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Czech and Slovak Collections at the Library of Congress

Music and Recorded Sound

Vojtěch Preissig, artist. Kdo jste boží bojovníci--Č. S. armáda ve Francii. [1918]. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Reading Room.

The Library has an impressive set of scores by Bedřich Smetana, Antonín Dvořák, Leoš Janáček, Zdeněk Fibich, Eugen Suchoň, and other Czech and Slovak composers. Chamber music is represented by several baroque and early classical figures such as Jan Dismas Zelenka, Josef Mysliveček, Jan Stamitz, and Jiří Benda, and, up through the modern period, Bohuslav Martinů.

Josef Mysliveček (called 'il divino Boemo') is represented by 30 titles of pieces of music, including several 18th-century manuscripts.

The Archives of World Literature on Tape has recordings of a number of Czech authors reading from their works (Bohumil Hrabal, Ivan Klíma, Arnošt Lustig, Ivan Diviš, and others).

The Library also has two recorded sound collections relating to key political events:

  • The NBC Radio Collection contains the network’s entire coverage of the September 1938 Munich crisis. (A list of the broadcasts can be found by searching, SONIC, the Recorded Sound Research Center's online catalog. Search the catalog's "News Only Broadcast Search" page, using the terms '1938' and 'Munich'. To listen, these recordings must be requested advance. Please contact RSRC at [email protected].)
  • A set of 23 tapes of the 1952 trial of Rudolf Slánský as broadcast by Radio Prague.

About the Performing Arts Reading Room

The Performing Arts Reading Room is the access point for the collections in the custody of the Music Division at the Library of Congress. Numbering approximately 20.5 million items and spanning more than 1000 years of Western music history and practice, these holdings include the classified music and book collections, music and literary manuscripts, iconography, microforms, periodicals, musical instruments, published and unpublished copyright deposits, and close to 500 special collections in music, theater, and dance.