A British musicologist has been given an honorary doctorate by a music academy in Brno in recognition of his life’s work in promoting Czech classical music.
John Tyrrell received the award from the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts (JAMU) in Brno late last month, the Czech News Agency (ČTK) reported.
An expert in Czech music, Tyrrell’s work has long centered on the works of Czech composer Leoš Janáček (1854-1928).
John Tyrrell
Tyrrell participated in the cataloguing of Janáček’s work and along with the late British conductor Sir Charles Mackerras (1925-2010), he revived the original version of Janáček’s opera Jenufa (1904).
Czech composer Karel Kovařovic had made revisions to the opera before its premiere in Prague, and it was performed only in this version for decades afterwards.
Tyrrell also focused on other Czech composers and wrote a book entitled Czech Opera (1988) that was later translated into Czech.
“Tyrrell’s work has opened the path for Janáček’s operas as well as other Czech music dramas and Czech music in general to European scenes and concert halls,” the academy said in a statement.
Fellow holders of honorary doctorates from JAMU include former Czech president Václav Havel, British playwright Tom Stoppard, French composer Pierre Boulez and conductor Zdeněk Mácal.
Born in 1942 in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Tyrell grew up in South Africa and later studied music at the universities of Cape Town, Oxford and Brno. A British citizen, he holds a doctorate from Oxford for a thesis on Janáček.
For most of the 2000s, he was research professor at Cardiff University, a position he now holds in an honorary capacity.
He also holds an honorary doctorate from Brno’s Masaryk University which he received in 2002.
Jan Vaclav Stamic, Karel Stamic, Jan Krtitel Vanhal, Frantisek Kramar and Vojtěch Matyáš Jírovec – all composers of ethnic Czech origin, and all known in the literature and media in the Anglosphere by their Germanised names of Johann Wenzel Stamitz, Karl Stamitz, Johann Baptist Wanhal, Franz Krommer and Adalbert Gyrowetz respectively. These Czech men of talent adopted, or were given their Germanised names for the very good reason, it seems, that they wished to display and further their talents, and make a living at their craft in the culturally German milieu of central Europe of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This era is now well behind us and the literature’s and media’s constant usage of the Germanised forms of these gentlemen’s names only serves to perpetuate the domination of the Czechs by the Germans during a bygone era. There is no need for this and I would like it to cease. So far as I am aware no composers from any other land are known by anything other than the names they were born with.