The Kapralova Society
Dedicated to promoting women in music
http://www.kapralova.org/
© 1998-2008 The Kapralova Society.
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Vitezslava Kapralova, Czech composer and conductor, b. Brno (now the Czech Republic), January 24, 1915; d. Montpellier (France), June 16, 1940.
Kapralova began composing at the age of nine and at fifteen she entered the Brno Conservatory where she
studied composition with Vilem Petrzelka and conducting with Zdenek Chalabala. She graduated with an award-winning Piano Concerto
that she conducted herself. In 1935 she moved to Prague and continued her musical education at the Prague Conservatory, attending
the masterclasses of Vitezslav Novak (composition) and Vaclav Talich (conducting).
In 1937 she received a scholarship to study in France, at the Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris, and became a pupil of Charles Munch (1937-1939) and briefly also of
Nadia Boulanger (spring 1940?). She also studied composition as a private student of Bohuslav Martinu (1937-1939) whose Harpsichord Concerto she conducted in Paris (1938).
Her award-winning Military Sinfonietta, premiered in Prague in 1937 by the Czech Philharmonic and conducted by the composer, opened the 1938
ISCM Festival in London.
At this occasion, Kapralova conducted the work with the BBC Orchestra.
Following the German occupation of Czechoslovakia on 15 March 1939 Kapralova decided to stay in exile in France.
In April 1940, she married the writer Jiri Mucha. Only two months later her marriage and musical career were cut short by her tragic death in Montpellier,
allegedly from miliary tuberculosis.
Kapralova's life has inspired no less than
two monographs and three novels. Her works were published by Baerenreiter, Eschig (La Sirène Editions Musicales), Editio Supraphon,
Czech Radio Publishing House, HMUB, Melantrich, Svoboda, Pazdirek, Editio Praga, and Amos Editio, and released on record by Supraphon and on
compact disc by Supraphon, Koch Records, Northeastern Records, Studio Matous, Stylton, and Tomas Visek.
Kapralova's music was critically acclaimed during her lifetime and continues to be praised by music historians today:
"There is no doubt that had she lived she would have become one of the greatest women composers in Europe." (Hartog, Howard [Ed.]:
European Music in the Twentieth Century. Penguin Books: 1961. P. 322). In 1946, in appreciation of her distinctive contribution, the foremost academic
institution in the country - the Czech Academy of Arts and Sciences - awarded Kapralova membership in memoriam (by 1948 this honour was bestowed on only 10
women, out of 648 members of the Academy).
In 1981, the same institution appraised her work as "representing a distinctive and progressive moment in the development of Czech music in the first half of the
twentieth century." (History of Czech Music Culture 1890-1945, p. 289). In 1999, after the release of the composer's landmark CD by Studio Matous, BBC Music Magazine (June 1999) hailed Kapralova as "a genuinely fascinating voice
in inter-war Czech music".
The Kapralova Society is a non-profit arts organization based in Toronto, Canada. Founded by Karla Hartl in 1998,
the society's mission is to promote interest in Kapralova and other women in music through education, research,
and special projects, in collaboration with other organizations.
We encourage and support recording and publishing of Kapralova's music, and seek to build awareness of women's
contributions to musical life through our online resources and other support.
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Vitezslava Kapralova
[24.1.1915 Brno - 16.6.1940 Montpellier]
Vitezslava (Vita) Kapralova naquit à Brno le 24 janvier 1915.
Son père, le compositeur Vaclav Kapral - qui fut plus tard aussi professeur au
Conservatoire de Brno -, guida ses premiers essais en composition. Entre 1930 et
1935, elle étudia la composition avec Vilem Petrzelka et la direction avec
Zdenek Chalabala au Conservatoire de Brno. Au cours des deux années qui
suivirent, elle poursuivit ses études au Conservatoire de Prague avec Vitezslav
Novak pour la composition et Vaclav Talich pour la direction d'orchestre.
