Taťána Petrasová – Pavla Machalíková
In conclusion
The papers presented at the 42nd interdisciplinary meeting on nineteenthcentury issues, held in Plzeň, dealt with a theme which is a defining feature for orientation in the previous meetings, and at the same time a digression
from them. The tradition of these interdisciplinary meetings is based on an approach where the theme "takes precedence over methodology". (For more on this, see Miloš Havelka in this volume.) It is therefore necessary from time to time to recall the methodology of the historical sciences as an essential component of the interdisciplinary discussion. And that is the purpose of this year's "digression". There are several reasons why the concept of "The Work" became the central focus of this methodologically oriented volume. Historically, it is because in the 1980s - when a new approach to the nineteenth century began to be established in what was then Czechoslovakia mainly due to the Plzeň symposia - an English translation of a selection of essays by Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language (1986, French original Le bruissement de la langue, 1984), appeared behind the Iron Curtain, and out of this there gradually emerged a new interpretation of works, through the intermediary of their readers and the readers' approach to the narrative of the text. In the first studies on nineteenth-century issues included in the proceedings of the Plzeň symposia, a "new reading of old stories" was one of the most significant methodological shifts. At the same time, Barthes' approach had already had a tradition among Czech philosophers since the 1960s. The essay "Dílo jako událost" [The Work as an Event] by Ladislav Hejdánek (1927–2020) had first been presented as a lecture in 1966, and was published in the journal Hudební?rozhledy in 1970. In Hejdánek's view, a musical work demonstrates very well how an event, in this case the performance of a composition by interpreters, transforms a work into concrete form and stands in contrast to its static, final form. Although the manuscript score is the fixed starting point for a musical work, it is only through its performance that a composition becomes a work. It is not the composer who is involved in transforming it into concrete form, but "those who interpret it, apprehend it, and experience it".
design by Bedřich Vémola
