This dissertation studies the musical activities of the Venezuelan pianist and composer Teresa Carreño (1853-1917) during her formative years in Caracas. It examines the sources that pertain to her musical environment, early piano training, and first compositions in the context of the growth in Caracas of the practices of recreational sociability, the increasing influence of virtuosic music, and the tradition of private concert-making sponsored by devoted music amateurs. This study argues that Teresa Carreño’s musical upbringing occurred in a social and cultural context in which Enlightenment-framed ideologies of civilization and social progress, shaped in fundamental ways the perceptions of the value of music and women in society, and their role in the newly-founded republic. This study is aimed at reconstructing Teresa Carreño’s musical activities in Caracas as a means for elucidating the values, aspirations, and contradictions of Caracas’s musical culture and how these were articulated within the broader context of the nation-building process that was shaped and promoted by the progressive intelligentsia since the early nineteenth-century.

The thesis focuses on virtuoso pianist, teacher, musical theoretician and composer Josef Jiránek (1855 - 1940). The thesis draws from Josef Jiránek's own estate, as well as resources kept at various archive institutions in Prague. It underlines Josef Jiránek's merit as regards the art of the piano and piano education in particular, while emphasizing Hugo Riemann's influence on his music-teaching as well as theoretical ideas. In the light of the Prague resources, Josef Jiránek may be viewed as a follower of the traditional interpretation legacy of Bedřich Smetana. Nonetheless, by further elaborating Smetana's legacy from a purely scientific perspective and with his analytical and rational approach to piano work, Josef Jiránek had indeed largely contributed to the development and evolution of piano education and piano reproduction art - regardless of the fact that his ideas and methods were later overcome. The objective of this thesis is to open a gateway that would attract greater attention of musicologists to Josef Jiránek, who has been on the periphery of their interest and whose true picture remains hidden under the label "Bedřich Smetana's pupil".