poems and the rhetorical terms of Latin chronicles or Czech and Styrian texts praising his magnificence or telling us how evil and treacherous he really was. Prince Otakar was born, probably in 1233, at the illustrious Prague court of his father, King Václav I, and his German mother, Kunigunde, of the noble Hohenstaufen family, granddaughter of an emperor of Byzantium and later closely related through her sisters to the most important European courts, including those of Emperor Otto IV and the king of Castile. Historians have speculated about Otakar’s early training and education; at the Prague court, the king and his nobles were committed to the fashionable ideas of chivalry, horsemanship, the hunt and the joust, but it is also suggested that Otakar, as a second son, was, according to tradition, surely trained for a position in the church, at least as long as his older brother Vladislav lived (he died in 1247). At the cathedral or the collegiate school at the Vyšehrad, he may have acquired a smattering of dynastic history, the beginnings of Christian teachings, and a little Latin. Considering the presence at court of German clerics, ladies-in-waiting to the queen, and itinerant poets, his German may have been passable (though I wonder how he really conversed with his Austrian mistress or the German and Austrian poets who rode with him in his wars).