En 1937, elle reçut une bourse pour étudier à l'Ecole normale
de musique de Paris où, entre 1937 et 1939, elle fut l'élève de Charles Munch et
prit des cours particuliers de composition avec Bohuslav Martinu dont elle
dirigea le Concerto pour clavecin à Paris en 1938. Elle produisit des
oeuvres en abondance. Sa Sinfonietta militaire, créée en 1937 par la
Philarmonie tchèque, sous sa direction, ouvrit le Festival ISCM à Londres en
1938. A cette occasion, elle dirigea l'oeuvre jouée par l'Orchestre de la BBC.
Après l'invasion de la Tchécoslovaquie par l'Allemagne le 15
mars 1939, elle choisit la France comme patrie d'exil. En avril 1940, elle
épousa l'écrivain Jiri Mucha, fils du peintre Alphonse Mucha. Avant que les
Allemands n'envahissent Paris, elle fut évacuée à Montpellier où elle mourut à
l'hôpital, le 16 juin 1940, terrassée par une maladie subite.
Traduction: Marie-Noëlle Maillard
In Search of a Voice: The Story of Vitezslava Kapralova
By Karla Hartl – IAWM Journal (2003)
When I approached IAWM Journal editor Eve Meyer, requesting
publication of my annotated catalogue of Vitezslava Kapralova’s music, she asked
a legitimate question: why should the Journal devote so much space to a
fairly unknown woman composer? Indeed, I had to pose the question to myself: why
should anyone care about a woman who lived in Europe between the two world wars
and who had earnestly searched for her own voice before dying tragically young,
at the age of 25, the day France fell. Being as familiar with the composer’s
music as I was, I already knew the answer: Kapralova was the most important
woman composer in 20th-century Czech music. “There is no doubt that had she
lived she would have become one of the greatest women composers in Europe.”1
When her first profile CD was released in 1998, it came as a revelation; the
BBC Music Magazine (June 1999) declared Kapralova “a genuinely
fascinating voice in inter-war Czech music,” while Tempo evaluated her as
“a substantial creative personality who had already hit her stride before her
career was so cruelly cut short” (October 2000). Since then, Kapralova’s music
has found many passionate advocates, best represented by Timothy Cheek, of the
University of Michigan, who claims that some of Kapralova’s songs are among the
finest in the art song repertoire.2 Admirers such as Maurice Hinson consider her
music “eminently pianistic”;3 and brilliant performers such as Virginia Eskin,
Jenny Lin, the Hawthorne Quartet, Ronald Corp and New London Orchestra, plus a
host of others, keep her legacy alive.
Yet, despite this steadily growing recognition, Kapralova remains fairly
unknown even in her own country,4 where the towering heroes of Czech
music—Smetana, Dvorak, Janacek and Martinu—seem to forever overshadow the many
gifted but “lesser” composers. In her homeland, she has been doubly
disadvantaged both as a composer outside the “big four” and as a woman. With
notable exceptions, her music (and women’s music in general) is not being
performed in the Czech Republic today, unlike during Kapralova’s own time, when
she was believed to be one of the brightest composers of her generation, with
her music frequently performed in Prague and Brno.
During her life Kapralova was considered a major phenomenon: vulnerably young,
attractive, and blessed by many firsts. She was the first woman to graduate as a
composer and conductor from the Brno Conservatory, the first woman to receive a
prestigious Smetana Award for her Military Sinfonietta,5 the first woman
to conduct the Czech Philharmonic, and— if not the first—one of the few women
ever to conduct the BBC Orchestra prior to WWII. Like Lili Boulanger, Kapralova
found her distinctive voice very early. Incredibly prolific, she left behind
over 40 completed works (25 of them with opus numbers) and a number of sketches
and fragments. Among her teachers were some of the best European composers and
conductors of the time.
Vitezslava Kapralova was born on January 24, 1915 in Brno, the provincial
capital of Moravia that was then still part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire.
She was an only child growing up in a musical family. Her mother, Vitezslava
Kapralova (1890-1973), nee Uhlirova, was a classically-trained singer; her
father, Vaclav Kapral (1889-1947), was a composer, music critic, writer and
teacher. Kapralova started composing at age nine, guided by her father, a
student of Janacek. At 15 she entered the Brno Conservatory, where she studied
composition with Vilem Petrzelka and conducting with Zdenek Chalabala.
