Vítezslava Kaprálová was born on January 24, 1915 in Brno, the provincial capital of Moravia that 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 the age of nine, under the guidance of her father. At fifteen, she entered the Brno Conservatory where she studied composition with Vilém Petrzelka and conducting with Vilém Steinman and Zdenek Chalabala. Her creative output at the Conservatory included an early yet already accomplished piano cycle Five Pieces for Piano, two violin pieces Legend and Burlesque, a piano sonata Sonata appassionata, and Piano Concerto in D minor, Kaprálová's first work for orchestra. In 1935, Kaprálová graduated from the Brno Conservatory at the top of her class with the 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.^[2] 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." ^[3]

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 leading Czech composer Vítezslav Novák and the conductor Václav Talich, and her music was soon heard at the concerts of the two most important societies of contemporary music in Prague in the 1930s: Prítomnost and Umelecká Beseda. 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 recall 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 players 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.^[4]

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 after meeting with Paris-based Bohuslav Martinu during his short visit to Prague 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 artistic development. 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 Stravinsky, and her Suita rustica from 1938, a large orchestral work commissioned by Universal Edition (London), is a personal tribute to his Petruschka. Of course, among the new impulses and influences that helped develop Kaprálová's voice, a particularly important one was the music of Bohuslav Martinu, with whom she studied composition privately. Their initial teacher-student relationship gradually changed into a relationship of two colleagues, albeit one senior to the other, who spent hours discussing and arguing the tenets of music theory and analyzing each other's works. Kaprálová's remarkable Partita for Piano and String Orchestra represents an entirely new direction in Kaprálová's output and can be considered a direct result of those discussions.

Kaprálová's charismatic personality, her beauty, and immense passion for life inspired the aging Martinu. His Tre ricercari, and especially the intimate String Quartet No. 5 ^[5] and the powerful Double Concerto reveal some of the strong emotions stirred in him by Kaprálová.^[6] But Martinu also had an enormous respect for her music and did not hesitate to open a few important doors for her. For example, in May 1938 he recommended to one of his publishers, Michel Dillard of La Sirčne Editions Musicales, to accept Kaprálová's Variations sur le carillon de l'église Saint-Etienne du Mont - a remarkable work for piano solo that she had composed a few months earlier. Although Kaprálová was not new to publishing, since by then several of her works had been published in Czechoslovakia, this was her first international recognition. Martinu also had great 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.^[7] She conducted her Military Sinfonietta as the Festival's opening work at Queen's Hall on June 17. Her performance created 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.^[8] She received excellent reviews in dailies and journals covering the event, including Time Magazine and Musical Opinion.^[9]

After two such 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 beloved 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^[10] 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 - seriously for a while - planning their future together, as far from vulnerable Europe as possible. But nothing came of the plans, as Martinu was unable to 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 the young Czechs on stipend in Paris. The friend was her future husband, Jirí Mucha.^[11]

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 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 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 to be conscripted 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.^[12] In early May, around the same time Kaprálová was finishing her very last work, Ritournelle pour violoncelle et piano, she suffered the first symptoms of the illness that was to kill her.^[13] On May 9 she was briefly hospitalized in Vaugirard Hospital, on May 20 she was 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 the country, 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 out of more than 640 domestic members who were elected to the Academy since its inception in 1890, and the only woman musician.^[14] 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... I was not her teacher per se - I was more of an advisor - 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 the 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 the whole, then you know that you have encountered a first-class artist - and that was the very case with Vitulka."^[15]

Vítezslava Kaprálová was a remarkable voice in Czech music of the first half of the 20th century. Her compositions reveal a great originality and a mature mastery of form and contemporary musical language. After several decades of undeserved neglect, her music, sounding as bold and fresh as it did during her lifetime, is now 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 creative output are her outstanding songs that have been considered one of the late climaxes of Czech art song.^[16] Together with the composer's sophisticated and highly original works for solo piano, 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 medium are among her most remarkable, from the early string quartet to her last opus - the ritornel for cello and piano.

Although quite a few of Kaprálová's compositions were published during her lifetime^[17] and several more published and even recorded after her death,^[18] it was only in the late 1990s that any concentrated efforts were made to systematically publish and release 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.^[19] A Supraphon recording of Kaprálová's art songs followed in 2003,^[20] 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 support of the University and the Society. In 2008, a third all-Kaprálová release, this time by Koch Records in New York, closed a gap in the Kaprálová catalog of chamber music and piano recordings.^[21] This project too was encouraged and financially assisted by the Society. 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. To date, more than half of Kaprálová's compositions have been published, often in a first, critical edition. While the Czech Radio and Baerenreiter have taken a primary interest in Kaprálová's orchestral catalog,^[22] Amos Editio has focused on publishing Kaprálová's vocal, piano, and chamber music.^[23] The publisher's greatest achievement to date has been their complete, critical edition of Kaprálová's songs, edited by Timothy Cheek; an exemplary publication that exudes professionalism and dedication of its production editor Veroslav Nemec.

Besides helping to publish Kaprálová's music so that it is available to both performers and the music loving public, 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, publishing an online periodical, The Kapralova Society Journal, and maintaining a website, www.kapralova.org.