Básně Josefa Kainara – bohatství inspirace ke kompozici melodramů
The Poems of Josef Kainar – a Fount of Inspiration for the Composition of Melodramas

Summary/Abstract: Josef Kainar’s verse draws on a seemingly bottomless source of subject matter, contemplation, poetic imagination, and also inspiration for further artistic interpretation. A number of composers have set his poems to music, not only as songs, but also as melodramas. A form of composition representing a synthesis of music and spoken word, melodrama has enjoyed a long tradition in Czech music: as early as in the eighteenth century, for example, melodramas were composed by Jiří Antonín Benda (1722–1795). Melodramas were composed as adaptations of verse and prose works by great writers from all over the world, including Czechs. In the twentieth and twenty-_rst centuries, composers have also found inspiration in the verse of Josef Kainar (1917–1971). Among them are, for example, Jiří Matys (1927–2016), Jan Schneeweis (1904–1995), Jitka Snížková (1924–1989), Josef Marek (b. 1948), and Antonín Vaigl (b. 1932). Thanks to the project ‘Melodram do školy’ (Melodrama for School), initiated in 2015 in the Music Education Department of the Faculty of Education at Jan Evangelista Purkyně University, in Ústí nad Labem, a number of melodramas based on Kainar’s collection of verse entitled Nevídáno, neslýcháno (Unimaginable, unheard of) were written, especially in that first year, by Zdeněk Zahradník and Petr Ježil. Melodramas made using Kainar’s verse have been well received by both adult and child performers and audiences.

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