Her choice of two entirely male-dominated disciplines at first met with the
strong disapproval of her skeptical father, who did not believe a woman could
succeed in these professions and wanted to spare her the disappointment. He did,
however, believe in her talent, and in spite of occasional moments of criticism
(“you think that if you write an out of tune carol that it is modern”6), he was
a devoted promoter of her music until his death in 1947.
In 1935, Kapralova graduated from the Brno Conservatory at the top of her
class with a Piano Concerto that she conducted herself at its public
premiere in Brno. It was her first public appearance as conductor, and she made
quite an impression on the curious but at first wary audience. She spent the
summer after graduation in her beloved summer retreat, Tri Studne, where she
sketched her first and only String Quartet, an ingenious work that
“blends something of the spirit of Janacek’s Intimate Letters with a free
chromaticism reminiscent of Berg’s op. 3.”7
In the fall of 1935 Kapralova moved to Prague, where she hoped to advance her
technical skills at the Prague Conservatory. She was accepted to the prestigious
master classes of the then leading Czech composer, Vitezslav Novak, and the best
Czech conductor of all times, Vaclav Talich. She plunged into the active musical
life of the country’s capital; and, thanks to a fair amount of fame that
preceded her and continued to grow, her music was soon heard at the concerts of
the two most important societies of contemporary music in Prague in the 1930s:
Pritomnost and Umelecka Beseda. At the Conservatory, she earned
much respect for her creative powers and determination. She was again the best
student, which enabled her access to Novak, and she greatly benefited from his
special attention and rigorous training. During her “Novak” period, she
experimented with impressionistic and expressionistic idioms and wrote some of
her most beautiful music, including April Preludes and the songs For
Ever and Waving Farewell.
In June 1937, when Kapralova graduated with a work for large orchestra, the
Military Sinfonietta, it came as no surprise that the work was chosen to
be premiered at an important event organized by the National Women’s Council. It
was performed in the presence of the president of the Czechoslovak Republic,
Edward Benes, to whom the work was dedicated. Kapralova composed the
Sinfonietta at a time of political unrest in her homeland. She noted that
the word “Military” in its title was “not an appeal for war, but an appeal
for...the preservation of national independence.”8 She went on to describe the
work as follows:
The first note of the small drum and short fanfare on the trumpets prepare
the basic mood of the whole work. The aggressive main theme (in the Aeolian
mode) is heard several times in different keys, rising to great intensity and
breaking into a singing movement with peaceful, rhythmic waves. Another theme
emphasizes still more the fighting spirit of the work, based on fourths. This
ends the exposition. Slowly the deep singing of the basses and ’cellos rises,
representing freedom. They are interrupted at intervals by contrasting dance
rhythms. After this the development of the themes begins. It reaches its
climax in the call of the trumpets....The main theme and the singing movement
recur, and the fourths are heard again in the final coda, which culminates in
an outburst of the whole orchestra in victorious jubilation.9
The premiere of the Sinfonietta took place at Lucerna Hall in Prague
on November 26, 1937. The orchestra was the Czech Philharmonic, the conductor—Kapralova.
Witnesses recall how very unusual it was for the Czech Philharmonic to perform
under the baton of such a young conductor, especially when that young conductor
happened to be a woman. The players were skeptical at first, but Kapralova’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.10
In October 1937, a month before the premiere of her Sinfonietta,
Kapralova moved to Paris to study conducting with Charles Munch at Ecole
Normale. Originally, she planned to study composition with Felix Weingartner in
Vienna, but on K.B. Jirak’s recommendation, and after meeting with Bohuslav
Martinu during his short visit to Prague, she decided instead to seek a French
Government scholarship. Kapralova must have made a deep impression on Martinu;
when they first met in April 1937, he did not hesitate to propose that she move
to Paris to study composition privately with him. Kapralova appreciated
Martinu’s music, which by then was frequently being performed both in Prague and
Brno, and she was therefore open to the idea. After her arrival to Paris, she
accepted Martinu’s offer. She also accepted out of necessity because her French
was so poor that she could not enroll in the classes taught by Boulanger. (With
Munch, she communicated in German.)
