Vítezslava Kaprálová was born on January 24, 1915 in Brno, the provincial capital of Moravia (now Czech Republic), which was then still a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She was an only child who grew up in a musical family: her mother, Vítezslava Kaprálová (1890-1973), née Uhlírová, was a classically trained singer; her father, Václav Kaprál (1889-1947), was a composer, writer, music critic, and teacher who had studied with Janácek. Kaprálová started composing at nine under the guidance of her father. At fifteen, she entered Brno Conservatory where she studied composition with Vilém Petrzelka and conducting with Vilém Steinman and Zdenek Chalabala. Her creative output at the Conservatory included Five Pieces for Piano, two violin pieces Legend and Burlesque, a remarkable piano sonata Sonata appassionata, and Piano Concerto in D minor, Kaprálová's first yet highly accomplished work for orchestra. In 1935, Kaprálová graduated from the Brno Conservatory at the top of her class with her piano concerto that she conducted herself at its premiere in Brno. It was her first public appearance as conductor and she made quite an impression upon the curious, and at first skeptical, audience.^[1] After the graduation, she spent the summer at her family retreat in the village of Tri Studne, where she sketched her first and only string quartet, an ingenious work that "blends something of the spirit of Janácek's Intimate Letters with a free chromaticism reminiscent of Berg's op. 3." ^[2]

In the fall of 1935 Kaprálová moved to Prague, where she hoped to advance her technical skills at the Prague Conservatory. She was accepted into the prestigious masterclasses of the composer Vítezslav Novák and the conductor Václav Talich, the foremost personalities of Prague's musical life, and her music was soon programed by the two most important societies of contemporary music in Prague in the 1930s: Prítomnost (The Presence) and Umelecká Beseda (The Artistic Forum). During her "Prague" period Kaprálová experimented with impressionistic and expressionistic idioms and wrote some of her most striking music, including the critically acclaimed songs Forever and Waving Farewell, and her best known piano work April Preludes. In June 1937 Kaprálová graduated from the Prague Conservatory with a composition for large orchestra, the Military Sinfonietta. Composed at a time of political unrest in her homeland, it was chosen by the National Women's Council to be premiered at their annual gala concert in the presence of Edvard Benes, President of the Czechoslovak Republic, to whom the work was dedicated. The premiere took place at Lucerna Hall in Prague on November 26, 1937. The orchestra was the Czech Philharmonic, the conductor - Kaprálová. Witnesses recalled how highly unusual it was for the Czech Philharmonic to perform under the baton of such a young conductor, especially when that conductor happened to be a woman. The members of the orchestra were skeptical at first, but Kaprálová's professionalism and her energetic gestures were persuasive arguments even for such experienced players. After the first few bars of the score, she won over the hundred-piece orchestra completely.^[3]

In October 1937, a month before the premiere of her Military Sinfonietta, Kaprálová moved to Paris to study conducting with Charles Munch at the Ecole normale de musique. She originally planned to study with Felix Weingartner in Vienna, but on Karel Bohuslav Jirak's recommendation and after meeting with Bohuslav Martinu during his short visit to Prague from Paris in April that year, she decided instead to seek a government scholarship to study in France. Paris was to broaden Kaprálová's intellectual horizons. The city's musical life in general and the concerts of La Societé de la Musique Contemporaine (Triton) in particular were immensely important for her development as an artist. Here she heard the latest works of Bartók, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Prokofiev, Milhaud, Honegger, Martinu and later also saw her own works performed. She was particularly attracted to the music of Stravinsky, and her Suita rustica from 1938, a large orchestral work commissioned by Universal Edition (London), pays homage to his Petruschka. Of course, among the new impulses and influences that helped develop Kaprálová's voice was also the music of Bohuslav Martinu who became for a brief period her mentor. Their relationship was not a typical teacher-pupil relationship but rather one of two colleagues, albeit one senior to the other, who spent hours discussing and arguing the tenets of composition and analyzing each other's works. Kaprálová's only neoclassical work - Partita for Piano and String Orchestra - can be considered a direct result of those discussions.

