The long shadows of the “Wozzeck Affair” extended over many endeavors of the Prague compositional community and its increasingly tense relations with the public in the late 1920s. As discussed in chapter 7, for several years after the November 1926 fiasco at the National Theater, all administrative decisions—largely conservative in the extreme—were made with Wozzeck in mind as a high-water mark of public reaction against modernism, never to be repeated. The reception of new works after this point, however, reflected something less tangible than box-office receipts. Almost invariably, operas of the late 1920s were afforded a new monolithic, iconic status, as though standing for something much greater than the musical and theatrical experience provided by an evening's entertainment at the National Theater. While the late operas of Janáček immediately achieved places in the national operatic canon, others, such as Švanda dudák and Bubu z Montparnassu, were vilified or blocked entirely. In between these two relatively extreme ends of the continuum, less contentious works were also treated as sole representatives of various aesthetic directions, each with the potential to resolve the crisis provoked by Wozzeck.

In many respects this legacy is echoed in the artistic choices of composers finally forced to reconcile their modernist styles with the expectations of a powerful paying public, and to resolve this dilemma in concrete, musico-dramatic terms. Operas premiered in the early 1920s, as we have seen in chapter 6, had dealt in musical and dramatic abstractions.