Prague Spring
The Prague Spring is either an international music festival, or an important period of history of Czechoslovakia in 1968. This page covers both.
The Prague Spring International Music Festival is a permanent showcase for outstanding performing artists, symphony orchestras and chamber music ensembles of the world. The first festival was held under the patronage of Czechoslovak president Edvard BeneÃÂ, and its organizing committee was made up of important figures in Czech musical life. In that year, 1946, the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, and was therefore given the highest honor: to appear on all the orchestral concerts. Such musicians as Karel Ančerl, Leonard Bernstein, Sir Adrian Boult, Rudolf FirkuÃÂný, Jaroslav Krombholc, Rafael KubelÃÂk, Moura Lympany, Yevgeny Mravinski, Charles Munch, Ginette Neveu, Jarmila Novotná, Lev Oborin, David Oistrach and Jan Panenka have won enthusiastic ovations on the Prague Spring Festival stage. Since 1952 the festival has opened with Bedřich Smetanaôs cycle of symphonic poems Má vlast (My Country), and it closes with the ninth symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven.
The festival commemorates important musical anniversaries by including works by the composers concerned on its programs, and presents Czech as well as world premieres of compositions by contemporary authors. Artists and orchestras of the highest quality are invited to perform here. At least a few of the inexhaustible galaxy of stars who have appeared at the festival should be named: Sviatoslav Richter, Lorin Maazel, Herbert von Karajan, Mstislav Rostropovich, Boris Pergamenschikow, Lucia Popp, Kim Borg, Sir Colin Davis, Maurice André, Dmitri Sitkovecki, Leonid Kogan, Paul Klecki, Gustav Leonhardt, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Alfred Brendel, Heinrich Schiff, Leopold Stokowski, Arthur Honegger, Arthur Rubinstein...
The Prague Spring is one of the few festivals in the world to show an interest in young performers. The Prague Spring Competition was established just one year after the festival itself, and is held each year in various instrumental sections. In 1957 it became a founding member of the World Federation of International Music Competitions, headquartered in Geneva.
Thus the Prague Spring Festival has been a prestigious showcase for world musical life and its latest trends since its very beginnings.
Czechs in a café watch Soviet tanks roll past
The Prague Spring (Czech, Pražské jaro) was a period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia starting January 5 1968, and running until August 20 of that year when the USSR and its Warsaw Pact allies (except for Romania) invaded the country.
The Czechs and Slovaks showed increasing signs of independence under the leadership of Alexander Dubcek. Dubcek's reforms of the political process inside Czechoslovakia, which he referred to as "Socialism with human face", did not represent a complete overthrow of the old regime, as was the case in Hungary in 1956. However, it was still seen by the Soviet leadership as a threat to their hegemony over other Eastern European states under the yoke of the Comintern.
The policy of the USSR to enforce Soviet-style governments among its satellite states, through military force if needed, became known as the Brezhnev Doctrine, named after Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, who was first to publicly declare it, although it was in use since Stalin's times. This doctrine remained in force until it was replaced by the Sinatra Doctrine under Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s.
The period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia came to an end on August 20, when 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops and 5,000 tanks invaded the country. Criticism from the west was quite muted, leftist writers such as Tariq Ali, argue that this was because the western states saw the humane and democratic socialism espoused by the Czechoslovaks as being an even greater threat to capitalism than Soviet communism which had largely been discredited by 1968.
A decade later, the Prague Spring lent its name to an analogous period of Chinese political liberalization known as the Beijing Spring.
Prague Spring - Music Festival
Prague Spring - Politics
See also