Kaprálová's charismatic personality, beauty, and immense passion for life inspired the aging Martinu. His Tre ricercari, the intimate String Quartet No. 5, ^[4] and the powerful Double Concerto reveal some of the strong emotions stirred in him by Kaprálová.^[5] Yet he also admired her music and did not hesitate to open important doors for her. In May 1938 Martinu recommended to one of his publishers, Michel Dillard of La Sirčne Editions Musicales, to publish Kaprálová's Variations sur le carillon de l'église Saint-Etienne du Mont, op. 16 - an ingenious work for keyboard she had completed several months earlier. Although Kaprálová was not new to publishing, since by then several of her works had been printed in Czechoslovakia, this was her first international recognition. Martinu also had faith in her abilities as a conductor - so much so that he had her conduct a performance of his Harpsichord Concerto in Paris, on June 2, 1938, with Marcelle de Lacour as soloist. Two weeks later Kaprálová arrived in London for the 1938 ISCM Festival as one of the four finalists who were selected by the festival international jury to represent contemporary Czech music.^[6] She opened the festival by conducting her Military Sinfonietta at Queen's Hall on June 17. Her performance generated quite a bit of excitement, and both her composition and performance earned her respect and applause from the BBC Orchestra, the audience, and the critics.^[7] She received excellent reviews in dailies and journals that covered the event, including Time Magazine and Musical Opinion.^[8]

After two eventful semesters abroad, Kaprálová was eager to return home for the summer holidays. She could not know that this was to be her last visit to her homeland. When she returned to Paris in January 1939, the world she knew was already disintegrating. In February she composed her last work for violin and piano, Elegy, to commemorate the life and work of the late Czech writer Karel Capek. A month later, on March 15, German soldiers marched in the streets of Prague. Three days after the forceful annexation of her country, Kaprálová, emotionally exhausted, began working on her Concertino for Violin, Clarinet and Orchestra. Clearly a statement of a sober mind, this dark, despairing work^[9] contrasts sharply with Kaprálová's energetic Military Sinfonietta, composed only two years earlier, still so full of youthful optimism. Separated by war from her loved ones, Kaprálová was now looking to Martinu for all of her emotional support. The two began planning their future together as far from vulnerable Europe as possible but nothing came of the plans, as Martinu was unable to make up his mind and leave his wife, and Kaprálová spent the summer alone in Augerville la Rivičre. She returned to Paris in September but left again to spend a couple of weeks with the Martinus in their home at Vieux Moulin, bringing with her a friend she met a few months earlier among young Czech students in Paris. The friend was to be her future husband, Jirí Mucha.^[10]

That fall, Paris began preparing for war. Kaprálová now lived with Mucha and a few mutual friends in a sort of bohemian commune in the city's Quartier Latin. Mucha worked for the weekly Ceskoslovenský boj, an official publication of Czechs and Slovaks in exile, for which Kaprálová wrote concert reviews and articles on various musical subjects. He was also involved in a regular broadcast to occupied Czechoslovakia, and soon found an opportunity for Kaprálová to participate; as a result, on the Christmas Day of 1939, his program featured Kaprálová's miniature Prélude de Noël, her last extant orchestral work.

The year 1940, Kapralova's last, began promisingly with the great success of Kaprálová's April Preludes performed by Rudolf Firkusný at a concert in Paris of the Society for Contemporary Music 'Triton' on January 28. That winter and spring Kaprálová worked on a number of commissions, including some incidental music on which she collaborated with Martinu. By March Mucha was no longer in Paris. Like many other young Czechs in exile, he volunteered for army service in Agde, southern France. As Kaprálová was growing restless in Paris, he returned in April for a few days. They married on April 23. Five days after her wedding Kaprálová composed a song, Letter, which was to be her last composition in a genre in which perhaps she excelled most.^[11] In early May, around the same time Kaprálová was finishing her very last work, Deux ritournelles pour violoncelle et piano, she suffered the first symptoms of the illness that was to kill her.^[12] On May 9 she was briefly hospitalized in Vaugirard Hospital, on May 20 evacuated from Paris to a small university hospital in Montpellier, and on June 16, 1940 - the day France fell - Kaprálová died, at the age of 25.