Paris was to broaden Kapralova’s intellectual horizons. She immediately
immersed herself in the city’s cultural life and was a frequent visitor to art
galleries, concert halls and even literary evenings. But most important for her
artistic development was the rich musical life of Paris, especially the concerts
of La Société des Concerts du Conservatoire and La Société de la
Musique Contemporaine (Triton), where she heard the latest works of Bartok,
Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Prokofiev, Milhaud, Honegger, Martinu and others, and
later also saw her own works performed. She was particularly attracted to
Stravinsky. Her Suita Rustica from 1938, a large orchestral work
commissioned by Universal Edition (London), is a personal tribute to his
Petruschka, so much so that when the work premiered at the Brno Opera in
1945, it was intuitively staged as a ballet.
Of course, among the new impulses and influences that were to transform
Kapralova’s voice, a particularly important one was the music of Bohuslav
Martinu. 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. Kapralova’s remarkable Partita for Piano and String Orchestra
represents an entirely new direction in her output and can be considered a
direct result of those discussions.
Kapralova’s personality, her beauty, charisma and immense passion for life
inspired the aging Martinu. His Tre Ricercari (a “hit” of the 1938 Venice
Biennale), the intimate String Quartet No 5, and his powerful Double
Concerto are just a few examples of the strong emotions awakened by
Kapralova. But he also had an enormous respect for her music and did not
hesitate to promote her at every opportunity and open a few important doors for
her. For example, in May 1938 he recommended to one of his publishers, Michel
Dillard of La Sirene Musicale, to accept Kapralova’s Variations sur le
Carillon de l’Eglise St-du Mont, in which she experiments with polytonality.
Although Kapralova was not new to publishing (by then many of her songs and
chamber pieces had already been published by the largest publishing houses 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.11
Two weeks later Kapralova arrived in London for the 1938 ISCM Festival. She
conducted her Military Sinfonietta as the Festival’s opening work in a
performance at Queen’s Hall on June 17. She created quite a bit of excitement,
and it was with enormous pride in the achievements of his 23-year-old protégé
that Martinu wrote the following in his review of the festival for the Czech
national daily, Lidove Noviny:
The very first item on the program of the Festival was Military
Sinfonietta by Vitezslava Kapralova—an opening with great promise for both
the festival and the composer. Her performance was awaited with interest as
well as some curiosity—a young woman with a baton is quite an unusual
phenomenon—and when our “little girl conductor” (as the English newspapers
called her) appeared before the orchestra, she was welcomed by a supportive
audience. She stood before the orchestra with great courage and both her
composition and performance earned her respect and applause from the excellent
BBC Orchestra, the audience, and the critics....Vitezslava Kapralova’s
international debut is a success, promising and encouraging.12
After two such eventful semesters abroad, Kapralova was ready to go home for
the summer holidays. Martinu had left Paris a day earlier to spend some time in
Prague and in his hometown of Policka before joining Kapralova in Tri Studne for
a few weeks that brought him much happiness. He could not know, when he returned
to Paris on August 1, 1938, that this was to be his last visit to his homeland.
Kapralova had intended to follow him in the fall, but her request for the
renewal of her scholarship was unexpectedly denied, and it took a a great deal
of effort, by Martinu in particular (he had to engage in a vigorous
letter-writing campaign), before she was granted her stipend.
When Kapralova finally returned to Paris in January 1939, the world she was
familiar with was already disintegrating. War seemed inevitable. That year’s
winter was bitterly cold and on March 15, 1939, the day of the German invasion
of Czechoslovakia, it snowed. Three days after the forceful annexation of her
country, the emotionally-exhausted Kapralova began working on Concertino for
Violin, Clarinet and Orchestra. She wrote to her parents, “I’ve started
something new but I am not sure what it is,”13 and she explained:
Well, it is for two solo instruments and orchestra, if I only knew what the
other instrument was. One must be a violin but the other — oboe? clarinet?
