From the very outset, Zdeněk Nejedlý critically observed Vítězslav Novák's compositional career. Whereas Nejedlý generally evaluated the latter's early compositions from the 1910s favorably if critically, starting with Novák's cantata Svatební košile (The Wedding Shirts, 1913) and in particular his operas (1914-26) Nejedlý's negative assessment of the composer took over.

The spectacular celebration of Novák's sixtieth birthday culminated with productions of all his stage works in Prague's National Theatre in December 1930. During the preparations, the composer got involved in a pointed conflict with Otakar Ostrčil, who at that time worked as the head conductor of the National Theatre's Opera. Their first disagreement was due to Novák's operas being postponed until December, because it was decided that Fibich's operas would be introduced earlier, in the fall of the same year. Consequently, there was very little time left to rehearse the productions; Novák himself considered the production of all his stage works within three weeks absurd. The last straw in the clash of the two men was Ostrčil's decision about the number of rehearsals of Novák's operas Karlštejn (The Karlštejn Castle) and Zvíkovský rarášek (The Imp of Zvíkov), which Novák felt was totally inadequate. He announced to Ostrčil and the National Theatre ensemble his withdrawal from the productions of all his operas, both rehearsals and stagings. He remained faithful to his decision and never compromised it, even when President T. G. Masaryk was present at a staging of his Karlštejn. Just before completion of performances of Novák's operas, Ostrčil published a defense of his conducting work in print in reaction to negative reviews of certain productions. This was accompanied by an explanation of the objective obstacles that the National Theatre ensemble had needed to overcome during the rehearsals. Novák followed suit and also reasserted his earlier statements in print, escalating them even further. Several further confrontations followed in the same vein, presented in the daily papers. In order to sufficiently develop his argument, Novák did not hesitate to publish a book at his own expense, entitled Vítězslav Novák contra Otakar Ostrčil (Vítězslav Novák vs Otakar Ostrčil). He described in detail the whole history of the conflict, starting with the failed staging of Lucerna (The Lantern) and finishing with the jubilee production of his stage works.

In the summer of 1799, demographer Thomas R. Malthus toured Scandinavia spending almost six weeks in Norway. On his way north to Trondheim, he stopped at an inn and found seven men in the kitchen eating ‘a most comfortable breakfast, of fried bacon & veal, some fried fish, large bowls of milk, & oat cake & butter’. Malthus was not sure what the men actually did, but the innkeeper confirmed they were his men and ‘lived in his house’. None were married. Based on this, Malthus concluded that the men were servants, and went on to argue that

What Malthus described, despite exaggerating the difference between England and Norway, is what Peter Laslett later came to call life-cycle service: service as a temporary position for young, unmarried people who circulated between households until they married and established households of their own.

This chapter examines the institution of service in rural Norway from the middle of the seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth century. In this period, the amount and type of source material increased substantially compared with the previous centuries, which makes it possible to examine the size and make-up of the servant population. The chapter particularly deals with the varied experience of service, and looks at regional and local differences.

Since the 1960s, research on census data and parish registers has largely confirmed that servants in pre-industrial Norway fit Malthus’ description: servants were young, unmarried and lived in the same household as their employers. At the same time, Norwegian population data and information on the servant institution have been used to argue that households in north-west Europe differed from households elsewhere. In his famous ‘Two Kinds of Preindustrial Household Formation System’, John Hajnal used census data from three areas in Norway in 1801, together with data from other countries in north-western Europe, to argue that a particular kind of household system where people married late and set up independent households upon marriage existed in north-western Europe in the pre-industrial period.

