Lost and found: 1935 passion play music score preserved in family archive
The South Bohemian town of Hořice has a long tradition of passion plays which are intertwined with the family histories of its Czech and German inhabitants. One such family helped save and preserve the first known score for the Šumava Passion Plays from 1935 and have now donated the valuable material to the Society for the Preservation of the Hořice Passion Plays.
The town of Hořice in the Šumava mountains was once the site of some of the largest Easter passion plays in Europe, attracting tens of thousands of visitors from across the Old Continent. According to the local archives the very first passion play – in which people re-enact the trial, suffering and death of Jesus Christ – took place in 1816, when a local weaver wrote a script for it with the help of the town priest and 15 locals performed it.
Written and photo records documenting these activities over the centuries are not easy to come by and many are preserved in the family archives and albums of the locals whose predecessors helped keep this tradition alive.
The historically first score for the Šumava Passion Plays from 1935 came close to being destroyed. Fortunately, one of the locals found the score among a heap of paper for recycling and saved it. His family has now donated the valuable musical material to the Society for the Preservation of the Hořice Passion Plays.
This historic gem was tucked inside a black paper folder and the chairman of the society, Miroslav Kutlák, handles it with the utmost care.
"It is a total of nineteen parts for thirteen instruments. All the notes are written in German, with Ludvík Schmidt listed as the author. This composer and conductor was commissioned in 1933 to produce musical accompaniments to the Passion Plays of Hořice. And we know from historical sources that the music was performed by members of the Czech-German Symphony Orchestra in České Budějovice."
Ludvík Schmidt completed the music for the passion play in 1935 and the play premiered a year later.
The score has over 200 pages, which shows that the performances of the time were much longer than the Easter passion plays enacted today. According to Miroslav Kutlák, the pre-war concept of the Easter passion plays was an all-day affair with a reenactment of scenes from the Old Testament and the New Testament in which many of the locals took part.
The score was donated to the Society for the Preservation of the Hořice Passion Plays by one of the town’s inhabitants. Radek Kamil Novák had it thanks to his grandfather, who also once performed in the plays.
"My grandfather had a recycling paper yard in Hořice after the war. Sometime in the 1950s, someone threw the score away. Grandpa recognized its value, took it home and saved it. I knew from childhood that we had it, but I had no idea how valuable it was. It was only later that my father explained to me that it was the sheet music for the passion plays that used to be performed in our town.”
The reason why Radek was unaware of this tradition as a child was that the plays were banned during two tumultuous periods of history – during the Nazi occupation and during the 40 years of communist rule. They were revived after 1993 –so Radek’s own children can once again be part of this long tradition.