In 1946, the foremost scholarly institution in Czechoslovakia, the Czech Academy of Sciences and Arts, acknowledged Kaprálová's distinct contribution to Czech Music by awarding her a membership in memoriam. She was one of only ten women members, out of more than 640 domestic members elected to the Academy since its inception in 1890, and the only woman musician.^[13] In 1947, Martinu was asked to contribute to a small volume of reminiscences about the composer. He wrote: "The loss to our music is greater than we might think. I know it, because I was there when she was transforming into an artist... and I can say that only rarely have I had the opportunity to encounter such genuine talent and such confidence in the task she wanted to -and was to - accomplish. It was a pleasure to discuss musical problems with her. In fact, I was learning along with her and it was a great joy as well as an experience to see the fight between the soul and the material again. Only rarely have I met someone with such a sharp sense for envisioning a work before it was written down. If you find someone who actually understands how the parts of the whole relate to each other, whose primary interest is in the whole, then you know that you have encountered a first-class artist - and that was the very case with Vitulka."^[14]

Vítezslava Kaprálová was a remarkable voice in Czech music of the first half of the 20th century. Her compositions display originality and a mature mastery of form and contemporary musical language and they sound as bold and fresh as they did during her lifetime, inspiring a whole new generation of performers and listeners.

In her short life, Kaprálová composed over forty compositions in a variety of genres. Particularly well represented in Kaprálová's oeuvre are her outstanding songs that have been considered one of the late climaxes of Czech art song.^[15] Together with the composer's sophisticated works for the keyboard, they have remained the most vital part of the Kaprálová repertoire. Kaprálová's orchestral works are lesser known and, with a few notable exceptions, have yet to be discovered. The orchestral catalog is strong and includes two orchestral songs, two piano concertos, a sinfonietta, a symphonic ballad-cantata, a concertino, a ballet-suite for large orchestra, and a couple of minor classics for chamber orchestra. Relatively least represented in Kaprálová's compositional output is chamber music, but the compositions she did produce in this genre are often remarkable, be it her early string quartet or her last opus - the ritornel for cello and piano.

Although quite a few of Kaprálová's compositions were published during her lifetime^[16] and several more published and even recorded soon after her death,^[17] it was only in the late 1990s that any concentrated efforts were made to publish and release systematically Kaprálová's works. The founding of the Kapralova Society in 1998 has played a seminal role in this revival of interest in Kaprálová's music. The same year a first profile CD featuring some of the very best of Kaprálová's offering was released by Studio Matous in Prague on the impetus and with the assistance of the Society.^[18] A Supraphon recording of Kaprálová's art songs followed in 2003,^[19] a result of the dedicated efforts of the Society's member, Timothy Cheek, Associate Professor of Voice at the University of Michigan School of Music, and the financial partnership of the University of Michigan and the Society. In 2008, a third all-Kaprálová release, this time by Koch Records in New York, added significantly to the Kaprálová discography with her piano and chamber music recordings.^[20] This project too was encouraged and financially assisted by the Society. In 2011, another profile CD of the composer, released by Czech Radio with the assistance of the Society, and featuring Kapralova's Piano Concerto in D-Minor, closed a gap in Kaprálová recordings.^[21] Most important among the projects the Society encouraged and assisted over the past decade, however, has been the Kaprálová Edition - a joint effort of the Society and its publishing partners (Czech Radio Publishing House, Editio Baerenreiter Prague, and Amos Editio) to make available in print Kaprálová's music. More than two thirds of Kaprálová compositions have been published to date, often in a first, critical edition. While the Czech Radio and Baerenreiter have been primarily interested in Kaprálová's orchestral catalog,^[22] Amos Editio has focused on publishing Kaprálová's songs, works for solo piano, and for piano and violin.^[23] Among the publisher's greatest achievements has been their complete, critical edition of Kaprálová's songs, expertly edited by Timothy Cheek, an exemplary publication that exudes professionalism and dedication of its production editor Veroslav Nemec.

