Thematic Catalogues and Inventories on the Music of the Czech Lands


Music has been one of the attractive ‘export commodities’ of the Czech lands since at least the early 18th century. However, the past – and in many cases still present – popularity of composers from this region contrasts with the lack of well-organised and easily accessible information about the oeuvres of many of them. The absence of thematic catalogues for some significant composers remains one of the debts of Czech musicology, and the need to systematise the output of numerous lesser-known figures is just as pressing. Lists of works included in dictionary entries are usually based on such catalogues and cannot serve as a full replacement. Thematic catalogues are a fundamental resource for music cataloguers processing records in libraries or in the international database of musical sources (RISM), as well as for authors of texts on music and for musicians themselves. Creating work catalogues is therefore still an important task of musicology and a natural part of caring for the cultural heritage of our country.

Catalogues of composers’ works exist in many forms – not only as independently published books or studies, but also as dissertations, master’s theses, or electronic databases available online. Although for twentieth-century composers the situation is often different (the Czech Music Information Centre registers contemporary Czech art music), the standard way of processing a composer’s oeuvre is the thematic catalogue. Such a catalogue contains musical incipits, which are rich in information and highly communicative. The compilation of a catalogue of works is demanding, as it requires the documentation and critical evaluation of all relevant sources – something often very difficult to achieve for a composer’s legacy at a given point in time. The challenges, however, rarely end there: finalising and publishing a thematic catalogue – especially in printed form – is technically complex and financially expensive. With the rise of information technologies and online publication, the methods and possibilities of producing thematic catalogues are changing.

Basic information on thematic catalogues in the Czech language can be found in the corresponding section of the entry “Katalog” by Jiří Fukač in the Slovník české hudební kultury (Dictionary of Czech Musical Culture) from 1997. In the same year, the second edition of the seminal bibliography, Thematic Catalogues in Music, created by Barry S. Brook, was published. More recent thematic catalogues, however, are not yet covered in any specialised bibliography of this kind. This website provides a bibliographic overview of thematic catalogues of Czech composers. Its goal is to gather information about thematic catalogues of composers in the broadest possible scope. It includes catalogues of various levels, concepts, and ages; it is not, therefore, a selection of catalogues primarily recommended for use in, for example, library cataloguing. The “Czech perspective” expressed in the title includes both composers originating from the Czech lands who were active abroad and composers of other nationalities who were active in the Czech lands.