Otakar Zich

Years later, he became a pupil of the prominent nineteenth-century Czech aesthetician Otakar Hostinský, and a protégé of the iconoclastic musicologist and critic Zdeněk Nejedlý.

His main contributions to concert life in Prague were the operas Malířský nápad (The Artist's Idea, 1908), Vina (Guilt, 1915), and Preciézky (on Zich's own translation of Molière's Les précieuses ridicules, 1924).

Because of his association with Nejedlý, performances of Zich's music often met with bitter controversy in interwar Prague, where critics assessed new compositions based on factional allegiances.

The lowest point of this was undoubtedly the premiere of Vina in 1922, which the arch-conservative critic Antonín Šilhan attacked in a vituperative article entitled Finis musicae (The End of Music).

In each of these he explored the application of phenomenology, derived from the work of Hegel and Husserl, to branches of the performing arts, and his theories are still the subject of debate in present-day Czech academic circles.