trumpet? Now, after forty bars, I had to stop and get an answer before
resuming the work. I have been writing it most likely for a clarinet, but what
a strange combination....It is cold here like in Siberia but not colder than
in my heart.14
It was only a year earlier that she told her mother “all and everything is
all right!”15 She wrote:
Are you whining about a night following a day? About a storm following a
beautiful sunny weather? Are you complaining that there are ugly, nasty things
in the world? Why are you so discontent with people? There will never be only
good people in the world had there been ten Jesus Christs—because what you
call “ugly” was, after all, given to us by the Creator. And it is meant to be
like that! The entire world is based on one simple but rather marvellous
principle: plus and minus, the good and the bad. That is the balance. So why
should it be taken away from people? There have always been and always will be
extremes that sometimes allow evil to win, for a while at least. What remains
to be done is to look for the good with an open mind and eyes and to become
stronger through our struggle with the evil. To enjoy simple and small things,
to live with a smile as long as we can.16
Now, Kapralova only scribbled the following two references before the last
two measures of the autograph sketch of her Concertino: Psalm 57 and
Job 30, 26 (“Yet when I hoped for good, evil came; when I looked for light,
then came darkness”).
Separated by war from her loved ones, Kapralova was now looking to Martinu
for all her emotional support. The two began—seriously for a while—planning
their future together as far from the vulnerable Europe as possible. Both
started yet another letter-writing campaign, this time to Martinu’s friends and
contacts in the United States, where they hoped to temporarily relocate.
Kapralova applied for a Juilliard School scholarship (it is unclear whether her
application was ever received or processed), while Martinu contemplated a
back-up plan that involved a visiting artist position with the famous Liberated
Theatre, now in exile in New York, where Kapralova was to replace ailing
conductor Jaroslav Jezek, himself an accomplished Czech composer. But nothing
came of the plans, and Kapralova spent the summer alone in Augerville la Riviere.
She returned to Paris in September but left again to spend a couple of weeks
with the Martinus in 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, Jiri Mucha.17
That fall Paris began preparing for war. Kapralova now lived with Mucha and a
few mutual friends in a sort of a bohemian commune in the city’s Quartier
Latin. Mucha had just been entrusted with a regular broadcast to occupied
Czechoslovakia. He was also responsible for preparing the weekly
Ceskoslovensky boj, an official publication of the Czechs and Slovaks in
exile, for which Kapralova wrote several concert reviews. On Christmas Day 1939
Kapralova wrote to her parents:
My dearest mom and dad, I am writing to you right after Christmas Eve. Have
you listened to my small present for you, my Prélude de Noël, which was
broadcast on Sunday at 11:00 o’clock, your time? I could not let you know
ahead of time because it was only on Tuesday when Jirka [Mucha] came home and
told me: Tomorrow morning I need a small orchestral work for Christmas and you
will be conducting it —on the Radio [France]. Hurry up! And I gave him a sour
look and complained why he did not tell me earlier and that it wasn’t to be
any good because I didn’t have enough time for it, etcetera, but by Wednesday
morning it was written as a score and thus I can’t send you a sketch because
it doesn’t exist. It was recorded on Friday...they liked my performance and
the piece too—as a result I got a contract for half an hour every month. It is
a smart little thing and everybody around here has been whistling its tune.18
The year 1940 began promisingly with the astonishing success of Kapralova’s
April Preludes, performed by initially reluctant Rudolf Firkusny on January
28 at Triton. That winter and spring Kapralova worked on a number of
commissions, including some incidental music on which she collaborated with
Martinu. In 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. Kapralova was growing restless in Paris, and he returned in April for a
few days. They married on April 23. Three days after her wedding Kapralova
composed a song, Letter, possibly as an assignment for Nadia Boulanger.
The words by Petr Kricka are written as a letter from a man to his lover who has
just rejected him:
You said “no.” Well, be it.... | It was fate that separated us.| I
regret that but I see you’re happy | - so I accept it. | I don’t judge who’s
more guilty | or whose loss is bigger. | Yesterday there was just one path |
today there are two. | I understand that now, and blame no one. | Who knows?...
Perhaps, one day | your heart will recognize me again. | For God is a great
artist | and has his mysterious ways....
If this was meant to be Kapralova’s farewell to her love affair with Martinu
and a closure (she desperately needed to move on with her life), she forgot to
take away the hope.