Besides making available Kaprálová's music on record and in print, the Society also encourages and financially assists important premieres of the composer's music.^[24] Finally, the Society has been playing a key role in promoting and advancing knowledge about the composer by assisting scholarly research,^[25] publishing an online periodical, Kapralova Society Journal, and maintaining a website, kapralova.org.

^[1] Jirí Macek, Vítezslava Kaprálová (Prague: Svaz cs. skladatelu, 1958), pp. 52-53.
^[2] Calum MacDonald, "Kaprálová," Tempo 214 (October 2000): 60.
^[3] Jirí Macek, Vítezslava Kaprálová (Prague: Svaz cs. skladatelu, 1958), pp. 133-34.
^[4] The original 12-page autograph sketch contains a number of whimsical cartoons in the composer's hand expressing his thoughts about Kaprálová.
^[5] In his letter dated February 25, 1958, Martinu admitted to his first biographer Milos Safránek: "[T]he Double Concerto [has], of course, a very private character, but only I know about that and all other conjectures are only [smoke]screen." Milos Safránek, Bohuslav Martinu: His Life and Works (London: Allan Wingate, 1962), p. 184.
^[6] The other three were Viktor Ullmann, Isa Krejcí, and Václav Bartos.
^[7] Bohuslav Martinu, "Mezinárodní festival v Londýne," Lidové noviny, June 28, 1938, 7.
^[8] The reviewer for Musical Opinion was Havergal Brian. He wrote: "The first work played and broadcast at the recent festival, a Military Sinfonietta, by Miss Vítezslava Kaprálová of Czechoslovakia, proved an amazing piece of orchestral writing: it was also of logical and well balanced design." In: Havergal Brian, "The Nature of Modern Music. Contemporary Music Festival," Musical Opinion (July 1938): 858. The success of Kaprálová's music at this prestigious international event is all the more so remarkable when we realize that participating composers also included Bartók, Britten, Copland, Hindemith, Messiaen, and Webern.
^[9] Just before the last two measures of the autograph sketch of her Concertino, Kaprálová scribbled the following two references: Psalm 57 and Job 30, 26 ("Yet when I hoped for good, evil came; when I looked for light, then came darkness").
^[10] Jirí Mucha, (1915-1991), Czech writer, son of the art-nouveau painter Alfons Mucha. His autobiography, published in Prague in 1988, is centred on the years Mucha spent in Paris before the war, his relationship with Kaprálová, and her affair with Martinu.
^[11] The words of the poem by Petr Kricka, written as a letter from a man to his lover who has just rejected him, are paraphrased in an awkward French translation made by Kaprálová on the back of the song manuscript as follows: "You said "no". So be it... It was fate that separated us. I regret it but see that you are happy - and accept it. I do not judge who is to blame, whose loss is bigger. Yesterday there were two paths, today there is just one. Who knows? Perhaps, you will return one day. The Lord God is a great artist and His intentions unfathomable..." Perhaps Dopis was meant to be Kaprálová's farewell to her relationship with Martinu and provided a closure she needed in order to move on with her life; yet, the poem seems to leave the door open to other possibilities. [The song's autograph has been published in: Jirí Mucha, Podivné lásky (Prague: Mladá fronta, 1988), pp. 389-392.]
^[12] While Kaprálová is generally believed to have died of tuberculosis miliaris, the symptoms that she manifested were not consistent with this official diagnosis.
^[13] Derek Sayer, The Coasts of Bohemia (Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 343.
^[14] "Bohuslav Martinu," in Vítezslava Kaprálová: Studie a vzpomínky, ed. Premysl Prazák (Prague: HMUB, 1949), pp. 122-25.
^[15] Timothy Cheek, "Navzdy (Forever) Kaprálová: Reevaluating Czech composer Vítezslava Kaprálová through her thirty songs," The Kapralova Society Journal 2 (Fall 2005): 1-6.