DIRECTOR OF THE NATIONAL THEATER F. A. ŠUBERT AND CZECH OPERA

The generation that began striving for erection of a Czech National Theater was one to whom the revolutionary year of 1848 gave hope for the political rebirth of Czechs within the Habsburg monarchy. The severe repression then imposed by Alexander Bach, named Minister of the Interior by the young Emperor Franz Joseph I, forced the idea of a National Theater to the background. When at last the “October Diploma” was proclaimed in 1860, allowing freer and more independent development to all the nations in the empire, the “Provisional [Czech] Theater” was soon opened in 1862, intended only as a temporary response to desires for a National Theater. However, this provisional situation lasted until 1881, and was then prolonged further to 1883 because on 12 August 1881, soon after its opening, the National Theater was gutted by fire. The year 1883 constitutes a landmark in the development of Czech national opera, a landmark toward which the efforts of Bedřich Smetana (1824-84) were aimed and which defines the generation of his successors. The works of Czech composers who composed for the “large” stage of the National Theater rather than the “small” Provisional Theater, seen in the light of performance of, reviews of, and reception of Smetana's operas, show many features in common. To bring them into focus we must first take a look at the management of this theater, erected as a showcase “by the nation for itself” and given the apt nickname “the golden chapel”. The National Theater was opened festively with the premiere of Smetana's opera Libuše.

In view of the prestigious standing of the National Theater in Czech culture of the second half of the nineteenth century, its first and long-term director František Adolf Šubert (1849-1915) acquired an important political and cultural position. He stood at the summit of his career in the mid-1890s, before Gustav Schmoranz took over the ‘reigns’ of the National Theater in 1900. Radical transformations in the theater's operations were then implemented by the new head of spoken plays Jaroslav Kvapil and the new head of the opera Karel Kovařovic. In 1901 Kovařovic replaced the orchestra and a major portion of the chorus! The extent of these uncompromising changes attests to the poor state of the National Theater at the end of the century.

“That's music from heaven!” Thus Antonín Dvořák described the incidental music by Josef Suk (4 January 1874 - 29 May 1935) for the fairy-tale play Radúz a Mahulena (Radúz and Mahulena) by the Czech writer Julius Zeyer. During final rehearsals for and the premiere of this work (on 6 April 1898) at Prague's National Theatre, Suk was playing second violin in the Bohemian Quartet on a lengthy concert tour abroad. And so Dvořák attended rehearsals in his stead. He had been Suk's composition teacher at the conservatory in Prague, and soon after the premiere of Radúz became his father-in-law when Suk married his daughter Otilie. When the quartet returned from the tour Dvořák came to the railway station to welcome them, and said to Oskar Nedbal (violist in the quartet and also his former pupil): “that Radúz—that's music from heaven!” From this music Suk then fashioned (in 1899-1900) an orchestral suite titled simply Pohádka (A Fairy Tale), Op. 16, which was issued by the Berlin publisher of works by Brahms and Dvořák, N. Simrock, and is today rightly considered part of the “golden treasury” of Czech music. Suk later said of his music for Radúz and Mahulena:

Suk had been admitted to the conservatory in Prague at the age of eleven as a violin pupil of Anton Bennewitz. At that time students were admitted only once every three years, and Suk's father did not want to postpone his son's truly professional musical training. Starting with the fourth year of the curriculum students who showed talent in composition could add to study of their instrument also study in the composition department, which had a threeyear curriculum, but especially gifted students could extend their study by one more year, which Suk of course did.

There are many reasons why it makes sense to juxtapose Leoš Janáček and Vítězslav Novák. For one thing, they both belonged to the first generation of modern Czech musicians and (in the eyes of Zdeněk Nejedlý) stood in line with Antonín Dvořák, sharing with him an interest in Moravian folklore; for another, during the course of their compositional development they both gradually embraced the genre of musical drama, which they both considered the peak of their respective creative efforts. It is an irony of Czech music history that Novák, who was almost twenty years Janáček's younger, was in the forefront in the 1900s, and not until after his heyday had passed was this position taken by Janáček. From this time on, Janáček's operas began to gain success on international stages, whereas Novák's operas failed to arouse interest even when performed in Prague's National Theatre. Novák was now considered a conservative, while Janáček was perceived as an avant-garde composer by the generation that emerged after the Second World War.

This changing situation was also reflected in the relationship between the two composers. Novák was first introduced to Janáček by the former's schoolmate from the Prague conservatory, Rudolf Reissig, who in 1897 succeeded Janáček as choirmaster of the Brno Philharmonic Choir (Beseda brněnská). At that time, in Novák's words, Janáček was considered a “loser from Brno.” In spite of their constant clashes of opinions, Novák twice accepted Janáček's invitation to visit him in Hukvaldy. In his memoirs Novák later gives several examples to show that Janáček “was not an infallible authority in Moravian folk song.” On the other hand, Janáček was jealous of the Praguebased composer's “victorious campaign in Moravia”; indeed, especially after the famous premiere of Novák's cantata The Tempest at the Brno Philharmonic Choir, he was celebrated by the people of Brno as the first among Moravian composers. Novák criticized Janáček's “compositional primitivism,” i.e. the absence of thematic work and the fragmentariness of his instrumental music: “While other composers develop their works organically from all their elements, Janáček's music may be compared to a mountain stream, constantly breaking against the stones.”