In early May, around the same time Kapralova was finishing her last and
arguably best chamber work—Ritournelle pour violoncelle et piano—the
first symptoms suddenly appeared of the mysterious illness that was to kill
her.19 She was briefly hospitalized in Vaugirard Hospital, on May 20 she was
evacuated by her worried husband from Paris to a small university hospital in
Montpellier, and on June 16, 1940—the day of the armistice—Kapralova died, at
the age of 25.
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; but a very attentive one—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....She was a
fast learner, immediately grasping what I had in mind almost before I could
finish my argument. She accepted these arguments only after due consideration,
however, and only when she was certain that my suggestion solved her immediate
problem and fit within the framework of her ideas....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 fully 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.20
Vitezslava Kapralova was a distinctive voice in Czech music of the first half
of the 20th century. Her music reveals great originality and a mature mastery of
form and contemporary musical language. Only now, after several decades of
undeserved neglect, her considerable worth as a composer is being rediscovered.
The time is long overdue.
NOTES:
1. Howard Hartog, ed., European Music in the Twentieth Century (Penguin
Books, 1961), 322.
2. Timothy Cheek, from his soon to be published essay, “Forever Kapralova:
The Songs of Vitezslava Kapralova.”
3. Maurice Hinson, in his correspondence with the author (January 23, 2002).
4. There have been some isolated efforts recently to acknowledge her
important artistic contribution, such as the 2001 documentary on Kapralova, a
project of Czech Television (Studio Brno).
5. Kapralova shared the prize with Pavel Haas, who received it for his opera,
Sarlatan.
6. Vaclav Kapral to Kapralova (December 20, 1939).
7. Calum (Malcolm) MacDonald in his review for Tempo 214 (October 2000): 60.
8. The 1938 ISCM Festival brochure, p. 12.
9. Ibid.
10. Jiri Macek, Vitezslava Kapralova (Prague: Svaz cs. skladatelu, 1958):
133-34.
11. Michael Henderson, “Bohuslav Martinu and Vitezslava Kapralova,” Czech
Music 20 (1997/1998): 76.
12. Bohuslav Martinu, “Mezinarodni festival v Londyne,” Lidove noviny (June
28, 1938): 7.
13. Kapralova to her parents (March 28,1939).
14. Ibid.
15. Kapralova to her mother (spring 1938, not dated).
16. Ibid.
17. Jiri Mucha (1915-91), Czech writer and son of the famous art-nouveau
painter, Alphonse Mucha. His autobiography, published in 1988, focused on the
years he spent in Paris before the war, his relationship with Kapralova, and her
clandestine affair with Bohuslav Martinu.
18. Kapralova to her parents (December 25,1939).
19. The official diagnosis tuberculosis miliaris was never fully proved.
20. Premysl Prazak, ed., Vitezslava Kapralova, Studie a vzpomink (Hudebni
Matice Umelecke Besedy: Praha, 1949), 122-25. “Vitulka” is a diminutive of
Vitezslava.
The Kapralova Society
The Kapralova Society was founded in Prague in 1997 with the mandate to
promote interest in the life and work of this remarkable composer. In 1997-98,
the organization took an instrumental role in publishing Kapralova’s music, a
project undertaken in collaboration with Studio Matous, a publishing house based
in Prague. The project received the support of many well-known personalities of
Czech cultural life, including the spouse of the President of the Czech
Republic, Dagmar Havlova, who became the organization’s honorary president.
In 1998 the Kapralova Society moved to Ontario, Canada, where it was
incorporated by its founding director, Karla Hartl, as a non-profit
organization. Since launching its website in Toronto in August 1998, the society
has been successful in attracting members from all parts of the world. It has
been transformed into a truly international organization. The society continues
to promote interest in Kapralova and other women in music through education,
research and special projects in collaboration with other organizations.
For the Kapralova discography and scoreography and for additional
information, please visit www.kapralova.org.
Karla Hartl is founder and chair of the Kapralova Society, an
international music society based in Toronto, dedicated to promoting Kapralova
and other women in music. A graduate of Charles University (Prague) and
University of Toronto, she has worked as Program Consultant for Status of Women
Canada and more recently as Arts Consultant for the Department of Canadian
Heritage.
Youtube :
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