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Bc. Kateřina Řeháková Searching for staging tradition of Bohuslav Martinů's opera Julietta on Czech stages Abstract The master's thesis depicts all productions of Bohuslav Martinů's opera Julietta on Czech stages since the world premiere in Prague in 1938 till the last one, performed in Brno in 2009. It describes staging techniques and their transformations and shows how the productions make use of other productions' methods or how they are original. The pivotal production was the very first from 1938 produced by conductor Václav Talich, stage director Jindřich Honzl and set designer František Muzika who - in harmony - created a performance, which was considered perfect by the composer himself. Jindřich Honzl came up with the crucial staging dilemma which impacted next directors as well: to stage Julietta rather as a dream or more as a realistic story? The directors who were able to find a balance were more successful.

In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W.E.B. Du Bois theorized that black peoples were viewed behind a metaphorical “veil” that consisted of three interrelated aspects: the skin as an indication of African Americans’ difference from their white counterparts, white people’s lack of capacity to see African Americans as Americans, and African Americans’ lack of capacity to see themselves outside of the labels white America has given them. This, according to Du Bois, resulted in the gift and curse of “double consciousness,” the feeling that one’s identity is divided. As African Americans fought for socio-political equality, the reconciliation of these halves became essential in creating a new identity in America by creating a distinct voice in the age of modernity. Intellectuals and artists of the Harlem Renaissance began to create new art forms with progressive messages that strove to uplift the race and ultimately lift the veil. William Grant Still (1895–1978), an American composer of African descent, accomplished this goal in his opera Blue Steel (1934) by changing how blackness—defined here as characteristics attributed to and intended to indicate the otherness of people of African or African-American descent—was portrayed on the operatic stage. Still exemplifies what Houston A. Baker called “mastery of form” by presenting double consciousness in the interactions of three characters, Blue Steel, Venable, and Neola, in order to offer a new and complex reading of blackness.