Four steps to the New world ⬩ Beethoven’s and Kabeláč’s Mystery of Time

Programme

Beethoven was a man of his times, but he wrote timeless musical works. One of them is Egmont Overture, which concerns freedom and the courage to risk confronting the powerful. Lamoraal, Count of Egmont, lived in the sixteenth century and became a symbol of the Dutch revolt against Spanish domination and the Inquisition. In 1956, Beethoven’s Egmont became the unofficial anthem of the Hungarian uprising against Soviet hegemony. – “Alongside Bohuslava Martinů and Karel Husa, Miloslav Kabeláč was the most important modern Czech composer. During the war, he refused to divorce his Jewish wife, so he was forced to leave his job in radio broadcasting, and he spent the rest of the war in hiding to avoid being sent to a concentration camp. After the war, he went back to work in radio, but he did not join the Communist Party. He was a musical programming director and a composer. His composition The Mystery of Timeis in perfect opposition to the regime – the communists felt that they had time under control. And Kabeláč makes it clear that there is still some sort of cosmic time that is indifferent to whether some plodding regime exists or not.” (The composer Milan Slavický, 2004)