^[16] Burlesque, op. 3/2 (1933), Groteskní (Grotesque) Passacaglia, op. 9/3 (1936), Jablko s klína (Apple from the Lap), op. 10 (1938), Military Sinfonietta, op. 11 (1938), Dubnová preludia (April Preludes), op. 13 (1938), and Variations sur le carillon de l'église Saint-Etienne du Mont, op. 16 (1938).
^[17] Waving Farewell, op. 14 (1947), Partita, op. 20 (1948), Forever, op. 12 (1949), and Potpolis, op. 17 (1976). In 1945, Ultraphon recorded two of the four April Preludes (Allegro ma non troppo and Andante Semplice); in 1957, Gramofonové závody recorded (and in 1958 released) the Military Sinfonietta; and in 1975, Supraphon released April Preludes, Waving Farewell, Suita rustica, and Partita.
^[18] The disc features Kaprálová's String Quartet, op. 8, Military Sinfonietta, op. 11, April Preludes, op. 13, Waving Farewell, op. 14 (orchestral version), Partita, op. 20, and Ritornel for Cello and Piano, op. 25.
^[19] The disc features the following song cycles: Dve písne (Two Songs), op. 4, Jiskry z popele (Sparks from Ashes), op. 5, Jablko s klína (Apple from the Lap), op. 10, Navzdy (Forever), op. 12, Sbohem a sátecek (Waving Farewell), op. 14, Vteriny (Seconds), op. 18, Zpíváno do dálky (Sung into the Distance), op. 22, and several other songs, including the composer's last song Dopis (Letter), of 1940, and Leden (January), of 1933, for soprano/tenor, flute, two violins, violoncello, and piano. The latter is a remarkable but up until its world premiere by faculty members at the University of Michigan in 2003, an entirely unknown work composed by Kaprálová.
^[20] The disc features her piano works Sonata appassionata, op. 6, April Preludes, op. 13, Variations sur le carillon the l'église Saint-Etienne du Mont, op. 16, Little Song, and Kaprálová's three piano and violin pieces: Legend and Burlesque, op. 3, and Elegy (1939). Six of the seven compositions are premiere CD recordings.
^[21] Besides the first CD recording of Kaprálová's Piano concerto, op. 7, the disc also features a first recording of complete Three Piano Pieces, op. 9, and piano works Sonata appassionata, op. 6, and Variations sur le carillon the l'église Saint-Etienne du Mont, op. 16.
^[22] The Czech Radio has so far published Kaprálová's Prélude de Noël (1st edition), Partita, op. 20 (2nd edition), Military Sinfonietta, op. 11 (3rd edition), String Quartet, op. 8 (1st edition), and To Karel Capek, melodrama for reciter, violin, and piano. Editio Baerenreiter has made available the composer's Concertino for Violin, Clarinet and Orchestra, op. 21, and Deux ritournelles pour violoncelle et piano, op. 25, both opuses in a first edition.
^[23] Since 2003, Amos Editio has published Kaprálová's childhood compositions, and, in partnership with the Society, the following scores: the first complete (critical) edition of Kaprálová's art songs for voice and piano; the first (urtext) edition of her song Leden (January) for soprano/tenor, flute, two violins, violoncello, and piano, the first (critical) edition of Sonata appassionata, op. 6; the first complete (critical) edition of the composer's works for violin and piano; the first (critical) edition of Grotesque Passacaglia and Three Pieces for Piano, op. 9; the first (critical) edition of Five Piano Pieces, and the first edition of Sad evening (a version for voice and piano).
^[24] An example is the 2007 world premiere of Kaprálová's symphonic ballad-cantata Ilena, op. 15, for soli, mixed chorus, orchestra, and reciter, a project of the Janácek Academy of Performing Arts, Faculty of Music, in Brno, encouraged by and realized with the financial assistance of the Kapralova Society.
^[25] The most important example of research assisted by the Society to date is The Kapralova Companion, the first English language biography of the composer, published by Lexington Books in 2011.