Photo: Sächsische Landesbibliothek, Dresden, CC BY-SA 4.0
Baroque music was very different across European countries. What most European influences agreed on within Baroque music, however, was polyphony – the simultaneous conducting of voices which have their own rhythm and melody, yet go together perfectly and sound parallel to each other. Its unsurpassed master, Johann Sebastian Bach, found no rival in his art of polyphony for many centuries. But now we know of a worthy challenger – the “Czech Bach” Jan Dismas Zelenka.
Although he was born in the Czech town of Louňovice pod Blaníkem in 1679, he worked in Dresden, Germany, where he stayed practically all his life. And maybe that’s why, we did not know much about Jan Dismas Zelenka until the 1970s. After Zelenka’s death in 1745, his work became the property of the monarchy and was deposited in the archives of the Dresden choir. For a long time it was not possible to copy or publish his compositions. However, this prohibition was broken when, for example, Bach’s son Wilhelm Friedemann Bach copied Zelenka’s Magnificat.
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Authors: Bětka Horáková, Lukáš Hurník, Source:Český rozhlas