Biography (read more)
Václav Jan Křtitel Tomášek was born in 1774 and taught himself the piano, studying violin and singing with Wolf. Until 1824 he worked as a piano teacher in aristocratic households in Prague, and afterwards built a substantial school of his own. He knew Beethoven, and knew Goethe, whose poems he set, and corresponded with the Polish pianist and composer Maria Szymanowska. He lived at 15 Tomášská Street in Prague, where a plaque in Czech and German records him. His memoirs, published in German and in Czech translation, show him — in Kenneth Delong’s summary — opinionated, often sarcastic and conscious of his own importance, and at the same time seriously concerned with artistic and intellectual questions and unflinching in pursuit of what he took to be true. He died in 1850, having been known as the musical Pope of Prague.
He wrote a great deal for the piano and stands as a forerunner of the lyric piano piece that Schubert and Chopin later brought to its height: the forty-two Eclogues published in seven volumes between 1807 and 1823, three volumes of Rhapsodies, the Dithyrambs, Op. 65, and six sonatas. He began as a Classicist and absorbed the new Romanticism later. The songs are a substantial part of his output, on Goethe’s German and on patriotic Czech texts alike, and he also wrote three symphonies, two piano concertos, chamber music, operas, a Requiem, masses and short pieces for glass harp and organ. In 1823–24 he was one of the fifty composers who each supplied a variation on Diabelli’s waltz for the Vaterländischer Künstlerverein. His teaching kept its hold on Prague for a century, with Jan Voříšek, Alexander Dreyschock, Johann Friedrich Kittl and the critic Eduard Hanslick among his pupils.
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