This chapter shows how ethnic concepts became prominent in Bohemian debates about Mozart in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The chapter first explores the writings of Mozart’s first biographer Franz Xaver Niemetschek to show that around 1800 regional identity in Prague was dominated by the ambiguous concept of Bohemian patriotism. With the rise of Czech and German ethnic nationalism in the ensuing decades, Prague’s critics and musicologists mined Mozart’s operas, as well as works by his eighteenth-century contemporaries and predecessors, such as Stamitz and Gluck, for inherent qualities associated with Czech and German-Bohemian cultures, especially folk music. In the 1930s, Czech and German-Bohemian musicologists used racial criteria to prove that Gluck’s and Mozart’s music was inherently Czech or German (or Sudeten German, as many Czechoslovak Germans identified themselves by then). These ethnocentric preoccupations were further emphasized by Czech Marxist musicologists in the post–World War II period.

This chapter explores the relationship between political developments in Bohemia from the 1790s to the 1880s and the concept of fidelity to “authentic” texts and music (Werktreue) in Mozart’s operas. The idea of Werktreue appeared in Prague in the 1790s in response to Bohemian patriotism and negative attitudes to the central government in Vienna. In the 1820s, Czech nationalists embraced similar attitudes in approaching Don Giovanni, and both the first Czech production of 1825 and the first production of the work at the Czech National Theater (1884) showcased the opera with musical numbers that were cut in contemporaneous German productions. German-Bohemians appropriated Werktreue as well but understood “authentic” performances of Don Giovanni as a link to the ideals of a pan-German national culture. By the time of the 1887 Don Giovanni centennial celebrations, however, some German-Bohemian critics considered Werktreue in Mozart’s operas antithetical to true German art under the influence of Wagnerian ideas.