Although he started out merely reviewing operas in Prague newspapers in 1901, by the interwar period his status had risen, guided primarily by socialist and later Communist political views.

[2] In 1896 he moved to Prague to study at Charles University, where he attended lectures in positivist history with Jaroslav Goll and music aesthetics with Otakar Hostinský, finally receiving his doctorate in 1900.

These factional divisions were to inspire Nejedlý throughout his whole career; in many ways he was personally responsible for perpetuating them for future generations, long after their currency in Czech musical society.

When Nejedlý's music reviews for Prague's daily newspapers grew distasteful in their anti-Conservatory bias, he and his followers were precipitously banned from publication, forcing the group to found their own journal, Smetana, which ran for sixteen years, 1910–1927.

Beginning with Vítězslav Novák in 1913, Nejedlý sought to end the careers of composers who did not conform to his pro-Smetana views of modern tradition and social responsibility: other notable targets included Josef Suk.

In these he chastised the interwar Czechoslovak Republic, its president Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, and various other leaders; the last issue of Var was taken up with a detailed defense of Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck, which Ostrčil had produced in 1926.

[4] At this time, his son Vít Nejedlý (1912–45), whose short career in Prague had focused on Communist agitprop pieces and workers' choruses, was involved with a Czech brigade attached to the Red Army, whose band he attempted to emulate.

After the end of the war (and Vít's death of typhus after the battle of Dukla, January 1945), Zdeněk Nejedlý returned to Prague to participate in the postwar government.

Over ten years before, in the mid-1930s, Nejedlý's public attacks against artists such as Leoš Janáček had turned many of his former adherents against him, most notably Vladimír Helfert, whose work as a musicologist had outstripped his teacher's, and Josef Hutter, who had published on Ostrčil and Zich.