AN OVERRATED COMPOSER

The musical talent of Zdeněk Fibich (1850-1900) was recognized at an early age. His stimulating family background helped develop his versatile interests, and so it is not surprising that the fifteen-year-old composer started to write his first opera Bukovín to a text by the eminent librettist of operas by Bedřich Smetana, Karel Sabina. In the 1870s, when Czech society was divided by polemics over Wagnerianism and the importance of Smetana, Fibich took an unequivocal stand in Smetana's defense. Like Otakar Hostinský, he considered Smetana's works progressive, modern, and Czech. He was assured that Smetana's inspiration by the mature works of Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner did not jeopardize the “Czechness” of his musical art; on the contrary, familiarity with valuable music of foreign provenance could make Czech music more international. In his study “Wagnerianismus a česká národní opera” (Wagnerianism and Czech National Opera, 1870), which became a sort of manifesto for Smetana's circle, Hostinský writes: “Wagnerianism is not that cruel and horrible monster that swallows the national character of our (Czech) opera and poisons the entire musical world.”

Fibich was inclined toward the onnection of music with an extramusical program in the manner of the “New German” school; he was also interested in exceptional compositions in the field of musical theater (e.g. those of

Fibich was inclined toward the onnection of music with an extramusical program in the manner of the “New German” school; he was also interested in exceptional compositions in the field of musical theater (e.g. those of Mozart, Berlioz, and Wagner). He composed symphonic poems, and even his symphonies could not stand without programmatic commentary. His piano works showed some affinity with Schumann's poetic pieces, and a good part of his creative energy was devoted to stage works. He appeared to be Smetana's legitimate successor and his work was clearly overrated by Czech musicologists, especially by Hostinský and Nejedlý. The former was an influential aesthetician and, despite his decidedly positivist orientation, succumbed to the romantic cult of genius, being interested in groundbreaking figures in the history of music, “[…] not summarizers but pioneers [… like] Gluck, late Beethoven, Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner. Especially Wagner, with his music dramas, was the point to which all the previous musical development aesthetically gravitated.”

Before the twentieth century, throughout northern and western Europe a large part of the agricultural work was performed by live-in farm servants, whereas in eastern and Mediterranean Europe they were far less important. Two different models of domestic service can be discerned within the northwestern European economic-demographic system. In regions without a large landless labour force – for example, the interior provinces of the Netherlands – the system was mainly used to even out shortages and surpluses between family farms caused by (temporary) discrepancies between family size and available land. Social differences between servants and masters were relatively small. Servants often acquired a (small) farm of their own after marriage, just like their parents. In more capitalistic regions such as the Dutch coastal provinces (including Groningen) – with large social differences within the agricultural population – the situation was quite different. Many farms had more land than a farmer's family could cultivate without support, while within landless labourer households useful economic activities were lacking, stimulating the members of these families to work for the farmers, partly as live-in farm servants.

Past Dutch research concentrated mainly on young women doing live-in domestic work. Around 1900 the position of domestic servant became increasingly unpopular with young women. The supply of domestic servants decreased, because it was felt that it was humiliating to be a servant and the work offered few prospects. Young women preferred to work in a factory or in a shop, inasmuch as these positions offered more individual freedom (as factory workers) or a higher social status (as live-in shop assistants). While demand for domestic servants did not fall, domestic work was increasingly done by non-resident women. After World War One, the resulting shortage of live-in domestic servants was partly solved by an influx of German maids.

Although attracting less attention in the literature, the number of live-in farm servants was probably higher than that of domestic servants for most of the nineteenth century. Van Zanden estimated the number of female Dutch farm servants using tax and census data. According to his analyses there were 37,200 young women aged sixteen or older in 1810, 42,200 in 1850, 33,000 in 1880 and 28,500 in 1910 active as live-in farm servants.